What is the most urgent need that you have?
Understanding cultural and artistic practice as systemic processes.
What is the best/ interesting case or project on new media arts that you have just recently experienced?
The best cases or projects are small media collectives. Like RIXC in Riga, or Kuda in Novi Sad. Both work in their own right but are also important nodes for networks of advanced practice. Also small collectives, but working differently, are the US Institute for Applied Autonomy or the well known Critical Art Ensemble. Their work is opposed to cheap affirmative thrills, a short-lived funny gadgets buzz or peddling poses of petty gestures of rebellion. It is removed from corporate interest window-dressing or predictable test grounds for the media industry. But despite a worldwide explosion of digital communication technology and the more recent inclusion of media arts in official showcase exhibitions conditions for an advanced and critical new media arts practice seem to deteriorate.
In your opinion, is there a potential for change on and change through a policy level, i.e. has the status of policy as an accelerator/ a meaningful factor for practice changed?
In more recent conversations I found out that an increasing number of my colleagues consider their longstanding involvement with and commitment to policy work as a sad waste of time. Looking back on my own experiences on the International European, National and local level (UNESCO, OSCE, EU etc) does not justify an optimistic outlook and is sorely lacking worthwhile outcome. But would it be worse if a critical and practice based assessment of digital culture technology would not have been voiced so many times by countless concerned groups and individuals? Who knows? But clearly, raising awareness on difficult issues has to happen on many different societal levels.
