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Crossing points: East - West, as viewed in the context of the New Media-Art Balkan Generation, 2000.

The Art Today Foundation presents for the second time
THE COMMUNICATION FRONT’2000 /electronic and media art/ at the Centre for Contemporary Art in the Ancient Bath, Plovdiv. Duration: from June 1. to June 20

The Project comprises:
from June 1. to June 14 a theoretical seminar; a workshop, centered around common web-based production;
from June 1 to June 20 an exhibition section - installations (interactiv, video, net, sound)

The theoretical seminar and the workshop are meant to be practically and conceptually interrelated with the exhibition section of the Project.
The Project will additionally include formal presentations delivered before audience by the invited participants, as well as meetings and discussions with the local media-art community.

A group of 23-25 media artists, theoreticians, curators, and activists from the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Romania, Finland, Serbia, Croatia, Canada, Greece, USA, Turkey, New Zealand, and Bulgaria, who have all voiced in their creative work a commitment to the development of media and visual culture in South-Eastern Europe, will be invited to work side by side on their individual projects. The participants will be encouraged to hypothesize on the possibilities of a common project aimed at provoking our desire for dialogue and mutual recognition, thus appealing for a tolerant overcoming of the boundaries imposed by our cultural and political differences.
Through the theoretical seminar and the workshop, CF’2000 will grant the opportunity for creative activities directed at compiling a unified body of theoretical and critical texts, and small-scale artistic projects, to be later included in a common web-project presenting the overall idea of Crossing Points: East - West.
The strive for concrete practical results is one of the underlying strategies of CF’2000.

The Exhibition Section:
The New Media Generation on the Balkans
presents a selection of 15-17 prominent young media artists based in South-Eastern Europe, whose work is immediately concerned with the development of contemporary media and electronic art, both in their own countries and on a global scale. These will be invited by the curatorial team of CF’2000 to carry out their projects in the space of the Ancient Bath at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Plovdiv.

Opening will take place on June,1, 2000.
The exhibition section of CF’2000 is meant to draw our attention on the insufficient demonstration of mutual interest in each other among Balkan countries. It also aims to build a common idea for the development of media-art in South-Eastern Europe. Indeed, the shared characteristics, trends, and thematic threads that bring together this community of artists go beyond our expectations since they are determined by the identical factors that were at play in the making up of their artistic personalities.

We intend the exhibition to become one of the basic starting points for the theoretical seminar of CF’2000 by calling forth an open discussion on the issues of the new media culture in the region. In this way, it would additionally facilitate the establishing of closer contacts between media-artists and theoreticians.

CFront’2000 is interested in the crossing points within the media-stream and information-flow of the Net that create opportunities for bringing closer the communities and media-artists from the Balkan region and Europe. These can be crossing points between objective reality and the interactivity of the Net, between history and utopia, the state and the ethnic community, between the personal and the socially-grounded, the physical and the technological, between culture and politics, between the commercial and the non-commercial, the local and the translocal, between two epochs. Or else, the crossing points of the subtle interaction between past, present, and future, which provides us with a starting point for a reflection upon the neutral time of the year 2000 that anticipates the challenges of the new century.
CF’2000 has set as its aim the stimulating of ideas-exchange and partnership between media-artists, curators, theoreticians and activists from the Balkans and Europe, who are all in search for the crossing points between our cultures. We would like to find a common language in the field of art and media-practices, while at the same time retaining the rich blend of our cultural and ethnic variety.

Along with that, CFront will centre around the shared interests and problems of the media community in the fledgling democracies on the Balkans. The historical and political reminiscence of the past has long been one of the main driving forces for the international and the ethnic relations in our region. In the face of media-culture, however, we hope to have found a new strategy.
Moreover, it is our belief that a second edition of the project will play a significant part in the stimulating of Bulgarian media-culture, which has definitely started to develop in the recent years, but due to the lack of experience, is still in need of a more clear-cut conception, social position and institution support.

Chief Organizer:
The Art Today Foundation
<arttoday@bitex.com> and <sevo@olb.net>
Curatorial Team: Emil Miraztchiev, Dimitrina Sevova
Organizing Committee: Emil Miraztchiev, Dimitrina Sevova, Monica Romenska, Nadya Ghenova
Co-curator: Honor Harger (New Zealand, United Kingdom) <honor@va.com.au>


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