GAMA – Gateway to Archives of Media Art
(EU-Rahmenprogramm eContent+)
2007-09
EU- Project, Contact: Bettina Henkel, Jakob Krameritsch, Andreas Spiegl
Artworks created with new media technology constitute one of the most popular contemporary art genres: media art. Its appeal for the general public is based on the importance that new technologies such as the Internet, digital equipment etc. play in everyday life. Media art explores the changing relationship between culture and technology, and questions in experimental, innovative and often audacious ways to the ambiguous role of new media technologies in our lives, while rendering homage to the technology at the same time.
In the face of this, media art archives have an invaluable mission amongst modern art collections. Yet, if the existing digital media art libraries are accessible only with difficulty for cultural or scholarly stakeholders, how much more so must they be for the general interested public? Use and re-use of the archives’ digital content are totally disproportionate to the importance of media art in contemporary culture. GAMA is a project to correct this incongruity.
The aim is the establishment of a central platform to enable multilingual, facilitated and user-orientated access to a significant number of media art archives and their digitalised contents. The consortium comprises of a majority of the most important digital content holders for media art in Europe. The content provided constitutes approx. 55% of all media artworks presented online by European cultural archives and distributors.
This amount will ensure a significant increase in use, re-use and cross-border visibility of the digital content when aggregated and accessible through one common interface. The gateway will quickly develop to be the European central online interface and search portal for any person interested in media art.