| Wietske van den Heuvel on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:45:12 +0100 (CET) |
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| [Nettime-nl] Video Active celebrates UNESCO World Day for the Preservation of the Audiovisual Heritage with a new documentary by Péter Forgács. |
Video Active celebrates UNESCO World Day for the Preservation of the Audiovisual Heritage with a new documentary by Péter Forgács. Video Active (www.videoactive.eu <http://www.videoactive.eu/> ) provides access to European television heritage through an online, multilingual portal. The project reached its final stage in August after three years of development and now contains over 10.000 videos, photographs and articles. This collection will continue to grow. The renowned media artist and independent filmmaker Péter Forgács has used the material from Video Active to create a short documentary. By using footage from the different archives, Forgács gives a beautiful insight in the rich material available on Video Active. The documentary enables viewers to discover various aspects of European television history in a compelling form. This new work will have its online premiere on October 27th, to celebrate the UNESCO World Day for the Preservation of the Audiovisual Heritage and can be viewed from this day on http://tinyurl.com/videoactive <http://tinyurl.com/yzxk26l> . About Video Active Television material is a vital component of Europe's heritage, collective memory and identity. However, audiovisual material can only reveal cultural commonalities and differences when its origins are known and understood. By presenting a large collection of European television heritage and by contextualizing this collection with extended descriptions of the sources and comparative articles the Video Active portal offers an enormous resource for exploring both the representation of cultural and historical events within and across nations and the development of the medium itself at a cross-cultural level. As such, it is a highly valuable source for the educational field at large, notably academic research. Also Video Active is a valuable repository for primary and secondary education where Video Active material can be used as (an addition to existing) learning material. On top of that media and cultural heritage professionals benefit from the unique possibility to search different collections through one access point. The Video Active consortium is comprised of 15 audiovisual archives, 3 universities and 1 software company. The web site provides multiple search modes, like free text search and timeline browsing, making it easy to search the collection. Various themes of the history of European television and European history can be explored through 33 showcases which contextualise different parts of the collection. Video Active has been established within a three-year project funded by the eContentplus programme of the European Commission. The consortium, coordinated by Utrecht University, currently jointly supports the portal in its operational stage. Video Active has been acknowledged by a worldwide community of professionals working in the field of cultural heritage, which resulted in the Best of the Web People's Choice Award 2009 and a nomination for the FIAT-IFTA Archive Achievement award. About Péter Forgács Since 1976, Péter Forgács is present in the Hungarian art scene as filmmaker and media artist. In the 1970s and '80s he collaborated with the contemporary music ensemble Group 180, and worked in the Balázs Béla Film Studio. In 1983, Forgács established the Private Photo & Film Archives Foundation (PPFA) in Budapest, a unique collection of amateur film footage, and has used this material as raw data for his unique re-orchestrations of history. His international debut came with the Bartos Family (1988), which was awarded the Grand Prix at the World Wide Video Festival in The Hague (1990) and in 2002 the Getty Research Institute exhibited his installation The Danube Exodus: Rippling Currents of the River. Forgács has received several international festival awards in Budapest, Lisbon, Marseilles, San Francisco, New York and Berlin. Forgács won the 2007 Erasmus Prize, which is "awarded to a person or institution which has made an exceptionally important contribution to culture in Europe." (biography source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Forgacs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Forgacs> ) ______________________________________________________ * Verspreid via nettime-nl. Commercieel gebruik niet * toegestaan zonder toestemming. <nettime-nl> is een * open en ongemodereerde mailinglist over net-kritiek. * Meer info, archief & anderstalige edities: * http://www.nettime.org/. * Contact: Menno Grootveld (rabotnik@xs4all.nl).