MEDIA DIGITAL ART AND CULTURE IN FLANDERS BELGIUM - BAM

esearches the design processes of play and games in the current societal
context. Both Social Spaces and Play work in close collaboration with the
social and the cultural field as well as with scientific labs and small and big
companies engaged in the development of serious games, alternative media
interfaces and mobile applications. The engineering school Group T also has an
research group investigating games. This research is primarily conducted from
an engineering perspective, but occasionally also gathers designers and artists
in their projects.
Besides the recently started artistic research institutes, networks like
Crosstalks, Arteconomy and Flanders District of Creativity try to make the link
between arts and industry. They specialise in building bridges with the industry,
bringing creative and critical actors into companies and large organisations in
order to innovate their practice.
T O C O N C L U D E : I M A G I N I N G O T H E R P O S S I B L E W O R L D S
It seems that the expertise of media artists in Belgium has been finding its
way in a large number of art and science and art and industry collaborations.
Although things are starting to change, the art of mediating or media art is still
an underexposed field. Hiding in the border area between people, disciplines
and domains, it takes many forms and is present in many contexts and many
actors still consider the cross-over between art, science, technology and
industry as time-consuming, odd or utopian. The advantage then of all this is
that there is still much to discover.
We find that media artists explicitly perform (and dramatise) the art
of mediating. Several methods are implicitly and explicitly used to – at the
same time – bridge and stress differences between people, disciplines or
domains. This essay zoomed in on media artistic methods such as creating
risky things, introducing fiction in order to critically probe technology and
networks, appropriative or participatory activities in artistic, academic and
commercial environments. Here, the difference between actors is used as a
method to produce different media: no standardised, slick, transparent or
efficient interfaces, but things with a risky character, imagining other possible
worlds. This approach to media can enrich and probe the broader media field in
an important way. Therefore it is important that a continuous effort is made to
apply the art of mediating in different contexts, domains and disciplines.
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