PRESS RELEASE

MEDEA ELECTRONIQUE & ONASSIS CULTURAL CENTRE

Across the Great Divide—Creative Human—Machine Improvisations

Since 2009 the artist collective Medea Electronique has organized an annual 10-day experimental artist residency, Koumaria, near Sparta in Greece, focusing on improvisation and new media practices.  The residency “Medea Electronique Koumaria 2012” is held, for a second year, in cooperation with the Onassis Cultural Centre (http://www.sgt.gr/en), who will host the performance of the residency results as part of a major international 3 day event entitled Across the Great Divide—Creative Human—Machine Improvisations. This event will feature workshops, lectures, performances and demonstrations by many of the leading artist/theorists working in the field of human—machine artistic interactions, including George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Evan Parker. Residents will have the unique opportunity to participate in this event, and interact with these, and other, participating artists.

How do machine-human improvisations reveal features of what improvisation itself is, or could be? What do such interactions tell us about what it is to be human, or to be a machine? How might we remain humanists as artists yet embrace new technologies and their potentials? Can machines help us overcome artistic limitations, or do they create new ones? Are new modes of improvisation suggested by software and hardware systems? Have the use of new technologies in art changed the notion of what a body is, or what a machine is?

This year residents are:

FREYA OLAFSON – Canada, THE NIGHT BEARS-USA (John J.A. Jannone, Daniel Munkus, Sophia Remolde), LUCY PAWLAK – UK, KATERINA UNDO-Greece, CHARITY CHAN – Canada, ARIANNA FERRARI – Italy, PANAGIOTIS TSAGARAKIS-Greece, DAFNE GIANNOULATOU – Greece, MEDEA ELECTRONIQE / ISE ENSEMBLE (Ioanna Kampylafka, Kleopatra Korai, Yannis Lolis, Panayiotis Goubouros, Manolis Manousakis, Alexandros Drymonitis, Eric Lewis, Thodoris Zioutos, Guido De Flaviis, Dimitris Tigas, Michael Larsson, Christos Laskaris, Tim Ward)

Programme: http://www.sgt.gr/en/programme/event/768

The residency
Machine-Human Improvisational Interactions

For 10 days at the foothills of mount Taigetos an olive grove will be transformed into a place of creation for contemporary arts. Artists from all over the world working in a variety of media will travel to Greece and, inspired by their surroundings, will engage in an improvisational multicultural dialogue resulting in a collaborative art piece. Both well-established and younger artists from different cultures will live and work together, exchanging not only their art practices but their lived experiences. An aim of this creative meeting, besides fostering artistic experimentation, is to enable experienced and newer artists to work collaboratively, as well as to facilitate the exchange of diverse ideas and problematics between people that hold different perspectives concerning artistic creation. In this sense the presentations of the results of the residency can be judged both aesthetically and socially, for they are experiments in both domains.

The goal of the residency is the creation of an educational experience for the participants that will inspire and exalt their future work. The cross-cultural dialogues that the residency engenders both create new artistic speculations and smelt older assumptions. Past residents have formed lasting friendships and new artistic partnerships. Medea Electronique, being an eclectic art collective, is interested in people from diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds. For us the residency serves as a model for future creative endeavors

Medea Electronique
Medea Electronique was formed in Athens Greece in 2006, inspired by a play of words, Medea versus Media. It is a cooperate group of individual artists that share a predisposition for innovation in performing arts. Working in fields like music, video, design, painting, multimedia, robotics, interactive technology and media production, we allow the integration of our distinctive areas of research and practice to define a unique style in the realization of various projects – from multimedia theatrical plays to experimental audio-visual shows and from electroacoustic compositions to human-machine-computer interfaces.

Across the Great Divide—Creative Human—Machine Improvisations.

8 – 21 October 2012
Koumaria Residency & 3-Day Event

Across the Great Divide—Creative Human—Machine Improvisations.
19-21 October 2012
Onassis Cultural Center

Contact/details:
www.medeaelectronique.com
www.koumaria.gr
Angeliki Poulou
press@medeaelectronique.com