Date: 10-12 March 2011
Location: Amsterdam

The Video Vortex events come back to Amsterdam. Organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, and in a top cultural venue, Video Vortex 6 offers artist presentations (performances, screenings and talks),  hands-on workshops, the launch of the upcoming  Video Vortex Reader II, and a 2-day symposium:

Conference Themes

Friday, March 11
Online Video Aesthetics
Platforms, Standards and the Trouble with Translation Civil Rights
Online Video Art
Book launch: Web Aesthetics, by Vito Campanelli

Saturday, March 12
It’s Not a Dead Collection, it’s a Dynamic Database
The World of Online Video: Country Reports
In Conversation with artist Natalie Bookchin
Online Video as a Political Tool
Book launch: Video Vortex Reader 2

About Video Vortex

The Video Vortex project aims to contextualize these developments by tracing continuities and fault lines across recent decades in artistic, activist and mainstream activity. Contrary to the way online video is frequently understood and presented as something entirely new, it has long threads woven into the history of visual art, cinema and documentary production. The rise of the database as the dominant form of storing and accessing cultural artefacts also has a rich tradition that needs exploring. As a platform for artists, film and video professionals, and researchers, Video Vortex responds to this emerging field, and offers a crucial space for the exchange of knowledge and experiences.

Since 2007, Video Vortex events, conferences, workshops, and exhibitions have taken place throughout (and outside of) Europe, and includes the publication of the first Video Vortex Reader (2008), and the second one being published March 2011. With this program, the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, and its project partners, have been initiating and facilitating a deep study of online video in its diverse forms and uses, and further, its impact both on, and within, the information society.

Press release by the BUFVC

A one day event for professionals in film and TV archiving.
Friday March 4th 2011
Organised and hosted by Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research
Birmingham City University
Margaret St Campus

What issues are facing film and other audio-visual archives? What are the immediate challenges for archive holders of cuts to public funding and threats to intellectual property in a digital age? How is our film heritage to be sustained and used? What kinds of collaborations might support the legacy of UK film and prompt innovation and best practice?

This event offers an opportunity for those with a professional interest in the film sector to hear about best practice in a range of public-funded projects and to share insights and ideas about the challenges for the audio-visual archive sector in the digital age.

The event will be anchored by the presentation of a range of innovative projects funded by Screen West Midlands under the Digital Film Archive Fund. Since the launch of the fund by Film Council in 2009, these projects have created new archival material, investigated and repurposed existing material, reaching new audiences and prompting engagement with archive issues and cultural heritage. As the projects seek to secure their legacy, develop and expand their scope, the issues they face will provide a prompt for discussion.

The event will feature contributions from BBC, SWM, MACE, EUscreen, workers from a variety of archives and from the education sector. EUscreen will be represented by Dr. Rob Turnock and Sian Barber, postdoctoral researcher both from Royal Holloway, University of London. They will be presenting their paper “From archive to online user: EUscreen and the challenges of creating access to European television content.”

The programme of the event contains presentations, screenings, opportunities for networking and discussion of current challenges in the sector.

Refreshments and lunch are provided.

RSVP: paul.long@bcu.ac.uk

Press release from PrestoPrime

The new AV Competence Centre  ― entitled PrestoCentre ― is a membership driven, non-profit organisation that will serve stakeholders in audiovisual digitisation and digital preservation in Europe. It will continue and expand the work of the EU-funded ‘Presto’ projects and will launch at the Screening the Future Conference in Amsterdam on 14 & 15 March 2011.

The conference will connect small and large archives, service providers, vendors, funders, policymakers and educators developing solutions to the most urgent questions facing audiovisual archiving. AV stakeholders in Europe and beyond are invited to attend the conference and to join the celebration of the launch of PrestoCentre.

More information
For registration and information visit: www.prestocentre.eu
E-mail: events[at]prestocentre[dot]eu

About PrestoCentre
PrestoCentre is an initiative of five large national audiovisual and broadcast archives in Europe:

• British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC);
• l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA);
• Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Beeld en Geluid);
• Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF);
• Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI).

For more than a decade, these archives have worked together in the EU-funded ‘Presto’ projects to bring together expertise and experience in AV digitisation and preservation in Europe. The goal of PrestoCentre is now to make sure that the knowledge and dedication that was built up in these projects persists and does not ‘fade away’.

By Sally Reynolds

The first Media & Learning conference took place on 25-26 November 2010 in the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training. Participants included policy makers, service providers, broadcasters and practitioners from all over Europe. They met to discuss and share their experiences in providing media-rich resources for learning, in building up the skills of teachers and trainers in media-based learning and in promoting and extending media literacy skills across the education and training sector. Over 230 people from 31 countries took part in this conference and a further 200 people followed the presentations which were streamed online. Several broadcasters took part including members of the EUscreen consortium and re-use of existing digital resources for educational purposes was one of the core discussion threads during the conference. You can read a full report about this conference here.  Media & Learning 2011 will be held in Brussels at the end of 2011, dates to be announced shortly.

Press release

Amsterdam & Hilversum
November 11 – 13, 2010

Economies of the Commons 2 is a critical examination of the economics of on-line public domain and open access resources of information, knowledge, and media (the ‘digital commons’). The past 10 years have seen the rise of a variety of such open content resources attracting millions of users, sometimes on a daily basis. The impact of projects such as Wikipedia, Images of the Future, and Europeana testify to the vibrancy of the new digital public domain. No longer left to the exclusive domains of digital ‘insiders’, open content resources are rapidly becoming widely used and highly popular.

While protagonists of open content praise its low-cost accessibility and collaborative structures, critics claim it undermines the established “gate keeping” functions of authors, the academy, and professional institutions while lacking a reliable business model of its own. Economies of the Commons 2 provides a timely and crucial analysis of sustainable economic models that can promote and safeguard the online public domain. We want to find out what the new hybrid solutions are for archiving, access and reuse of on-line content that can both create viable markets and serve the public interest in a competitive global 21st century information economy.

Economies of the Commons 2 consists of an international seminar on Open Video hosted by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision on November 11 in Hilversum, a two day international conference and two public evening programs on November 12 and 13 at De Balie, centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam. The event builds upon the successful Economies of the Commons conference organised in April 2008.

Confirmed speakers include:
Charlotte Hess (Syracuse University – Keynote), Ben Moskowitz (Open Video Alliance), Simona Levi (Free Culture Forum), Bas Savenije (KB National library of the Netherlands), Yann Moulier Boutang (Multitudes), Peter B. Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Harry Verwayen (Europeana), James Boyle (Duke University), Jeff Ubois (DTN), Sandra Fauconnier (NIMK), Dymitri Kleiner (Telekommunisten), Nathaniel Tkacz (University of Melbourne), a.o.

Organisers:
Images for the Future Consortium / Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision / De Balie / Institute of Network Cultures University of Amsterdam, Department of New Media

By Johan Oomen

EUscreen representatives participated in the joint AMIA/IASA conference. The event, that attracted hundreds of delegates from around the globe, was organised in Philadelphia. Johan Oomen presented Europeana and EUscreen in a session that also included an insightful presentation by Georg Eckes of the European Film Gateway. The presentation is now available online.

From the conference programme: “This presentation will firstly discuss the goals of Europeana and benefits this unified access brings to both users and contributing organisations. Secondly, the presentation will outline the commonalities and differences between the two aggregations. More specifically regarding: Architecture, handling metadata, content Selection policy and handling IPR, functionality and multi-linguality. Both projects have invested ample time defining Use Models by engaging in focus groups and executing desk research. One of the common requirements that needed to be addressed was the issue of providing multilingual access. However, film institutions and broadcast archives often have a slightly different focus in terms of the way archival content is archived, accessed and explored.”

The first EUscreen International Conference took place on 7 and 8 October, 2010 and was hosted by Cinecittá Luce in Rome. The theme of this years conference was Context Selection Policies and Contextalisation. Over 100 participants attended the conference. The programme provided different angles on this theme with lecturers coming from the academic domain, the archives domain and the audiovisual production domain. With such a rich and interesting programme, many issues regarding online audiovisual content were addressed. In the conference report we will focus on only a few of these issues, notably contextualisation, collective memory and different users and uses.  The full conference report written by Andy O’Dwyer, Sian Barber and Wietske van den Heuvel can be read here.

Besides being the EUscreen projectmanager, Quirijn Backx also works as a photographer. She has taken photos during the conference which can be viewed here.

By Marco Rendina and Wietske van den Heuvel

The EUscreen project was presented to a professional audience during the FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2010 which took place in Dublin from October 16^th to 18^th. Johan Oomen gave a plenary presentation about the project and its links to Europeana and addressed questions of how to safeguard the audiovisual heritage. This presentation was held in conjunction with a presentation about the European Film Gateway, represented by Georg Eckes.

In the afternoon of the 18th, Rob Turnock, Johan Oomen and Marco Rendina showed the current status of the project during a EUscreen dedicated workshop. The workshop focused on how EUscreen makes television history ‘real’ and about the kind of television history EUscreen is representing. The presentations included the content selection policy and the metadata schema. The event was attended by a large audience and it was a success.