Stiftung
The Inter Media Art Institute is dedicated to exhibiting, archiving, and distributing time-based media art.
Archive
The archive includes around 3,000 works of artistic and documentary value that offer a broad overview of the evolution of video art from its pioneer era in the 1960s to the present. The holdings of the archive are accessible by appointment. Scholars, curators, lecturers, students, and other interested parties are invited to make use of the extensive holdings of art videos for research purposes.
Conservation
The conservation of media art is a challenge for all institutions that collect this form of art. The Inter Media Art Institute participates with studies, workshops, conferences, and publications in the discussion and development of new approaches and solutions for media art conservation and restoration.
Distribution
The distribution program is one of the core tasks of the Inter Media Art Institute in order to promote video artists and their audiovisual works and to gain them a solid footing in public perception. Almost 1,500 audiovisual works by more than 120 international rtists can be borrowed and purchased through IMAI's distribution program.
The communication of media art occurs through regular lectures, screenings, and exhibitions of the Inter Media Art Institute.
Catalogue
The online catalogue comprises nearly 1,100 videos, which can be played back in full. It represents a solid instrument for information and research on the evolution of video art from the 1960s to the present and offers scholars, students, and other interested parties a considerable store of art historically important audiovisual works of art and documentations.
To the catalogueHistory
The Inter Media Art Institute (IMAI) was founded in 2006, when the Düsseldorf municipality and the local art institutions NRW-Forum and Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast joined forces with Kulturstiftung des Bundes and Kunststiftung NRW to preserve the collections and continue the activities of the Cologne media art distributor 235 Media. Axel Wirths and Ulrich Leistner had founded 235 Media in 1982 as a tape label and distribution platform with a focus on underground and independent music, specifically punk, postpunk, new wave and industrial, before venturing into the distribution of music and artists’ videos a couple of years later. By the late nineteen-eighties, they had established an international video art distribution program that rented out videos by artists to exhibition venues, festivals, and TV stations all over Germany.
