IMAI Play: The video art channel of the Inter Media Art Institute
2nd Summit on New Media Art Archiving, ISEA 2022
The Second Summit on New Media Art Archiving was held at the MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona as part of the 2022 International Symposium on Electronic Art. The Summit facilitated critical discourse and collaboration amongst archivists, curators, artists, researchers, and other parties interested in the preservation and online archiving of new media art. IMAI's research associate Darija Šimunović participated in the Summit and presented a paper about the participatory video art channel IMAI Play.
IMAI Play hopes to make the archive of the Inter Media Art Institute accessible to more diverse audiences from all over the world by inviting them to view video artworks, create their own programs, discuss them with a dedicated community, and challenge art historical paradigms with new perspectives and unexpected connections.
With IMAI Play, the Inter Media Art Institute strives to liberate video art history from the confines of the strictly thematic and stylistic taxonomies of professional art historians and embrace the rich and unexpected folksonomies that emerge among the wider community of video art enthusiasts instead. The platform can thus be understood as a tool for user-defined metadata collection that provides new possibilities for citizen science in the humanities. By drawing on the expectations that users have developed during everyday interactions with commercial audiovisual platforms and streaming services, the participatory channel seeks to combine a pleasant viewing experience with a lasting contribution to art history.
