[spectre] Symposium: In Medias Rest - Media Art Archive Access and Activation (Berlin, 29 Jan)

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Betreff: 	Symposium: In Medias Rest - Sharing Approaches to Media Art 
Archive Access and Activation: Audience Outreach, Rights and Technical 
Issues/Janury 29, 3pm to 7pm/Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst
Datum: 	Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:05:13 +0100
Von: 	Nat Gravenor <natgravenor at gmail.com>


In Medias Rest - Sharing Approaches to Archive Access and Activation: 
Audience Outreach, Rights and Technical Issues

Berlin, Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 
11/13, 10178 Berlin

Thursday, January 29, 2026, 3 pm to 7 pm

Session 1 - Spaces of (Informal) Education, Visibility of Marginalized 
Communities and Artistic Research

This session highlights initiatives which are making experimental, 
subversive and "marginalized" audiovisual practices of the past visible 
and accessible while engaging new audiences or inspiring artistic creation.

Sinema Transtopia (Berlin) by the bi'bak collective (guest: artistic 
co-director Malve Lippmann) redefines the cinema as a transnational 
space for social discourse, exchange and solidarity. "Please Rewind", an 
early project, explored German-Turkish film and video culture in Berlin 
and the role it played in shaping diasporic, post-migrant identities. 
Through workshops and symposia, Sinema Transtopia investigates 
transnational archival politics through the lens of post-colonialism and 
how to make archiving inclusive of migrant and marginalized viewpoints 
(such as feminist or queer). Sinema also offers a variety of educational 
activities for school children, students and adults and has launched a 
fellowship for film educators from diverse backgrounds.

With the collection of pioneering video artists Steina & Woody Vasulka 
as a point of departure, Vašulka Kitchen Brno (guest: Jennifer Helia 
DeFelice) is dedicated to presenting (new) media art. VKB has developed 
educational programs for children and families, kindergartens and 
schools, universities and adults which promote media literacy and 
self-creation using current and vintage technologies. Vašulka Kitchen 
Brno also supports scholarly and artistic research as well as the 
creation of new media art works with a residency program.

The performance collective D'epog (Brno) is a platform for contemporary 
experimental stage work. The company’s activities are of laboratory 
nature and their work often transcends artistic disciplines. Their 
commissioned intervention into the EastUnBloc exhibition, BYE BYE MY 
EYE: Confirmed. Understood. Over and out, was developed in collaboration 
with experimental filmmakers Marie and Petr Šprincl and sound designer, 
producer, DJ, and composer Mojmír Měchura. Lucia Repašská of D'epog will 
discuss how this live cinema experience explores the principles of 
chance, unrepeatability, and radical expressivity, with retrofuturist 
and media archaeological elements.

Flóra Barkóczi (Central European Research Institute for Art History) 
examines the MetaForum conferences in Budapest (1994–1996, 2024) as a 
key site of cultural transfer in the post-socialist context, where 
emerging digital technologies and media theory met local artistic 
practices. She will investigate how far MetaForum enabled meaningful 
knowledge exchange and whether it succeeded in integrating regional 
voices into the international discourse.


Session 2 - Sustainable Access to Media Art in Physical and Online 
Archives: Technical and Legal Challenges

30+ year-old moving image works have seen conversion from film to tape 
and then digitization as various formats: DVD, mp4 and DCP. Similarly, 
conserving interactive, browser-native digital works has posed 
challenges in terms of transferring and migrating code and its 
dependencies. Furthermore, the disppearance of online platforms and 
finite server hosting has stranded some works in the realm of 404, 
unless the Wayback Machine crawl or initiatives like Rhizome have 
salvaged at least some screenshots if not the full functionalty. Another 
issue is copyright.

Paul Klimpel of the digital rights NGO iRights.info will provide an 
overview of rights models. How can rights claims of artists, estates, 
galleries, commercial and non-commercial distributors, collections etc. 
be untangled so works can be sustainably accessible on site and also 
online? What solutions could copyleft models like Creative Commons or 
CC2r provide?

As a case study, Jennifer Helia DeFelice of Vašulka Kitchen Brno will 
discuss the presentation of Steina Vašulka's evolving and multi 
iteration work Violin Power within a rights framework that was conceived 
for static intellectual property.

Anna Schäffler will present Art Doc Archive, a prototype for distributed 
self-documentation of Berlin’s cultural scene, addressing the largely 
unarchived web-based traces produced by artists and cultural workers 
since the 1990s. Developed in 2022/23 with support from the Berlin 
Senate, the project brings together web archiving, data parsing, and 
visualization to explore new ways of collectively preserving and 
reclaiming cultural memory.