About Media Forum

Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) is held since 1959 and gradually it has become one of most respectable and prestigious film-forums in the world. In 1973 MIFF was registered by the International Federation of Film-producers associations (FIAPF) as an «A» class film festival alongside with those in Berlin, Cannes, San-Sebastian, Karlovy Vary and Venice.

This is the fifth year Media Forum is organized as part of the Moscow International Film Festival. The role of new media in audiovisual art and culture received due recognition and Media Forum was immediately introduced into the official program of MIFF.

Media Forum is the first event of such scale in Russia and it reveals a new vision of the world of new media culture and new screen technologies to the professionals, critics and public in general. The objective of Media Forum is to demonstrate the connection between traditional and modern branches of screen culture, the impact of technological innovations on visual arts.

Media Forum as action is an exchange of ideas, infusion of new forces into contemporary culture and vice versa. It is an attempt to demonsrtate the logic of new thought and new communications. At the moment it is inside media culture that new ideas go through trial and approbation, ideas that cannot be realized in contemporary art context.

For seven years Media Forum has brought new media art to the Russian audience. It presented an avant-garde trend in the works of artists, performers, video artists and animation-makers experimenting with language, context and techniques of electronic and digital mass media. This year the Forum will also screen novelties and classics of both Russian and world’s video art.

The programme was started in 2000 at an initiative of Aleksei Isaev, a well-known Russian media artist, curator and theorist of the new media, who founded and directed the Moscow MediaArtLab Centre. Because of his untimely death in March of this year we decided to dedicate this Media Forum to his memory and realize his last idea – the Author(writ)y theme.

“Contemporary screen culture finds opportunities for the most rapid, clear and actual reflexion to changes or alterations in viewer mentality. It defines this experience as avant-garde and progressive. Newest tendencies of contemporary culture connected with new technologies make it possible for us to describe this part of culture as possessing own content and audience. The audience is attracted by communicational art model, which allows for the viewers’ interactive participation in the art work dramatic composition” (Aleksei Isaev)

AUTHOR(WRIT)Y. Drawing borders.

Media artist is by the way things are preordained to Author(writ)ative authorship. First, as a creative individual who generates own significant discourse and own rhetoric. The artist is automatically put into opposition to totality: confronting matter, audience, society, authority, time and space. Authorizing his concept the artist stages a rhetoric fight with the context. Only the charismatic, autonomous, despotic rhetoric can break open the emptiness of distrust, indifference and apathy. To assert one’s authority and realize the art’s impact the artist flashes his will, power, self-regard and ambitions. Under this aegis he storms heaven and breaks away into the deep avant-garde. Only the ambitious will own the future. (Viktor Miziano).
Second, he grasps the tentacles of authority – the media. He manipulates its manipulators. Media are in themselves rhetoric – with no execution of the authorship authority they break away. When the artist rules them with a firm hand he doubles the authority and creates art.

The VII Media Forum traditionally consists of the thematic competition and individually curated programmes. They present both fresh works and classics of world’s media art. This wide range of works represents new screen technologies and helps the audience adequately estimate the possibilities of media technologies.

International board

Woody Vasulka – electronic art pioneer, founder of the world’s largest media archives «Vasulkas», USA
Dr. Kirill Razlogov – MIFF art director, Russian Culture Studies Institute director, Russia
Cathy Ray Hoffman – Cornerhouse Centre for Visual Arts director, Manchester, UK
Etienn Sandrin - curator of the media art centre of Centre Georges Pompidou, France
Jan Schuijren - curator, the Netherlands.

Competition programme >>>
Presentation programme >>>