Technology, Exchange and Flow: Artistic Media Practices & Commerical Application

This project explored the relationship between creativity and innovation within the contemporary European media sector.

The project questioned how interaction between cultural categories in Europe, such as industrial/advertising film and new media arts on the one hand, and commercial exploitation of audio-visual media on the other, have been radically transformed at key times. As such it was intended to prepare the way for thinking about new media environments when the distinctions between the consumer and the producer are no longer valid or viable.

The project was based around three distinct European examples of artistic practices and their commercial applications:

• early advertising and experimental film at times when the technologies of production became more widely available
• post-war industrial films and early television commercials
• the emerging category of prosumers in contemporary media distribution around games

The two related key objectives of this project were to improve understanding of the relationship between commercial applications and implementation of artistic media practices in Europe and to uncover leading factors determining this relationship. Such factors include in particular the mutual exchange between artists, producers and consumers and the interweaving of cultural media formats (film, video, internet) that have potential for reproduction and distribution.

The project’s larger objective was then to ask how the findings might help ‘creatives’ in industrial and artistic sectors to collaborate more effectively in the future. To do this, the project examined the reciprocal connections between the arts and their application from a pan European perspective by combining philosophical, historical and practice based approaches.