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Introduction
The Western dominance in media art is over. This could serve as the 'subtitle' of the 18th World Wide Video Festival that will take place at 9 locations in Amsterdam from 13 September through 15 October. This fulfils a long cherished wish of the festival, as all over the world more media artworks are made than ever before, facilitating truly border-crossing international visions. Where until recently production was limited to Western Europe and North America - and to a lesser extent Japan and South America - now we see a major breakthrough in China, Korea, India and Latin America.
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This is reflected in this year's festival programme. The exhibition  'World Wide Media Art' offers installations from China, India, Brazil, South-Africa, amongst others. The single-screen section of the festival features videotapes and CD-roms from countries like Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Costa Rica, Lebanon, China and Korea.
The exhibitions will be held at six locations in Amsterdam; performances, single-screen presentations, the programme section 'Meet the Artist' and the seminar will take place in the three festival buildings situated around the Leidseplein.
This year the festival features a lot of interdisciplinary media artworks. Visual artists collaborating with composers and DJs, varying from the highly esthetical images by Marnix Carpentier Alting (music by Anton Havelaar & Marc Verhoeven) and the more experimental audiovisual performance by René Beekman & Bruce Gremo - both productions are a world premiere - to the programme section entitled 'Culture Jamming'.
The Dutch artists collective Planetart will build a '200.000 Volts Trash Lab', an immobile-audiovisual-noise installation that will double as the setting for daily live performances.
The section 'Culture Jamming' also includes performances by Coldcut, the British pioneers of sample culture, and by Yasunori Ikunishi who will sample the archive of the World Wide Video Festival. It is remarkable in this respect to see how Nam June Paik was already ahead of this sample culture in a way during the sixties, as is obvious form his 45 minute videotape 'Tiger Lives', which he made for the Korean contribution to the Millennium Broadcast.
One of the highlights of the festival will no doubt be 'The Wake - History is a Nightmare from which I am trying to wake up' by the Danish artistic twosome Christian Lemmerz and Michael Kvium, which was inspired by 'Finnegans Wake' by James Joyce; an eight hour long film, accompanied by a live concert of ten international DJ's conducted by Swedish conductor Dror Feiler. The show will start at sunset and will end at dawn. Other reworkings of the same material from 'The Wake' will be an installation for four screens as well as an online presentation on the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Video Festival is a journey of discovery. The programme schedule offers a guideline, grouping together the various programme elements in categories such as Screenings/ Meet the Artist/ Performances/ Culture jamming/ Seminar/ Exhibitions. The total Programme offers some 100 hours of media art. In order to make all this also physically accessible, the exhibition of installations and a selection of the single-screen presentations will remain until 15 October. Performances/ Meet the Artist/ Screenings/ Culture Jamming and the seminar will all take place during the first 5 festival days. During these 5 days many of the selected artists will be present at the festival to introduce their own work.
To enjoy the festival to the full, the best thing to do is to buy a passe-partout which is valid for all locations and events through 15 October. This makes it easy to walk in and out of all the festival buildings. The festival will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue containing descriptions of all the works and some interviews with artists.
Tom van Vliet
Director World Wide Video Festival
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