Wireless experiences

ISEA2004 offers Wireless Experiences

ISEA (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) is an international network of media artists and researchers. ISEA is also the name of a symposium and media art event, which will take place for the second time in Helsinki this year, co-hosted by Tallinn. Helsinki was also the venue ten years ago. The Museum of Contemporary Art was a partner of ISEA94 but the exhibition was organised in the Ateneum.

What makes ISEA so important is the interaction, encounters of ideas and people and the demos. As an international event, ISEA has always acted as a local booster of sorts, an initiating and revitalising force that has had a strong influence on the development of the organising country’s media culture. ISEA94 played an important role as the force launching the internationalisation of Finnish media culture.

Hopefully ISEA2004 will also function as a similar booster; after all, Finnish media art and culture has – at least from the inside – meant a strong internationalisation of Finnish art and the presence of Finnish academics and artists in the key forums of international interaction.

The theme of ISEA2004 for Helsinki – including the conference and the exhibition – is wireless experience, which refers to how the expanding wireless media technology and the new media experience it offers (freer movement and the increasingly diverse terminal devices using various media programmes) are becoming part of the art world. Online is a new sphere of meaning for art.

The international ISEA event has been organised since 1988 around the world.
Originating in the Netherlands, this movement of events has so far covered Europe, the United States, Australia and Japan. It is organised by a small international community which has grown into a large debating conference in the form of a series of events and exhibitions.

Its principal forms are international collaboration and interaction and encounters between media science, research and activism. The next ISEA will take place in the United States in San Jose, California in 2006. Material from earlier events is stored in the archives of the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montreal, Canada.

Perttu Rastas