Panel Statement

Chair Per­son: Raivo Kelomees
Pre­sen­ters: Chris Hales, Ag­nieszka Pokry­wka & Piibe Pi­irma

The panel will dis­cuss how the changes in East­ern and Cen­tral Eu­rope have in­flu­enced the art ed­u­ca­tional sys­tem there dur­ing the last twenty years, with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to ed­u­ca­tion in the new media field. The rea­son for choos­ing such a seem­ingly broad timescale is to in­clude the ‘fi­nal­i­sa­tion’ of the po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­i­cal in­te­gra­tion of some post-So­viet coun­tries (like Es­to­nia) into the Eu­ro­pean Union whilst con­trast­ing this with ex­am­ples like Be­larus, which have be­come (or re­mained) more au­to­cratic and closed. One par­tic­u­lar point of in­ter­est is the change in the un­der­stand­ing and in­ter­pre­ta­tion of ‘new media art’ dur­ing the last two decades, partly due to the dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies and spe­cial­i­ties that this field of prac­tice en­com­passes.

1. Twenty years of change: in the po­lit­i­cal sys­tem, art par­a­digms, tech­nolo­gies and ways of think­ing
2. Travel and tran­si­tion: ex­ported artists and im­ported ideas
3. The tran­si­tion from arte­fact-based artis­tic prac­tice to process-based and non-ma­te­r­ial art
4. The sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences be­tween ‘West’ and ‘East’ men­tal­i­ties
5. Ini­tia­tives, cen­tres, de­part­ments and in­sti­tu­tions of new media and ed­u­ca­tion
6. Re­sources, fund­ing, fi­nan­cial prac­tices, gov­ern­men­tal sup­port, busi­ness schemes for pro­duc­ing and ex­hibit­ing new media
7. Changes in the art ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem: from tra­di­tional and man­ual fine arts prac­tices to me­di­ated and tech­no­log­i­cal ed­u­ca­tion
8. Dif­fer­ent net­works fo­cused on the or­gan­i­sa­tion, the­ory, and prac­tice of tech­no­log­i­cal art

• Raivo Kelomees, PhD (art his­tory), artist, critic and new media pro­fes­sor. Stud­ied psy­chol­ogy, art his­tory, and de­sign in Tartu Uni­ver­sity and the Acad­emy of Arts in Tallinn, ET. Presently work­ing as the pro­fes­sor of the New Media De­part­ment at the Es­ton­ian Acad­emy of Arts. Has pub­lished more than 300 ar­ti­cles in main cul­tural and art mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers of Es­to­nia since 1985. Book au­thor, “Sur­re­al­ism” (Kunst Pub­lish­ers, 1993) and an ar­ti­cle col­lec­tion  “Screen as a Mem­brane” (Tartu Art Col­lege pro­ceed­ings, 2007). Doc­toral the­sis „Post­ma­te­ri­al­ity in Art. In­de­ter­min­is­tic Art Prac­tices and Non-Ma­te­r­ial Art“ (Dis­ser­ta­tiones Acad­e­miae Ar­tium Es­to­niae 3, 2009).