With the intrusion of digital and network technology into our world (the integration of chips and sensors in clothing, accessories and devices, the Internet of Things), the separation between digital and analogue media is being increasingly challenged. Nevertheless, the denominator 'digital art' still stands for work that maintains this conceptual separation. Like visualizing digital data in an analogous way or vice versa for example.
Digital art provides new possibilities in terms of reproducibility, online publishing, interactivity and participation. But digital art also raises new questions and problems, such as authorship and plagiarism. It would be a missed opportunity to answer these challenges only within the limited domain of digital art practice itself. With the MediaLab project, the applicants emphatically want to create a space where manual (not to say traditional) techniques are connected to the digital instruments.
Two tracks and the accompanying (apparent) oppositions (digital versus analog, high-tech versus low-tech, digital versus mechanical, interactive versus narrative) are examined: approaches from the history of motion graphics from early cinema and contemporary approaches to data exploration and visualization in infographics.
