About
From May 6th-13th 2010, Mapping Festival Geneva will host a workshop (directed by artist Manuel Schmalstieg) that focuses on collaborative knowledge management and writing, around the topic of realtime video performance.
The practical objective of this working group will be an in-depth rewriting and improvement of Wikipedia articles related to the artistic practice of VJing.
Project Background
Wikipedia, since its launch in 2001, has become an increasingly important resource not only for study and academic practice, but also in its global effect on the perception of cultural phenomena. Despite this incredible achievement, specialized cultural fields – such as contemporary art practices – are insufficiently covered and suffer from many shortcomings. This workshop encourages theoreticians and experts to step in with their knowledge and resources.
This workshop will gather a team of contributors who will hold several meetings over the course of the festival, in order to brainstorm, collect references, record interviews with artists attending the festival, produce documentary imagery that will be published under a Creative Commons license, and finally produce an improved version of the Wikipedia article(s). The activity of the research group will be visually documented, and the resulting articles will be turned into a print edition.
For more information about the motivations behind the project, visit the FAQ page.
Downloads
• Dossier de Presse en français
• Fiche du projet en français
• Project sheet in English
Appendix: What’s a “wiki-sprint”?
The concept is derived from “code sprints”, a practice that originated in the free/libre/open-source software communities, and consists in gathering a team of developers engaging into strongly focused, intensive sessions of code writing. Its transformation into a “book-sprint” for textual production has been pioneered by Tomas Krag and has been successfully implemented by artist Adam Hyde for the FLOSS Manuals project (dedicated to the creation of free software manuals, see images on the right). For more information, visit www.flossmanuals.net
