Asst. Prof. Ahmet Gürata, chair of the Department of Communication and Design, and Asst. Prof. Andreas Treske of the same department recently attended Video Vortex XI, held February 23-26 in Kochi, India. Titled “Video in Flux: Art, Activism & Archives,” the international conference was organized by the School of New Humanities and Design of the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in collaboration with the Bilkent University Department of Communication and Design and the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam.
Video Vortex XI focused on “other” video cultures, which, the organizers noted, “have largely evaded scrutiny under the fiction of video’s universalism.” In keeping with this focus, the event was held in the city of Kochi-Muzeris during the third Kochi biennial, “giv[ing] contemporary form to the histories of an extremely cosmopolitan city.”
The two-day conclave included screenings, discussions, workshops, roundtables and proposals that addressed the following themes: histories of video in Asia, video art and activism, aesthetics of online video, video and surveillance, video archiving and curation, infrastructures and platforms of video, and emergent technologies of video and moving images.