30/09/2024
It was with great disappointment that we were informed that, as from next year, there will no longer be any media/digital-arts focused Platform and/or Network funded through the Creative Europe programme.
For a long time, Creative Europe has sensibly focused on digitalisation as one of the priorities of the European Union's cultural programme. Contrary to this priority, in the near future no European platform nor network was approved for funding by Creative Europe.
This is inconsistent with the EUs priorities, that only recently announced further digitisation with the creation of the digital Euro, but incapacitated the cultural sector which specifically addresses, works with, and critically investigates emerging and established media technologies, policies, and/or culture by no longer offering representation in its important structural funding schemes. Although we agree with, and support the necessity of thematically oriented cooperation projects, platforms such as the European Media Art Platform have offered a horizontal approach and created production and exhibition opportunities for professionalisation for artists and organisations but also established the largest network of media arts organisations which offered major benefits to the artists and knowledge exchange between the organisations.
The discontinuation of such funding in the field of media art contradicts the European Union’s efforts to seriously address issues surrounding media illiteracy and disinformation, and it is at odds with its mission to foster a strong European media creative industry. It places this already precarious sector at a disadvantage as structures, ethical practices, and methodologies that have been meticulously developed over many years with the support of Creative Europe must now be dismantled until EU funding is reinstated.
In times of global insecurity instigated by extremists who attack our democracies, through the algorithmically promoted proliferation of misinformation advocating xenophobia, religious hatred, racial, and gender bias, and environmental degradation denialism using digital technologies such as the social media platforms, instant messaging group chats, forums, and the dark web, the new media sector for years has addressed, and sometimes provided prototypes of the necessary ecological and social transformation tools and processes needed to improve our failing ecological, political, economic, and social structures. It appears incomprehensible to us that the commission no longer offers a corresponding programme that can support this work and diminish the only sector that is for many years critically engaging with, and addressing these very important structural problems.
The European Media Art Platform (EMAP) is an example of the good work that platforms, as open cascading grant funding models, can achieve.
In the 7 years of its existence EMAP has supported 150 artists and co-produced with them 91 projects which received 54 international awards including the European Short Film Price and had been exhibited widely internationally including the Centre Pompidou, the Venice Architecture Biennale or The Barbican and connects next to 16 European members also 150 international partner organisations.
We believe that there is an urgent need for action on the part of the European Union, to reinstate a European platform with sufficient funding to produce new critically imagined media works and support and promote emerging European artists.
This petition is meant to be signed by institutions, museums, media labs, other organisations, academics, scholars, curators, and artists who wish to express their concern about the cancellation of specific European support for the new media and digital creative sectors and industries in a politically, socially, economically, and environmentally unstable climate when this support is more vitally needed than ever, not only for the cultural sector, but also because of the accelerated, alarming changes we are witnessing in all aspects of our physical, digital, and systemic environments.
https://www.change.org/p/petition-for-europe-s-continuous-structural-support-of-the-digital-media-arts
Petition for Europe's continuous structural support of the digital / media arts
