Mediale
Ian Jones, Food and Drink Editor
York Mediale is an international media arts agency, founded in 2014, when York was designated UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts. They deliver a biennial festival, the largest of its kind in the UK. This international arts festival brings together a diversity of artists from around the world, working around the blurred edges of digital art.
Taking place in venues around the city, past festivals have included work from multi-disciplinary dance artist Lydia Cottrell and Can You Die If You Don’t Exist?, a 10 and half-hour-long performance and video work chronicling the deaths of undocumented people, conceived by artist Tamara Al-Mashouk in collaboration with Deep Lab collective. Klasien van de Zandschulp and Natalie Dixon’s Good Neighbours project meanwhile took a forensic approach to surveillance by social media.
And that only describes about a tenth of the exhibits and events put on by the festival. Expect these contemporary themes to be reinterpreted afresh each time the festival is produced, through an eclectic combination of video art, projections and digital forms that there aren’t even words for yet.
Through incorporating technologies into their works, the artists they work with bridge the gap between the new and the traditional, to challenge and inspire. York Mediale is a hot ticket for students of media, art and related disciplines, as well as anyone interested in issues of media and technology in the contemporary world.
