Funded by the HERA: Joint Research Programme (April 2010- April 2013).
This project explored the relationship between creativity and innovation within the contemporary European media sector.
The project questioned how interaction between cultural categories in Europe, such as industrial/advertising film and new media arts on the one hand, and commercial exploitation of audio-visual media on the other, have been radically transformed at key times. As such it was intended to prepare the way for thinking about new media environments when the distinctions between the consumer and the producer are no longer valid or viable.
Exhibition “Play and Prosume” at the Kunsthalle am Karlsplatz in Wien (2013). Foto: Christian Lendl
The project was based around three distinct European examples of artistic practices and their commercial applications:
- early advertising and experimental film at times when the technologies of production became more widely available
- post-war industrial films and early television commercials
- the emerging category of prosumers in contemporary media distribution around games
The two related key objectives of this project were to improve understanding of the relationship between commercial applications and implementation of artistic media practices in Europe and to uncover leading factors determining this relationship. Such factors include in particular the mutual exchange between artists, producers and consumers and the interweaving of cultural media formats (film, video, internet) that have potential for reproduction and distribution.
The project’s larger objective was then to ask how the findings might help ‘creatives’ in industrial and artistic sectors to collaborate more effectively in the future. To do this, the project examined the reciprocal connections between the arts and their application from a pan European perspective by combining philosophical, historical and practice based approaches.
A crucial question the project asked about the relationship between commercial applications and artistic media practices in Europe was the extent to which it is determined by technological opportunity, or the exchange between artists, producers and consumers?
HERA Joint Research Programme: Outcomes and Achievements (2014) pdf
Liebig Company Trade Card (from the private collection of Martha Blassnigg)
Project Leader: Prof. dr. Michael Punt, Transtechnology Research at the University of Plymouth, United Kingdom.
Project Partners: Prof. dr. Bert Hogenkamp, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Dr. Margarete Jahrmann, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria; with Mark Paul Meyer (Senior Curator) EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Amsterdam and Bas Agterberg, The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum.
Selected Publications:
Martha Blassnigg (2013) Light, Image, Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Martha Blassnigg (2013) ”Free Play’ between Science, Art and Conjuring: Advertising and the Knowing Prosumer‘. In Jahrmann, M., Felderer, B. (eds), (2013) Play &
Prosume. Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst. [PDF]
Martha Blassnigg & Michael Punt (2013) ‘Transdisciplinarity: Challenges, Approaches and Opportunities on the Cusp of History’. SEAD White Paper. [PDF]
Michael Punt (2013) ‘Start Playing’. In Jahrmann, M., Felderer, B. (eds), (2013) Play &
Prosume. Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst. [PDF]
Martin Woodward (2011) ‘The [unseen] Modernist Eye: Minimalism, Defamiliarisation, and the Advertising Film’. [PDF]
Martin Woodward (2013) ‘A Staging and Choreography of a Theatrical Play: A Brechtian Aesthetic for Popular Culture’. In Jahrmann, M., Felderer, B. (eds), (2013) Play &
Prosume. Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst. [PDF]