New Forms: History, Vision and Mandate

New Forms Media Society is a non-profit society and media arts organization founded in 2000 that nurtures and connects local and international arts, science and grassroots communities through the annual New Forms Festival.
 

By promoting Canadian Artists in collaboration with the international arts and technology world, the NFF facilitates multimodal art works and engages in discussion on their role in our cultural environment. Since its inception, an integral element of the NFF is the recognition of independent and groundbreaking artists; the NFF aims to showcase and increase awareness of these artists and their work within our community and beyond by promoting them within a larger milieu.

The NFF is part of a larger, international, multi-media festival movement, which explores the ever changing and evolving world of art and creates a platform for artistic growth. The society wishes to make new media art, music, film, technology base-based installation and performance accessible to a wider audience.

THE THEME THIS YEAR

NFF08: Mosaics will look at Media Arts from all corners of the Earth. Works for the festival should examine relations of cross-cultural media, through video, sound, internet, print and writing. A mosaic has traditionally referred to art which takes pieces of a part to create a whole. The word has been used in multiple references across literature, media, science, software, video and religion to describe different constellations of this phenomena. To quote Sean Cubitt, ‘A newly global connectivity creates new arenas for interaction between science, art, and technology, but also creates the preconditions for global crises.

In recent years many political scientists and economists have discussed the equalizing effects of the internet on global culture. In 2008 NF will be creating different ‘pods’ working with regions around the world to connect via the internet. These pods will have the ability to become part of a larger discourse on all platforms including audio, video, word, design, locative and performance. NF will be looking for applications that incorporate an artists personal work as well as proposals incorporating this greater participatory project.
 

In addition NF sees the Mosaic of ARC’s and MAC’s within Vancouver as crucial to the local dialogue that creates the fabric of our culture here at home, and is interested in partnering with different centers in works appropriate to this years theme.