DIGITAL AND ELECTRONIC ART
Thanks to support from Apple Europe and a donation including several of the latest in Macintosh computers, in 1994 MIDECIANT of Cuenca expanded its artistic electrography studio to include a laboratory for the production of digital and electronic art. Guest artists and creatives alike began to develop pieces there that included infographics, interactive multimedia pieces, digital post-production methods for video, net art, software art, computer animation (2D and 3D), interactive art installations and more.
All of these productions can be divided into four general categories. 1) Individual research projects, carried out through collaboration agreements with businesses and institutions both public and private, national and international. 2) Creative projects carried out by scholarship recipients, research staff, and resident artists and researchers at MIDE. 3) Projects by Spanish and international artists benefitting from MIDE support programs, produced in MIDE’s labs with support from its technicians and scholarship recipients. 4) Projects underwritten by MIDE funds and carried out by the artists themselves, or in collaboration with other national and international research centers.
Multimedia Art at MIDE 1994-2006, was the inspiration for creating an online application which provides an overview of all of the projects developed over a period of more than two decades at the MIDECIANT laboratories in Cuenca. The undertaking was commissioned by the multimedia library at the Fundació la Caixa in Barcelona, which proposed the compilation of all significant work produced at MIDE-Research Center for Electronic Arts from the time of the first project in 1994 (Rent a Body, by Paco Cao, an interactive multimedia piece created in Director v.2.0) until the time of the final project (Incorrectas, by Ana Solano, a 3D computer animation piece on digital video), which was completed in 2006. Various other significant pieces have been added to the list since then, including the video installation Richter vs Mercali by Chilean artist Daniel Reyes (2008-09) and the 3D video animation piece Devir / To Become by Portuguese artist Marta Alvim (2010).
In all, MIDECIANT has managed to compile, and make available, about one hundred virtual works of electronic art, created during the groundbreaking period from 1994 to 2010 (at which time, for economic reasons, the labs were temporarily shuttered). This is not, strictly speaking, a “permanent collection”, and the Cuenca center is therefore not the “owner” of the pieces within. However, the museum does control the distribution rights, both one-off and temporary, on behalf of the artists, with the objective of using the artistic institution to make these electronic artworks available to a wider audience.
Go to the Digital Art Collection