At the beginning of October, we attended our Media arts cluster meeting of UNESCO Creative Cities Network in York and met the fellow representatives of creative cities of Braga (Portugal), Enghien-les-Bains (France), Gwangjiu (North Korea), Sapporo (Japan) and York (UK) as well as local artists and producers.
CIKE’s activities, the Art & Tech Days festival, and our experiences in connecting art and technology were presented in the panel titled “The Role of Media Arts in Developing the Creative Ecology,” attended by about forty experts, mainly from the UK. The presentations were followed by a discussion panel which answered the audience’s questions and established the topic within a broader international context.
At the same time, the very first edition of York Mediale 2018 took place, including more than thirty events citywide. Inspiring was not only the significant networking but also meeting with Professor Dianne Willcocks, President of the York Mediale Council, and festival’s creative director, Tom Higham, who elucidated the collaboration of the city with different creative and cultural subjects as well as the festival’s collaboration with York Art Gallery.
York is a popular tourist destination that is visited by more than 7 million tourists a year. York became the UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts in 2014 and, same as Kosice, is the first and so far the only city belonging to such creative cluster in the country. York Mediale has the ambition to become the UK’s leading digital arts festival, which is thought to be held as a biennale. The organizers already expected 80,000-100,000 visitors for its first year. Thanks to the invitation to York, after returning to Košice we’ve started working on new collaborations with festivals as York Mediale, Ars Electronica and partner city of Braga.
The travel was supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.
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