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MAAP in Singapore 2004 'GRAVITY'

MAAP in Singapore organised by Brisbane based MAAP (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific) coordinated a 2 month long event that opened on 1 October.

The festival theme GRAVITY created a critical mass with 7 major art venues presenting New Media Art from our region: The Singapore Art Museum, The Substation, The Earl Lu Gallery, The Art Gallery, National Institute of Education, Nanjang Academy of Fine Arts Gallery, p-10 and The Esplanade (including 80 metre transit tunnel wired for artists audio creations!). The Festival Focus Week ran from the 27 to 31 October and saw over 23 artists and curators including Yukiko Shikata from the Mori Art Museum gravitate to Singapore. Trebor Sholz made the key note address at the 2 day conference hosted by Nanyang Technological University. The Festival Focus Week saw the launch of Zhang Ga's Peoples Portrait online project blasted to video walls around the world, including the Reuters video wall in Time Square NYC, in the Singapore Central Business District and in Brisbane on the video walls of QUT Creative Industries Precinct. The public was invited to upload their picture to a massive scale on these and other walls in Linz and Rotterdam

Tsunamii.net conjured The Zero Gravity Party, a live broadband event connecting The Singapore Art Museum and QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane on Friday 29 October with 2mbs to play with www.zero-gravity.tv

MAAP02 Moist

MAAP Festival theme "MOIST", is an evocative adjective, suggestive of conditions relating to life; growth; humidity; seepage and residue. These loaded references unleash imaginative poetic associations as wide as a fine foggy mist, a first kiss or a sweaty palm. "MOIST" suggests a conductive environment of cultural ideas recognising the non-linear and pluralist characteristics of contemporary art, culture and society where we look to artists as mediators and explorers of our maturing and evolving networked understanding. This moist and fertile platform connects us and will draw together a place to consider the cross fertilisation, seepage and residue of artists working to extend conventional and enhanced functions of media and technology. A traditional view of technology suggests a dry functioning environment where moisture is an enemy of its electrical existence, oppositional in position to a traditional view of organic nature where moisture is an essential element of growth and life. The festival focus will fuse metaphors combining the seepage of artistic expression through the wires and circuits promoting mature understandings and relationships to our experience of technology.

MAAP01 Excess

The festival theme enabled an investigation into artist's extreme positions and examined artworks and artists pushing visual and conceptual limits and celebrated an indulgence in the outer limits of original aesthetics. This year MAAP sent out screening programs and partnered satellite events in Beijing (Loft New Media Art Space) Seoul (Art Center Nabi) where we simultaneously presented the same installation "empyrean" by Melinda Rackham; and collaborated with the Digital Media Festival in Manila.

MAAP00 Presence and Place

MAAP organisation moved to the Brisbane Powerhouse Centre which has become the organisation's core venue. The theme of the festival examined the notions of "Presence and Place" recognising that while the Internet is an international space, how artists produced their work was embedded in their particular localised situation. The festival embraced difference and looked for a gauge of working realities through the Asia region in the digital arts. We held a "Web Jamm" session streaming over 6 locations connected with Artists Sonje (Seoul), Feng Mengbo (Beijing).

MAAP99 Collapsing Geographies

MAAP 99 entered a successful partnership with the Queensland Art Gallery's Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art by presenting major content for the APT Virtual Triennial (online) and also contributing to the APT screening program. MAAP's conference ran parallel to the APT main conference program and proved to be an extremely rich and popular component.

Participating artists: Young-hae Chang (Korea), Feng Mengbo (China), Tina Gonsalves (Australia), Rick Vermey (Australia).

MAAP98 MAAPing the Region

The first MAAP Festival set about collecting partners locally, nationally and internationally, to establish a focus pool for the region.

MAAP presented a forum in association with ANAT, held at the Queensland Art Gallery. Titled "MAAPing the Region" the forum collected and exchanged contacts and strategies to develop a regional network of digital media organisations. Highlights of the festival included the realisation of "Shoreline: Particles and Waves" being one of the first online exhibitions that commissioned artists to create a response to the curatorial theme.