At the end of April, I spent a total of five days in Ankara, Turkey, where I had the privilege to meet the organisers of the third Video Vortex event on October 10-11 2008: Andreas Treske, Ahmet Gürata and Mahmut Mutman of Bilkent University, as well as conference producers Alper Sarikaya and Firat Berksun. Andreas Treske was a guest at the Amsterdam conference in January 2008, where he participated in the session on Online Video Aesthetics. He is currently chair of the department of Communication and Design at Bilkent.
Bilkent University, the backdrop for the conference in October, is a – for Dutch standards – enormous private university. The dorms, faculties, and newly-grown forrests are spread over 1200 acres of hilly land, about 15 kilometres outside of Ankara. Bilkent caters 12.000 students and is one of the in total 7 universities of the nation’s capital.
At the time of my visit, the department of Communication and Design organised the eigth annual Paso International Student Film Festival, a four-day festival with screenings of student shorts, a range of workshops and performance nights. Meanwhile, the preparations for Video Vortex 3 were well under way. The Ankara Edition will consist of a two-day international conference, an evening program, live performances and a new media art exhibition in the Faculty Gallery.
Conference sessions will include navigating the database, p2p, art online, visual art, innovative art, participatory culture, social networking, political economy, collaboration and new production models, censorship & YouTube, collective memory, cinematic and online aesthetics. Speakers mentioned – not all confirmed – are Geoffrey Bowker, Donato Totaro, Jaromil, Birgit Richard, Steve Wilson, Vera Tollmann, Basak Senova, Angela Melitopoulos, Aras Ozgün and Michael Verdi.
The event website and blog will be up shortly, in the mean time please subscribe to the Video Vortex discussion list to stay up to date on the latest developments: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/videovortex_listcultures.org. For inquiries regarding participation, contribution or submission of related works, please contact Andreas Treske at treske@bilkent.edu.tr.