Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow   
"  D  a  -  D  a  -   N  e  t  "
(sorry, only russian version)

Annual festival of Russian art resources in the INTERNET (http://www.da-da-net.ru)

Co-organizers:

Anigraph - presentation of "Da-Da-Net" project at "Anigraph" Festival
Artinfo - technical support

Deadline for application - the 5th of May, 1999
Prize fund - 130 000 rubles
Working language of the Festival - Russian

Competition of the year 1999: "Russian contemporary art and culture resources on the threshold of the Third millennium".

The 99' competition aims at researching in the field of the existing contemporary art and culture resources and clarifying the perspectives of their development.
What cultural luggage shall we take with us to the new millennium?
What shall we leave behind us - data-trash or civilized cultural annals?
What technology allows to support the vital capacity of the culture resources? Contemporary art and culture and contemporary technology...
In 1999 the priority within the nomination "contemporary art and culture" will be given to the "media-active" projects, which present the innovative artistic and cultural ideas, aim at communicability and use contemporary technology as the basic means of their realization...

We see the goal of "Da-Da-Net" festival in comprehending and common search for the most effective ways of valuable integration of different art and culture resources into the global electronic network of the information exchange. The horizontal scheme of dissemination of the information, where each user is simultaneously a producer of the intellectual content, will assist the productive assimilation of the culture resources only when the efficient mechanisms of dealing with the information will be developed (including selection, archivation, structurization, classification, replenishment, renovation, ways of access, navigation, communication, criticism, etc.).

W o r k i n g   g r o u p    o f   t h e    F e s t i v a l :

Irina Alpatova - director
Alexei Isayev - curator
Olga Shishko - curator and PR
Yury Plastinin - technical director
Tatyana Goryucheva - coordinator
Elena Lavrenko, Konstantin Zimin - presentation of the project at "Anigraph" Festival
Pavel Yurasov - web-master

T h e    J u r y :

Marat Guelman - owner of the first Moscow private gallery "Guelman gallery", exhibition curator (http://www.guelman.ru)
Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov - artist, poet
Evgeny Gorny - editor of "Net-culture" section " in "Russian Journal"
(http://www.russ.ru)
Andrey Kovalev - art historian, art critic
Nikolay Dmitriev - music critic, journalist, editor, moderator of TV and radio- programs, lecturer, organizer of musical concerts, festivals, tours and guest performances, CD producer, organizer and active participant of the "New music" movement
Mikhail Donskoy - specialist in computer human interaction

N o m i n a t i o n s :

1. Contemporary art
2. Contemporary culture (music, theater, cinema, TV, literature)
3. Electronic publishing

C r i t e r i a :

1. Adequate presentation of materials on the announced theme (competence of the site-creator)
2. Structured programming from the user's point of view (adequate navigation and convenient access to information)
3. Regular renovation of the resource
4. Design
5. Capacity to propagate the resource in the new information community

"D a - D a - N e t "     f e s t i v a l     y e s t e r d a y      a n d     n o w

Thanks to the "INTERNET" program of the "Open Society Institute" the humanitarian network initiatives regularly receive support in the form of OSI grants. Unfortunately in most of the cases contemporary art initiatives are excluded from the interests of the "INTERNET" program and demand special approach.

The first festival of Russian art resources "Da-Da-Net 98'" aimed at drawing the attention to the new form of the exchange of information in the Internet. The display of the institutional network projects in this field in 1998 (within the frame of "informational resources in art and culture" nomination) demonstrated the necessity of more detailed discussion and research of the matter. Following this logic, the question "What is this?" now could be substituted with the question "How?". "Da-Da-Net 99'" festival will first of all focus on the search for adequate answers to this last question.
The time for professional analysis of contemporary art and culture resources has come. Today we are faced with the necessity to develop more effective strategies and tactics of assimilation in the information field.
"Da-Da-Net 98'" festival (within "artistic project" nomination) revealed the new artistic strategies developed by Russian artists, who began to use the Internet as a new space that does not only provide the new methods of creating art works, but also the new conditions of their functioning: the mechanisms of communication with the public, demonstration and archiving of artworks. If the first festival "Da-Da-Net" marked the contours of the web- art in Russia, the 99' festival continues this tradition by also including foreign projects into the "Trash-art" festival experimental scene. The alternative forms of art, culture and communication will now be discussed in the international context .

Today the concept of "data-trash" became the approved term that stands for the information dumps in the Internet, that often also include culture resources. One of the global tasks of the festival is to extract the contemporary culture resources from these data-trash and to prevent its disappearance there.

"Da-Da-Net" и "Trash-art" festivals time-schedule:
26th of March - official opening of the Festival and press-conference (SCCA, Moscow)
26th of March - 5th of May - registration of applications for participation in the Festival
from 26th of March - on-line conference
9th of April, 23rd of April, 7th of May - seminars (SCCA)
5th-15th of May - the work of the Russian and International Juries
20th of May - the winners reward at "Anigraph" Festival
August -September - publication of the catalogue and CD-ROM.

CD-ROM will present the research on the subject of "trash-art", that will bring together all art-projects, interviews, discussions and the texts of the Jury.