TransCoding

ABOUT

“TransCoding–From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture“ was an arts-based research project conceived of by the artist and researcher Dr. Barbara Lüneburg (project leader), funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (PEEK AR 259-G21) and located at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz/Austria. The project was run by an international team of artists and researchers from 1.2.2014 – 30.1.2017.

Our research topic was the question of how we could involve an audience that was hitherto not available for the new arts in our project, exemplary create a link between the world of young people coming from the popular culture and that of internationally working multimedia artists and thus make “highbrow art” more accessible.
Click here for the link to the monograph on "TransCoding" published at [transcript]

With TransCoding we wished to encourage participation in art and generate a new audience by

Audiovisual installation "Read me" by Barbara Lüneburg, personalized for What if? community member Gloria Guns

• initialising an online/offline community that picks up on a given frame in an artistic, social and interactive way using every day media of participatory culture such as facebook, blog, youtube, twitter etc.
• creating a multimedia-solo-show for one violinist, live-electronics and video aiming for performances at festivals and concert podia. Influenced by or in exchange with the community we would like to explore the topic „identity“ by crossing between popular culture and so-called high art.
• by generating an audiovisual installation that will reflect on and evaluate the artistic and scientific results as well as the contributions of the community putting it together to an interactive artwork that can exist and travel independently from any performing artist (first exhibition at Schmiede Hallein/Austria, September 2015).

By offering participatory culture via web 2.0 as part of our arts project we invited to speak out, share a discourse and take influence on the approaching art project. Through these online platforms we hoped for input across boundaries that eventually showed its influence in the second and third step of the project. Our main communication node was the blog www.what-ifblog.net.

In this project, practice based arts research was not just about the artistic process reaching into new contexts. We applied findings and theories from media sociology to an artistic process and investigated their applicability and meaning in the arts. The (commonly hierarchic) relationship artist and audience/community was defined to one of permeability and mutual influence.

Our goal was to raise interest in participation in art as a way to express one’s identity and achieve personal empowerment and to further a sense of their belonging to a peer group by participating in an arts project.

Please, click here for more information about our key research questions.

TransCoding is funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF as project PEEK AR 259-G21.