November 7th:

Introduction of the partners of the OASIS project to the public

Marc Mercier, artistic director of the festival, and Jürgen Enge, OASIS project leader, introduced the partners of the OASIS project to the public.

• Sebastian Nestler (HfG) explained the main goals and results of OASIS in the preservation and distribution of media arts. He presented the Metawiki database created at HfG to archive works of the university students.
• Mikolaj Leszczuk (AGH) explained the technical achievements of the OASIS technological infrastructure for the exchange of data through the Middleware and the local Database Adapters on partners' servers which represent an important innovation of the OASIS project. He also presented the tools used for automatic content based indexing like face, sound and character recognition.
• Bohus Ziskal and Villiam Simko (CIANT) presented the functions of the OASIS front end which allows a precise search of artworks in all the partners databases and the display of the results.
• Gaby Wijers and Ramon Coelho (Montevideo) explained in detail the complicated process for the archiving and preservation of media artworks with the example of the video installation Geomania by Steina Vasulka (1987). Time based media artworks like the video installations are composed of different components which require different processes for their preservation and distribution on the Internet.

The video installation Geomania was then inaugurated in the presence of Steina Vasulka to illustrate the preservation work of Montevideo. It was exhibited during the entire week of seminars.