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Les Instants
Characterisation of the Institution
For several years, Les Instants Vidéo have been instigating efforts in addition to the festival in order to reach a wider public locally and internationally, with artistic workshops or presentations on the history of video art. When the festival became nomadic in 2004 it was able to reach a far more diverse public thanks to the different partners we worked with, which already had their contacts and networks. One of the priorities of the festival is to involve the artists, which is very much appreciated by the public, which often considers video art difficult to understand. The presence of artists is the key for the comprehension of their work.
A rich network of nearly 150 partners in sixteen countries has been created over the years for the organisation of screenings and multiple activities promoting media arts. The festival is also associated with several magazines publishing critical articles on video creation: BREF, Incidences, Les Acharnistes, Chambre avec vue, Barka, Il Particolare, Propos de Campagne, Petite.
The OASIS Project enabled the festival to develop a wonderful tool, which will be used as support for these activities. Our wiki interactive website will be used to organize artistic projects involving international participants directly on the Internet. This is a new way to involve our public by contributing directly to an open platform of exchange. We think it will be very efficient to reach a public which does not know the festival or even video art.
The originality and strength of OASIS is to offer an efficient exchange network while keeping editorial independence with each partner of the project, thus any local action can be good for the platform as well as for the other partners.
Les Instants did not have a database, or even properly structured archives, when the OASIS project started. So the archiving process had to be organized from scratch. The result is a MySQL-database, based on the open source system
→ PhpMyBibli (PMB).
In the continuation of these reflections on memory and the festival's history, the archive database had to be designed for public use and contribute to the festival's goal of disseminating original video and media arts. It had to allow new encounters between the public, the artists and their works.
The archive database itself was built using a free and open source software system: PhpMyBibli. PMB is made of PHP scripts for the local or web based administration of a MySQL database. Every aspect and function of this application can be edited and adapted to the administrator's needs (cf. Next section “Description of curatorial tools” for a precise presentation.)
In addition to the built-in PMB user interface, we implemented an → interactive wiki interface designed to allow simple access to the information and the files. The purpose of the wiki system is to offer the possibility to registered users to directly publish texts or documents on the website: they can comment on archived works, propose additional information, react to the programs they have seen during the festival and include the database information and documents inside their publication.
Marc Mercier's book “Time at work, f(r)iction” was ideal to demonstrate the possibilities of linking original texts with the database content and with external links leading to various resources on the Internet. A new chapter of the book has been published on the wiki every week since the opening of the site in October 2006 and the visitors have been following the serial faithfully.
After researching the best compromise between image quality and file size, Quicktime video format with H264 video codec and AAC sound was chosen for the videos made available through our database.
This database intends to reflect → past and present creation processes through artworks associated with the words of their creators and their spectators. Its interactive properties have been designed to make it a living memory which is constantly changing. The two database interfaces are used respectively for purposes of documentation and creation using the archived materials.
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Les Instants: PMB Database
Learn more about the internal organization of the → Les Instants Database.
Read more about the → amount of content.
Observe the → Metadata Model of Les Instants.
About the → technical structure of the Le Instants database.
More information about the choice of → video format.
Read more about the → festival's history.
Les Instants → activities related to the OASIS Platform and Database.
Additional → issues how a wider public was being reached.
→ Curatorial Tool: Les Instants Database.
Download Article
Marc Mercier. "An OASIS for Memory". Marseille: Les Instants Vidéo, 2005.
In his text Marc Mercier reflects the difficult political and economical situation of the options to found a "video library" under the circumstances of "globalisation" with its effects on the cultural field.
Download An Oasis for Memory
Les Instants Vidéo
Link to the institution: http://www.instantsvideo.com/
Visit the → database of Les Instants
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