Media Arts: Convergence of Art Spheres in the Digital Age

Daniel Brandão holds a PhD in Digital Media in the domain of Audiovisual and Interactive Content Creation at the University of Porto (2014), where he developed the project Museum of Ransom (www.museudoresgate.org). This participatory website collects videos made by citizens about the city’s daily life, aiming at legitimising their cultural heritage vocation. He also co-coordinated the project Citadocs, which was the creation of collaborative mini-documentaries born in Future Places Medialab for Citizenship. He holds a degree in Communication Design (2004) and a master’s degree in Multimedia Art (2008), both from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. He is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication Sciences at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Minho, where he founded and currently directs the master’s programme in Media Arts. He is an integrated researcher at the Communication and Society Research Centre and a collaborator at the Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture. He is co-principle investigator of the project bYou: Study on Children and Young People’s Experiences and Expressions of the Media (PTDC/COM-OUT/3004/2020), and integrated the teams of the research projects ECHO: Echoing the Communal Self (EXPL/ART-DAQ/0037/2021) and HERIC 2D: Health Risk Communication (2022.06008.PTDC), all of them funded by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. He is co-chair of DIGICOM (International Conference on Design and Digital Communication), has co-edited several books on design and has participated in several scientific committees of international conferences and journals. With vast teaching experience in public and private universities in the areas of communication design, audiovisual and multimedia, he has worked at the Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, Escola Superior Artística do Porto, College of Art and Design — Matosinhos, Universidade Católica Portuguesa — Braga. He has worked with several institutions in the area of culture, with particular emphasis on the Serralves Foundation and its Museum of Contemporary Art, with which he collaborated for six years.

João Martinho Moura is a Portuguese researcher and media artist. Over the last 20 years, his work has been shown internationally several times in more than 20 countries, some of them city-wide. In 2013, he was awarded the National Multimedia Art and Culture Prize in Lisbon for his contribution to digital arts in Portugal. He is the author of several academic publications in the field of media arts, interfaces, computer graphics, artificial intelligence and visualisation. His work has been included in the curated collections “Selected Works ARS ELECTRONICA Animation Festival” (Linz, 2012), “Processing Curated Collection” (United States, 2008) and in the catalogue of “ISEA 2019: 25th International Symposium on Electronic Art”, in South Korea, where he was a guest artist. He is a founding member of the Artech-International Association and a member of the artistic cooperative Au Au Feio Mau. He has also been a guest media artist at Balleteatro, Porto, since 2008. Since 2013, he has collaborated as a media artist with international institutions such as the European Space Agency, the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and Unesco. From 2015 to 2017, he was a member of the committee for Braga’s application to Unesco’s Creative Cities Network in the Media Arts category. The title was awarded to the city of Braga on 31 October 2017. He is a partner artist in the Braga Media Arts network. In 2018–2019, he was a laureate and resident artist in the European Commission’s STARTS (EU Science, Technology and Arts) programme, having presented the results of his work and research at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory in Braga, at IRCAM: Centre Pompidou and Centquatre in Paris, and at the Art Center Nabi gallery in Seoul. In 2020, he was awarded the MindSpaces prize, a European Commission programme that aims to create new urban and architectural approaches by integrating immersive “neuroenvironments” in virtual reality. He has a PhD in Science and Technology of the Arts from the School of Arts of the Portuguese Catholic University. He is currently a senior researcher at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory and a visiting assistant professor at the University of Minho.

Christa Sommerer is an internationally renowned media artist, researcher and pioneer of interactive art. Together with Laurent Mignonneau, she worked at the IAMAS Academy in Gifu, Japan, the ATR Research Labs in Kyoto, Japan, the MIT CAVS in Cambridge, Unites States and the NCSA in Champaign Urbana, Illinois, United States. In 2004, Sommerer and Mignonneau set up the Department for Interface Cultures at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria. Sommerer held visiting professor positions at CAFA Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing, Tsukuba University and Aalborg University, Denmark. Together, Sommerer and Mignonneau created around 40 interactive artworks that were shown at around 380 international exhibitions. They received numerous awards, including the Austrian State Art Award in the category of “Media Art” and the Wu Guanzhong Art and Science Innovation Prize awarded by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China. Between 2021 and 2024, their 30 years retrospective exhibition The Artwork as a Living System was touring from the ZKM in Karlsruhe, to the OK Center in Linz, to the iMAL in Brussels and to the Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao. This exhibition is also accompanied by a comprehensive overview of their artworks in the book Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau - The Artwork as a Living System edited by Karin Ohlenschläger, Peter Weibel and Alfred Weidinger, published in 2023 at The MIT Press. More information at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048156/christa-sommerer-and-laurent-mignonneau/ and http://www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent.