german version
Globalscreen_
Globalscreen is a flexible media-art platform for artists and arts institutions. It stands for collaboration worldwide amongst video and media artists engaged in finding new, contemporary avenues in art and communication. These are experiments by artists from different countries turning to contemporary subjects, to political, aesthetic and philosophical contemplations and which, expressed in diverse projects, make a mark both in museum contexts and in public spaces.

The intention is to promote dialogue and culture in Europe and beyond. The programme�s base is NRW, Northrhine Westfalia; it is an emanative project through time and space in the sense of forming identity and networks.

Globalscreen_Networkings
Globalscreen Network pieces are flexible by design and each inspires the other. Invitations to apply are public or drafted as collaborative projects at the outset. Cooperators with Globalscreen (formerly Euroscreen 21) are international artists, curators and arts establishments as well as cooperating partners in politics and trade.

Globalscreen as a media art platform is constituted mainly in virtual space. The aim is to present with each contribution a distinct current political and artistic stance and perspective. What applies to all is that we want to stimulate artistic investigative processes. These can include interdisciplinary approaches. Drawing respectively on differing principles, projects remain flexible for future developments.

Exhibitions and projects in museums, galleries, at festivals or in public spaces are elaborated in collaboration with the pertinent institutions and artists. The genres range from experimental to interactive, animation or documentary pieces. The participating artists include the younger and the professionally established.

This makes for many and varied contacts. By including different sections of the population in its ambit, Globalscreen is ultimately also engaged in a Beuysian social sculpture that opens up new contemporary impulses and potential for further development.

Globalscreen_ Background
Globalscreen developed out of the video art group, Artscreen (Andrea Natterer, artistic co-ordinator), who in 2000 set about presenting video art in public spaces and to permeate everyday life with art. Cooperating with the group were the firm, Infoscreen, and the Deutsche Bahn (German Railways), who ran video art between the news and commercials showing on digital media boards at German airports and underground and railway stations.

The introduction of the Euro, the expansion trend in the EU and the rapid development of data transfer all suggested that work should be pursued at a European level and that we should overcome the language problem in communication by circulating pictures. The idea of conceptual and media artist, Judith Nothnagel, Euroscreen21 thus came about in the year 2002 and was published in a catalogue raisonn� on the occasion of the activities of Europe�s Cultural Capital then, Graz. In 2003, the project was realised in cooperation with the PAN Kunstforum Niederrhein and the North Rhine-Westphalian Art Fund/Kunststiftung NRW.

2005/6 saw the development of cooperation at a decisive level with the District of Wesel. The concept was awarded the EU Commission�s Netdays Certificate, a scheme to promote dialogue and culture in Europe. At the same time it became inevitable that this successful collaboration should be widened beyond Europe�s borders. International cultural institutes and artists showed increasing interest in the project�s way of perceiving, engaging in and handling contemporary art in Europe.

To accord with these developments, Euroscreen�s name has been changed as from 2006 into Globalscreen. The new projects are not restricted to Europe throughout; according to the subject at hand, specific target groups are invite to take part in both, research on contemporary means of artistic expression and collective forms of perception and dialogue.

Globalscreen_ Initiators
Globalscreen operates flexibly and draws on cooperation with interested artists and freelance curators according to the emphasis of the project at hand. Artists today take their work beyond the classical institutional framework in creative ways and at manyfold levels. They are artists and/or curators or designers, programmers, teachers, art historians and theoreticians, etc.; they operate independent web forums, arts institutes and much more.

Thus we create our own networks on a local and global footing, which generate, in parallel to the art industry, spaces and scope for action and communication, be it critical or participatory.

In artists� hands, �classical� media such as sculpture, painting, video art, the Internet, etc., are continually redefined and redesignated. For a cultural programme like Globalscreen, this implies operating between the permanently shifting practices of contemporary art and a heterogenous public, with changing formats and modes of communicating and presenting that art. An essential in all this is to integrate both local and international processes of networking and cooperation.

� bano, Germany, 2006