About
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The interdisciplinary project “GAMA – Gateway to Archives of Media Art” was launched on 2007-11-01 by 19 participating organisations from Europe’s culture, art and technology sector, with the aim to establish a central online portal to different European media art collections for the interested public, for curators, artists, academics, researchers, and mediators – an endeavour supported by European Commission within the framework of the
econtentplus programme .

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Artworks created with new media technology constitute one of the most popular contemporary art genres: media art. Its appeal for the general public is based on the importance that new technologies such as the Internet, digital equipment etc. play in everyday life. Media art explores the changing relationship between culture and technology, and questions in experimental, innovative and often audacious ways to the ambiguous role of new media technologies in our lives, while rendering homage to the technology at the same time. In the face of this, media art archives have an invaluable mission amongst modern art collections. Yet, if the existing digital media art libraries are accessible only with difficulty for cultural or scholarly stakeholders, how much more so must they be for the general interested public? Use and re-use of the archives’ digital content are totally disproportionate to the importance of media art in contemporary culture. GAMA is a project to correct this incongruity.

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The aim is the establishment of a central platform to enable multilingual, facilitated and user-orientated access to a significant number of media art archives and their digitalised contents. The consortium comprises of a majority of the most important digital content holders for media art in Europe. The content provided constitutes approx. 55% of all media artworks presented online by European cultural archives and distributors. This amount will ensure a significant increase in use, re-use and cross-border visibility of the digital content when aggregated and accessible through one common interface. The gateway will quickly develop to be the European central online interface and search portal for any person interested in media art. The enhanced access shall also incite other archives to place their content online. The future perspective is to expand the network so as to represent all European online archives of media art.

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The GAMA Team includes highly qualified technical partners with vast expertise in the field of digital media art archives. Through the implementation and combination of previous work in multimedia content search, service-oriented architectures and database adaptors with respect to the nature of media art and the needs of the user community, the project will provide a major improvement in accessing the different archives regardless of their diverging archive structures, their metadata characteristics, their individual focus and approach, their various digital formats and the languages used within the archive.

   Objectives

• Enable enhanced access to European media art archives and significantly increase awareness and mediation of media art
• Be Europe’s key online portal to its media art archives and facilitate the discovery, use and re-use of the archives‘ contents
• Provide sophisticated multilingual query performance and implement advanced search functionalities
• Combine and adapt existing standard and state-of-the art solutions to meet the needs for interoperability between the individual archives and their heterogeneity

   Expected results

• Sound framework and quality procedures for media annotation in order to be able to expand the GAMA gateway content and activities also to other content types
• Internet and systems compatibility of content: analysis of digital data configuration for adaptation to existing standards, securing necessary server space and respective logistics for server operation
• Integration of the state of the art automatic metadata indexing and video segmentation tools (face detection, motion detection, shot boundaries, representative frame generation) in order to provide fast access and content browsing capabilities
• Online availability of the GAMA gateway with an operable and advanced user interface
• Advanced search facilities (like image query by example, or visual similarity search) combined with keywords to ease the finding of media art items
• Take up of the project results after the project’s funding period