MEHI – Media Art History in Finland was a 3-year project initiated by the Finnish Media Art Network. The objective of the project was to record and publish the history of Finnish Media Art, and to build information infrastructures for its documentation in the future.
The scope of the project was based on a wide definition of media art as a practice working with and reflecting on media and technology. It spaned all media art related genres and a history timeline ranging from experiments in the early 1900s to the 2020s.
MEHI was realized in a consortium between the Media Art Network with its member organizations AV-arkki, the Centre for Finnish Media Art, SOLU / Bioart Society, m-cult, MUU Artists’ Association and The Finnish Light Art Society FLASH, with Poike Productio as project producer. A 15-member expert group guided the process and was responsible for its art historical framing. Key project partners are The Finnish National Gallery and The National Library of Finland. 20 media art organizations contributed materials to the database collection.
MEHI project was based on three work packages:
- Information infrastructures for media art. A comprehensive reference database of Finnish media art works and events (producer: MUU) as well as a special ontology and open data for media art (producer: M-cult).
- Documenting and archiving historical materials. Interviews with Finnish pioneers of the field and documentation of key historical events (producer: AV-arkki), as well as conservation plans for pioneering works in various genres (producer: FLASH).
- Anthology of Finnish Media Art. A book exploring “The 1st Century of Media Art in Finland” (producer: Bioart Society).
The anthology was published by PARVS Publishing Ltd., and a selection of articles were made available in English at the media-art-finland.fi website.
The project has been made possible by The Finnish Cultural Foundation, The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and Kone Foundation, with support from The Ministry of Education and Culture and The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture, AVEK. The preliminary research phase was funded by Oskar Öflund Foundation in 2020.