Minä näen, I see – the Kuopio International Video Festival 1989.
AV-arkki organized the Kuopio International Video Festival in 1989–1990. The following year, the event moved to the capital region and was renamed. The MuuMediaFestival was organized from 1991 to 1998. In 2000–2001, AV-arkki organized the new Avanto festival, which later became independent as its own association. In the years 2002–2009, AV-arkki compiled View – video art viewings. Archive materials from the festivals produced by AV-arkki were digitised in the MEHI – Media Art History in Finland project.
Founded in 1989, AV-arkki launched the Kuopio International Video Festival together with video workshops that same year. In the second year, the works of the festival were also screened on a monitor wall at the Helsinki railway station.
In 1991, the festival moved to the capital region, expanded to media arts and was named MuuMediaFestival. The shows and performances were organized in Helsinki and the exhibitions in the Otso Gallery in Espoo. Various types of media art were widely exhibited, such as CD-rom art, robotics, computer animations, music videos and radical documentary films. Some TV programmes were also produced, such as the Videopolis series (1993–1995) and the media art discussion Late Night Show (1995).
MuuMediaFestivaal 1993, brochure
The last MuuMediaFestival was organized in 1998. In 2000, AV-arkki launched the Avanto festival of electronic art, which later became independent as its own association. In the years 2002–2009, AV-arkki organized View – a viewing of video art.
view03, flyer, artwork: Juha van Ingen ”Waterfall”
The entire AV-arkki archive from 1989–2008 has been donated to the National Gallery’s archive (2010, THAA14). One of the goals of the MEHI – Media Art History in Finland project was the digitization and cataloguing of MuuMediaFestivals’ documents included in the archive. In cooperation with the National Gallery, the paper archives were opened for scanning and cataloguing. The digitised material has been deposited both in the National Gallery, where it is accessible to researchers, and in AV-arkki, for the association’s own use.
AV-arkki with the archivist Vesa Puhakka and the civil servant Alfons Fellman were responsible for the digitizing and cataloging of the MuuMediaFestivaali archives in the MEHI – Media Art History in Finland project, financed by AVEK, Kone Foundation, The Ministry of Education and Culture, Oskar Öflund Foundation, The Finnish Cultural Foundation and The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.
The MEHI – Media Art History in Finland project 2021–2023, led by The Finnish Media Art Network, was realized in a consortium with AV-arkki, the Centre for Finnish Media Art, M-cult, Artists’ Association MUU, Poike Productio, SOLU / Bioart Society and FLASH – the Finnish Light Art Society.
