Regine has been interviewed by fine art Trendbeheer. One of the topic they discussed is very relevant to me:

Trendbeheer: Art is all about hypes and media art more then that: there are so much sponsored/government subsidised events these days - at least in Holland - that there are more conferences then artists. There is a danger of disillusion for a new audience.

Regine: I see a proliferation of new media art festivals all around europe. And there’s a lot of repetition, not always in favour of the best works.

On the one hand it’s great for new media artists, on the other hand the audience is not growing as quickly as the number of festivals.

Why do I blog this? I fully agree with this statement about repetition: it seems that as in engineering, media artists are sometimes not aware of other projects related to theirs (hence they reinvent the wheel on a regular basis). This is no an attack targetting artists but rather a phenomenon that I noticed both with engineering students and media artists which IMO is rather about the way they work than their intrinsical behavior. And of course, as a person working in the academic world, I have a strong bias towards an overamphasis on checking earlier work of others.