“TransCoding– From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture“ is an arts-based research project conceived of by the artist and researcher Dr. Barbara Lüneburg (project leader), funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (PEEK AR 259-G21) and located at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten. The project will be run by an international team of three artists/programmer and three researchers from 1.2.2014 – 30.1.2017.

Our research topic is the question of how we can involve an audience that is hitherto not available for the new arts in our project, exemplary create a link between the world of young people coming from the popular culture and that of internationally working multimedia artists and thus make “highbrow art” more accessible.

With TransCoding we wish to encourage participation in art and generate a new audience by

• initialising an online/offline community that picks up on a given frame in an artistic, social and interactive way using every day media of participatory culture such as facebook, blog, youtube, twitter etc.
• creating a multimedia-solo-show for one violinist, live-electronics and video aiming for performances at festivals and concert podia. Influenced by or in exchange with the community we would like to explore the topic “identity” by crossing between popular culture and so-called high art.
• and as a final step by generating an audiovisual installation that will reflect on and evaluate the artistic and scientific results as well as the contributions of the community putting it together to an interactive artwork that can exist and travel independently from any performing artist (first exhibition planned at Schmiede Hallein/Austria, September 2015).

By offering participatory culture via web 2.0 as part of our arts project we invite to speak out, share a discourse and take influence on the approaching art project. Through these online platforms we hope for input across boundaries that will show its influence in the second and third step of the project. Our starting point will be the blog www.what-ifblog.net.

In this project, practice based arts research is not just about the artistic process reaching into new contexts. We apply findings and theories from media sociology to an artistic process and investigate their applicability and meaning in the arts. The (commonly hierarchic) relationship artist and audience/community will be defined to one of permeability and mutual influence.

We hope to raise interest in participation in art as a way to express one’s identity and achieve personal empowerment and to further a sense of their belonging to a peer group by participating in an arts project.

Please, click here for more information about our key research question.

TransCoding is funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF as project PEEK AR 259-G21.

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/what-ifblog/