Woodstock Digital Media Festival Launches This Weekend: An Interview with Organizers Marcin Ramocki and Joe McKay

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This weekend tech art nerds will flood Woodstock for the first Digital Media Festival of its kind. Themed, “Out of Place” — a nod to the unlikely union of local landscape and tech– some of the country’s top art professionals converge to discuss and exhibit an array of new media projects specific to the festival. I’m talking, Christiane Paul, the Director of the Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School, NY, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Magdalena Sawon and Tamas Banovich, owners of the well-known Chelsea Gallery, Postmasters, and Jeremiah Johnson/Nullsleep to name just a few. Also the artist collective eTeam and VTDigger.org journalist Anne Galloway. I talked with two of the project’s organizers, Marcin Ramock and Joe McKay about the festival this week in the hopes of giving readers and travelers a better idea of what’s in store. Here’s what they said: 

 

Paddy Johnson: So I wanted to talk to you guys briefly about the Woodstock Digital Media Festival in Vermont, which happens this Saturday.  Can you tell me a little bit about it?

Joe Mckay:  Sure. Through a friend of a friend, I met the director of the festival.  He’s a guy who comes from working at Time Magazine for a while, working at PBS, and he’s actually in England as the acting CEO of some cable television networks there.  He’salways been interested in new media, but more from a commercial side…so he doesn’t know a lot about new media in the art world, but he’s always sort of been a fan and been interested.We had a couple meetings just because of our personal fan connection, and we got talking about what we might do for a festival; this is sort of a brainchild of his, and he brought me along.  The idea is to do something in his summer hometown, which is in Woodstock…the incongruity of having a new media festival in a place that’s so pastoral and idyllic makes sense, but also there is a real wave of people who are turning to new technologies in Vermont as way of preserving that pastoral, idyllic lifestyle.  So it seems sort of an incongruous way of doing a festival in that location, but on the other hand, it makes sense when you’re there and you see the community.

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