One lovely Tuesday evening in Amsterdam during IDFA, I went out to the “boonies” of the city (about a 20 minute walk from the city center) to attend a presentation of the Mediamatic Lab. Tipped off to this open presentation by Joel Heller, three intrepid Americans set off to see what the Dutch design community was up to. The lab is a beautiful wide open space near the public library and a floating hotel/Chinese restaurant. And, oh yeah, there’s also a big looming pirate ship.

In this space, there is a “shop” called El HEMA that sells the original designs of its collective–one-of-a-kind pieces of clothing, household items and gadgets, food and wine products and other amusing personal-use paraphernalia. That evening, a group lecture and debate was being held with a variety of guest media makers from around the world participating in the project where they would have a chance to present their works-in-progress to one another and a small audience. Presented by media researchers, academics and filmmakers, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Florian Thalhofer and Jakob Schillinger, Mediamatics’ “AnyMedia Documentary @ IDFA Course” explored the relationships between content, media format and strategic production planning, a three-pronged schematic that, in their opinion, seems to make sense for new media documentaries, internet-based ones, in particular.

This was illustrated with projects developed in the course. What the artists needed to address were these main queries: Will the Long Tail apply to documentary making? Is the film business going the same way as the music business? (Let’s hope not.) And, what will it take to make a living from making new media documentaries?, i.e., the all-important end-game of marketing to the audience most interested in your particular kind of work and how to distribute to them using DIY-based dissemination strategies. The audience for most of these projects were librarians, researchers and experts in a particular field, be it health sciences, social sciences, community outreach or international relations.

While much of the discussion was a bit insular and academic for my taste (I’m a practical girl, not real enamored of theory; I want to see things up on their feet), we saw how, by using innovative media strategies in conjunction with the wide reach of the Internet, an artist, filmmaker, or videographer can be very efficient in targeting a way to look at work that can advance new ideas and strategies in any kind of discipline.

Visit the Mediamatic web site to learn a bit more and to also keep apprised of what they’re working on next.

The next day, Kuitenbrouwer pitched at the IDFA Forum with a project that had been birthed in the Lab. More on the brutal ways of the pitch at IDFA in another post soon.