The Migrating Art Academies (MigAA) project is an ongoing aggregate network of participating art academies, people and events. A radical departure from the traditional learning process within bricks-and-mortar, MigAA released a cadre of graduate art students for a series of mobile and located explorations that, literally, spanned Europe, from the Baltic beaches of Lithuania to the Gironde Estuary in France, the Tatras mountains of Slovakia and elsewhere. With public manifestations in Linz, Austria at the prestigious Ars Electronica festival, in Berlin at the Collegium Hungaricum, in Royan, France and numerous other places on the way, the students piloted their Media RVs (recreational vehicles) along the highways and byways of Europe. Literally the Migrating Art Academies is linked to Plato’s school of philosophy which was later called Aristotle’s Peripatetic School or simply the Academy. It is based on a process of thinking by walking. Replacement of the accustomed educational practice with experimental forms of work like doing-while-moving unleashes new forms of creativity and offers a different kind of study and research.
The basic idea behind the project is to challenge the traditional and habitual artistic routines of the students in order to inspire their continued creative development. The Migrating Art Academies project is an attempt to juxtapose the digital, non-haptic, anonymous, collective, and virtual on one hand with the unique, corporeal, and individual on the other. The project concentrates on social and interpersonal communication and encounters between differing cultural habits. “The breach between locations are the breaches between the individuals’, as the Maître à penser of this project, Vilém Flusser, once stated in his writings on migration and nomadism.
The MigAA from 2008 through 2010 was led by the European School of Visual Arts in Poitiers/Angouleme (EESI, FR) along with the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM, DE) and the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VDA, LT). The project was supported by European Commission Culture Program 2007. In 2011 the project is led by the Vilnius Academy of Arts and among others is supported by the Culture Support Foundation of the Republic of Lithuania and the Nordic Culture Point.
