Keiko Sei

Keiko Sei is a writer, curator, and advocate of independent media.

After working as a video curator in Japan from the early 1980s, running an organisation for videoart and independent video, she moved to Eastern Europe in 1988 to research the communist bloc media scene. In 2002, she has moved from Czech Republic to Bangkok to continue her research on independent media in Southeast Asia, especially Burma, where she founded the Myanmar Moving Image Center in 2003.

She has initiated and worked as curator on various projects, including The Media Are With Us - The Role of Television in the Romanian Revolution (Budapest, 1990); the video program The Age of Nikola Tesla (Osnabrück, 1991); Ostranenie (Dessau, 1993); Prague Media Symposium; Ex Oriente Lux - Romanian Video Week (Bucharest, 1993); Orbis Fictus exhibition (Prague, 1995) and the exhibition POLITIK-UM/New Engamement, (Prague, 2002); and as editor of documenta 12 magazines project (2006-2007).

She has taught and given lectures on media art, independent media, and media activism at numerous institutions, including Video/Performance/Multimedia Studio of the Technical University of Brno (1998-2002); Kazakhstan (1999); and the University of Media Art and Design in Karlsruhe (HfG) where she currently teaches as a guest professor.

Her video archive, which has been collected in transition across different continents (1988-1999), was exhibited to the public at translocation_new media/art, Generali Foundation, in Vienna in 1999, and the German media described it as "the biggest collection of revolutionary videos in private hand."

She has written for Umělec magazine and Respekt in the Czech Republic and numerous publications worldwide, with the overall focus of her essays being society in transition.

Publications

Books

• editor, Von der Bürokratie zur Telekratie. Rumänien im Fernsehen. Ein Symposion aus Budapest, Berlin: Merve, 1990, 165 pp. Contributions by Paolino Accolla, László Beke, Magda Cârneci, Mihaela Cristea, Serge Daney, Jean-Paul Fargier, Vilém Flusser, Ingo Günther, Veijo Hietala, Ari Honka-Hallila, Erkki Huhtamo, Derrick de Kerckhove, Richard Kriesche, Geert Lovink, Margaret Morse, Morgan Russel, Jeffrey Shaw, Tjebbe van Tijen, Paul Virilio, Peter Weibel. (German)
• Konečná krajina, ed. Vladimír Havlík, trans. Jakub Geisler, Pavla Niklová, Lucie Simerová and Vladan Šír, Prague: One Woman Press, 2004, 267 pp. ISBN 80-86356-28-0. [1] Review: Denisa Kera (Ikaros, 2005). (Czech)

Articles

• "Quick review of my days with video in Eastern Europe".
• "Productive Unclarities. An interview with media artist Barbara Lattanzi".
• "Malcolm X, McLuhan, Media Study. Interview mit dem Medientheoretiker Gerald O'Grady". (German)
• http://www.springerin.at/dyn/search_result.php?index_autorinnen=Sei%2C+Keiko
• "Hladký přechod. Umění, umění ve veřejném prostoru a reklama v post-komunistické východní Evropě". (Czech)
• "Flusser, média a východní Evropa", Výtvarné umění 3-4 (1996), pp 231-235. (Czech)
• Petr Szczepanik, "Média mezi kulturami a žánry. Rozhovor s Keiko Sei", Cinepur 23-24 (2002), pp 16-19, PDF. (Czech) [2]
• "The Need for Brother TV", 2006. In: Luksch, Patel (eds.), Ambient Information Systems, 2009.
• "Living with Censorship", Metropolis M No 2, April/May 2008.
• "Troubled adults and the modernist experiments of transformation", 2008.
• Articles in Umelec

Links

• http://flyingcircusproject.weebly.com/1/post/2013/01/public-intellectual-4-keiko-sei.html
• http://web.archive.org/web/20090214142325/http://solaris.hfg-karlsruhe.de/hfg/inhalt/de/Lehrende/10001
• http://web.archive.org/web/20071201130655/http://www.labinary.org/media.art.theory.week/Keiko-CV-more.txt
• Wikipedia-CS