www.mosaica.ca - The Digital Diaspora and a New Cultural Aesthetic

Shelley Hornstein, York University, Canada
Reesa Greenberg, York University, Canada
http://www.mosaica.ca/

Demonstration: Demonstrations - Session 1

MOSAICA is a creative arts-based, transnational, virtual "museum" dedicated to exploring and galvanizing the possibilities of the internet as a new space for contemporary Jewish culture. Because MOSAICA is the first free-standing, web-centered exhibition venue dedicated to Jewish culture not affiliated with any bricks-and-mortar building and not dependent on collections of artifacts, it offers a revolutionary opportunity for reorienting a post-Holocaust culture understandably focused on preserving artifacts of the past rather than oriented to the future. Unlike museums that use the internet as exposure for their material collections and curate exhibitions online to accompany the main geographic site of the building, MOSAICA is dedicated to the exploration of the internet as a new medium where artists and curators can create distinctive works that exist only through computer technology and the web.

We will demonstrate how MOSAICA operates and what it attempts to achieve. MOSAICA is devoted to redefining Jewish, digital, and diasporic aesthetics in the design of its homepage and the artist projects on the site. We will also address the presentation of Jewish art forms in the new global diaspora. By embracing artists across national boundaries, MOSAICA, as a Digital Diaspora, offers possibilities for reformulating "home" for all diasporic cultures. We will discuss in what ways our Web site serves as a model for redefining museums in terms of nationality or ethnicity, and expands the diasporic community in previously unimagined ways.