Looking Back on 10 Years of Expanded Animation Symposium: Organizing, Documenting and Archiving TogetherWith Students

The Expanded Animation Symposium is an annual event at the media art festival Ars Electronica. Since 2013 the symposium has featured 200 experts (i.e., artists, researchers, cultural workers, and curators) in the expanded field of animation. The video and online documentation are essential because the conference focuses mainly on lectures, artistic presentations, and panel discussions. Such symposia on animation and media art are only possible through cooperation with different partners (e.g., festivals, institutions, and universities). In many cases, a big challenge is the low level of funding and restricted resources. In the case of the Expanded Animation Symposium, cooperation between Ars Electronica and the Department of Digital Media at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and other partners enabled the production of such an event in the context of media education. Students attended relevant media production courses and were included in the organization of the symposium as equal partners. This article explains the various tasks of organizing, documenting, and archiving the symposium and shows how students successfully became part of this process over the last ten years.