Ela Kagel

Ela Kagel is a freelance curator and producer. She holds an M.A. in European Cultural Planning from the De Montfort University in Leicester / UK and is a member of Public Art Lab since 2005.

Ela is co-initiator of the Mobile Studios project and curator of Upgrade! Berlin, a series of events on digital culture. Together with Public Art Lab, she has iniated and realised various projects such as the Mobicases, mobile documentary units, which have been presented at the Upgrade! International Festival in Skopje 2008 or the HTMlles Media Art Festival in Montreal / Kanada.

Online since 1996, Ela has focused her work on the intersection of art and technology - with a special interest on digital culture. On this basis she has created interface structures and concepts for various cultural events: media art exhibitions, networked performances, mobile applications, television formats, ambient computing or multimedia exhibition design- very often in combination. She starts from a cross-media approach to use synergies between different media platforms. As a professional guideline she aims to offer people a self-determined access to digital contents and, most important for her, creates efficient forms of knowledge transfer for her audiences.

Besides her work with Public Art Lab, Ela is a consultant and researcher in international media arts. Her recent work covers research projects such as City Interface , a mobile prototype for the Museumsquartier Vienna, or the production of IPTV-platforms, like the videoclip channel of Motor Music.

Together with New York-based media artist Ursula Endlicher, she regularly publishes texts about the challenges of curating netart on their common blog or as guest curators, like for the TAGallery. (initated by CONT3XT.NET) 
The latest collaboration of Ela and Ursula is the Tabutheater 2.0 project , commissioned by the Theater am Neumarkt in Zürich.

Currently, Ela is involved in the development of the 2010lab, a digital plattform for the cultural economy, for RUHR.2010 and is part of the curatorial team of the Transmediale Festival.