The World Wide Video Festival is an international media art festival. Founded in the early 1980s, it is one of the pioneering events in a now internationally respected field of visual art. World Wide organizes an annual festival/exhibition, basing its choice of works on aesthetics and commitment. The aesthetic element is expressed in the intrinsic value of the interplay of light and sound and the often poetic compositions. The commitment lies in how artists reflect upon developments in their culture and society. World Wide chooses those artists that succeed in sublimely expressing content. A third element that characterizes the festival is its attention to interdisciplinary collaboration between the visual and the performing arts, as expressed in the VJ/DJ culture and the collaboration between dance, theatre and media art.
World Wide is foremost an international event, presenting the various continents. This underlines its conviction that media art is an international development and not exclusively a ‘western’ form of expression.
Occasionally, World Wide commissions artists to make a work. Artists are selected on the basis of the originality of their work, in relation to new presentation formats. This may involve the presentation of media art in public spaces or the development of installation pieces.
Besides the annual festival in Amsterdam, World Wide also organizes presentations in other parts of the world. On the request of and in collaboration with local organizations, events and exhibitions are held. In 2002, there was an exhibition in the Michaelis Gallery of Fine Art in Cape Town (South Africa), and before that in Bombay (India), Skopje (Macedonia), Pusan (Korea), and Lima (Peru).