2005 was the year in which Andrea Sodomka and Elisabeth Schimana jointly established the IMA Institute of Media Archeology. For IMA, there is a clearly positive interrelationship between technology and art by women. Whether this art is now produced by means of processing via devices or programming computers is beside the point. The primary consideration is an active process of coming to terms with technological developments.

IMAfiction is the Institute’s portrait series dedicated to women artists from the field of media arts with a focus on sonic art.

In this DVD series of five Austrian and five international female artists (Liesl Ujvary, Rebekah Wilson, Heidi Grundmann, Eliane Radigue, Andrea Sodomka, Maryanne Amacher, Anne La Berge, Electric Indigo, Beatriz Ferreyra, Elisabeth Schimana), most of the artists chose who they wanted to be portrayed by. The results are homages that are aesthetically diverse, intimate, and refreshingly free from any conventional film format constraints.

In her essay “A room of ones own” published in 1928, Virginia Woolf writes about women and fiction. In this context, fiction refers both to narrative literature and the related fictitiousness of the persons whose story is to be told.

“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point – a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions – woman and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”

“I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existrance. ‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide wether any part of it is worth keeping.” (Virginia Woolf)

For the purposes of IMA, literature can simply be replaced by media arts or technological art or electronic art or computer art or sound art or radio art or … Today, the core message is as relevant as it was in 1928.