Symposium

UNLIMITED EDITIONS

Public discussion about personal collecting and media archiving

5 July 2012, 2 PM, TENT, Rotterdam

Monoskop Library is a new public resource for history of media culture. The online archive includes experimental films, video art, electroacoustic music, computer art, graphics, prints, as well as numerous publications covering media arts and culture from their pre-history up until the last decade. It primarily focuses on the works, which – despite their historical significance – are not appropriately represented in the canon of art history, and seemed destined to remain out of sight for many years to come. The public launch of Monoskop library will be followed by a discussion about personal collecting, media archiving, and collaborative production of art history, together with invited guests Annet Dekker, Darko Fritz, Florian Cramer, and Sandra Fauconnier. The event is facilitated by Dušan Barok, with the support from the Piet Zwart Institute and TENT.

Over the years Dušan Barok has collected approximately 100 gigabytes of experimental films, video art, electroacoustic music, scanned versions of computer-aided paintings, graphics, prints, and numerous publications covering the development of media arts and culture from their pre-history back in the 1910s up until the last decade. He has focused primarily on those works which, though relevant, are not appropriately represented in the canon of art history. Archived in different cities and not accessible online, many of these works seemed destined to remain out of sight for many years to come. After being asked so many times to share a film or a recording, Dušan decided to share them all.

Preserving the legacy of these works involved three main goals: reaching the widest possible audience (including researchers); involving more people in the initiative; and maintaining public access. Rather than attempting to create some grand historical narrative interweaving the content, the collection is designed instead to provide quotable online resources, presented in their context, thus enabling other researchers to produce alternative art histories.

The work explores various problems related to private collecting and media archiving. Over the past few months, a context for the collection has been set up through a number of interventions, including a series of lectures, a magazine, a conference on media-art history, and an exhibition of remakes, by young artists, of historical media works.

The symposium in TENT on July 5, 2012 is an occasion for a public launch of the Monoskop Library and a discussion with invited artists, scholars and cultural practitioners: Annet Dekker, Darko Fritz, Florian Cramer, and Sandra Fauconnier.

How does an artwork become historical? How can a media archive create meaning? Why do so many collectors of digital materials choose to keep their treasures out of the public eye? How do we define ‘fair use’ of copyrighted material? Monoskop Library explores the intersection between personal collecting, media archiving, and collaborative production of art history.

http://monoskop.org/Symposium
http://monoskop.org

Guests

Annet Dekker

Annet Dekker is an independent curator and researcher. Subjects of interest are the influence of technology, science and popular culture on art and vice versa. Currently she works as webcurator for SKOR, as researcher on the project ”Born Digital art in Dutch art collections” for SBMK, VP, NIMk and DEN, as lecturer at Piet Zwart Institute for the thematic project “Archive & Memory” and new media theory at Rietveld Academy. In 2009 she initiated aaaan.net with Annette Wolfsberger. At the moment they organise the Artist in Residence programme at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam and they produced Funware, an international touring exhibition in 2010 and 2011 about fun in software (curated by Olga Goriunova). Since 2008 she is writing a PhD on strategies for documenting net art at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, under supervision of Matthew Fuller. http://aaaan.net

Darko Fritz

Darko Fritz is an artist and independent curator and researcher. He studied architecture at the University of Zagreb and fine art at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.

His work fills the gap between contemporary art practices and media art culture. His research on histories of international computer-generated art resulted in several publications and exhibitions, as the world’s first historic retrospective exhibition of the field: I am Still Alive (early computer-generated art and recent low-tech and internet art), Zagreb, 2000 and later Bit International - Computers and Visual Research, [New] Tendencies, Zagreb 1961—1973, Neue Galerie, Graz, 2007 and ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2008. As editor for media art at net portal Culturenet he edited related database and published "A Brief Overview of Media Art in Croatia (Since the 1960s)". In 2010 he started the research on the beginning of computer-generated art in the Netherlands.

He curated numerous contemporary art exhibitions as Reconstruction: private=public=private=public=, Belgrade, 2009 and Angles and Intersections (co-curated with Christiane Paul, Nina Czegledy, Ellena Rosi and Peter Dobrila), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, 2009. Fritz is founder and programmer of the grey) (area – space of contemporary and media art since 2006.

Florian Cramer

Florian Cramer is an applied research professor ('lector') for the impact of new media on the profession of artists and designers at the applied research center Creating 010 at Hogeschool Rotterdam.

He studied Comparative Literature and Art History at Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Konstanz and University of Massachusetts at Amherst, obtained his M.A. degree in 1998 and doctorate in 2006. From 1999 to 2004, he was a junior faculty teacher at Peter Szondi-Institut for Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin, in 2004, a guest researcher at Piet Zwart Institute, from 2006 to 2010, course director of the Master programme Media Design & Communication, since 2008 reader/applied research professor, since 2011, programme director of the new research center Creating 010 of Hogeschool Rotterdam, and a board member of Stichting WORM, Rotterdam.

Since 1996, he has been a critical writer on literature, arts and media. His most recent longer publication is the book Exe.cut[up]able statements. Poetische Kalküle und Phantasmen des selbstausführenden Texts, Wilhelm Fink, 2011. In practical projects, he has collaborated among others with Stewart Home, mez breeze, Alan Sondheim, Sebastian Luetgert, Eva & Franco Mattes, Cornelia Sollfrank, Istvan Kantor, Coolhaven, Wilhelm Hein & Annette Frick. He is both an amateur computer programmer and an amateur filmmaker.

Sandra Fauconnier

Sandra Fauconnier is an art historian. She has (the equivalent of) a BA in architecture at Sint-Lucas (currently WENK, Hogeschool Kunst en Wetenschappen) Ghent (1994), and received an MA in art history (Kunstwetenschappen) from Ghent University with a dissertation "Web-specific art: the World Wide Web as an artistic medium" (1997). She was researching the design of participatory web-based resources at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.

Sandra worked briefly at Madoc bvba (Ghent) as content and interface designer (1997). Later she was employed as web designer, webmistress, educator and educational technologist at the Teacher Training Department, Ghent University, Belgium (1997-2000). Together with Guy van Belle she ran dBONANZAh!, a Flemish non-profit media art initiative involved in digital audio projects, among other things (1998-2002). From 2000 to 2007 she was a media archivist at V2_, Rotterdam, where she designed a description model for electronic art activities, developed a thesaurus on media art, and worked on various research projects related to (among others) the preservation of electronic art, and alternative copyright models. Afterwards she joined collection and mediatheque at NiMK, Amsterdam (2007-2012). Currently she is the project lead of the successful online video channel ArtTube, launched by Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, as well as a board member of Wikimedia Netherlands, focusing on projects that involve Wikipedia and Wikimedia and cultural and heritage institutions (GLAM).

She has published and lectured extensively on the subject of internet art and media art.

Facilitator

Dušan Barok is an artist and cultural activist involved in critical practice in the fields of software, art, and theory.