New Media - New Networks

The exhibition entitled New media - New Networks is the first retrospective dedicated to the new media art and culture in Croatia. The exhibition is a result of last year’s research on new media art in Croatia proposed by Ljiljana Kolešnik (Institute of Art History from Zagreb) and conducted by Klaudio Štefančić (the research results will be soon available for download).

The new media art in Croatia is presented as a practice of social and artistic networking in the wider context of applying new communication technologies to old institutions of civil society, public and mass media, art and higher education. Instead of the best of presentation of the artists who have experimented with new media, we decided to represent the new media art in relation to concepts of chronology and social network.

Distinguishing the three chronological lines - political, informatical and artistic - that began in 1990 and ended in 2005 as a background, we hope to point out particularity of new media art in Croatia in relation to international events and contemporary art. Overlapping of these three chronologies forms temporary social structures: cultural and artistic networks in which new media art has been created, produced, presented and interpreted.

Three networks are presented with the help of four hubs.

o BBS (Bulletin Board System) of citizen’s initiative Anti-war campaign and Zamir Transnational Net are parts of the first network. Their activities are presented in the form of archive of the mailing list.
o Arkzin magazine and Multimedia Institute(1) from Zagreb are also parts of the first network but they are shown seperatedly: in the form of the magazine issues that can be photocopied and in the form of Marcell Mars' net artwork NRD Kit (2)
o Media Scape(3), the art festival that used to take place in Zagreb in the period between 1993 and 1999, presents the second network in the form of Darko Fritz’s telefax action 410 Gone, which is a part of the The Internet Error Messages series.(4)
o Department of Visual Communication Design at the Fine Arts Academy, University of Split(5), together with the International Festival of New Film(6) mark the third new media network in the form of Dan Oki and Sandra Sterle's work “Interstory.org“. (7)


The low budget and the gallery space had a direct influence on the exhibition layout. Due to both reasons, the presentation of artworks has been reduced to minimum. However, the limitation on the number of exhibits enabled intertextual links, of which the reference to Arkzin’s timeline is the most prominent.

New Media - New Networks is not a traditional retrospective exhibition. It is more appropriate to compare it to the function of hub, centre that enables connecting and participation in the network. Therefore, once you get connected the data can be added, corrected, copied, shared, deleted…

+ informatical timeline: Marcell Mars, Ognjen Strpić
+ political and artistic timelines: Klaudio Štefančić

Links:
(1) http://www.mi2.hr/
(2) http://nrd.picigin.net/t\_nrdkit/index.html
(3) http://www.mediascape.info/
(4) http://darkofritz.net/
(5) http://www.umas.hr/
(6) http://www.splitfilmfestival.hr/menu4.htm
(7) http://www.karma-multimedia.nl/interstory.org/