Media Art in Croatia @ culturenet.hr

Media Art in Croatia
written and edited by Darko Fritz

http://www.culturenet.hr/v1/english/panorama.asp?id9


First survey and attempt at defining the term Media art in Croatia in its
historical context and setting up a relevant database. Media Art in Croatia
is part of the culturenet.hr web portal to Croatian art and culture.

. A brief overview of media art in Croatia (since 1960s)
. Institutions, events, databases
. Publications [magazines, TV, books, mailing lists and on-line texts;
Bibliography of the Croatian video art]


Databases:

Craotian cultural institutions & subjects / media art:
http://www.culturenet.hr/v1/english/catalogue_search_results.asp?lang=Eng&po
drucje=8

festivals and other regular events / media art:
http://www.culturenet.hr/v1/english/category.asp?cat=4

info servis [recent events, updated daily, in Croatian only]
use pop-up menu 'po kategorijama' > novi mediji + press button 'listaj'
http://www.culturenet.hr/v1/novo/infoservis/


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A brief overview of media art in Croatia (since 1960s)

Between 1961 and 1973, the Gallery of Contemporary Art (now the Museum of
Contemporary Art) organized five international exhibitions entitled New
Tendencies. The first New Tendencies exhibition was organized on the
initiative of the art historians Matko Mestrovic, Radoslav Putar, Bozo Bek
and Boris Kelemen, and the artists Ivan Picelj and Almir Mavignier. The New
Tendencies strived at a synthesis of different forms of the arts of the
1960s and 1970s. In the beginning, the movement characterized broad issues
but later the exhibitions veered towards neo-constructivism, lumino-kinetic
objects (mostly mechanically made, often under group authorship) and finally
computer art and conceptual art. The first exhibition (1961) - apart from
the participants such as Almir Mavignier, Zero Group (Oto Peine, Hienz Mack)
and Azimuth Group (Enrico Castellani, Piero Manzoni) - contained works that
were bent mostly on a system research (Francois Morellet, Karl Gerstner) and
optical research of the surface and the structure of objects (Marc Adrian,
Julio Le Park, Gunther Uecker, Gruppo N - Biasi, Massironi, Chiggio, Costa,
Landi). The origins of the preprogrammed and kinetic art whose
characteristic language would mark New Tendencies as a movement as early as
their following exhibition (1963) had also been noted. The demands for the
scientification of art favored experimenting with new technical media as a
means of researching the visual perception based on the Gestalt theory. The
third exhibition of New Tendencies (1965) probed the relationship between
cybernetics and art and a symposium on the same topic preceded the
exhibition. Vjenceslav Richter, Aleksandar Srnec and Ivan Picelj exhibited
lumino-kinetic objects. The fourth exhibition (1968/69) was dominated by the
information theory and encompassed an international conference entitled
Kompjuteri i vizualna istrazivanja. The same year, the Gallery of
Contemporary Art started the Bit international magazine. I have to mention
the computer light installation by Vladimir Bonacic DIN.21 as a paradigm for
media art coming from the sphere of science. The work was installed in 1968
on the facade of the NAMA department store in Zagreb and was intended as a
permanent exhibit. In 1968, Vladimir Bonacic and Ivan Picelj realized T4, an
electronic (and computer programmed) object. Beside the computerized visual
research section, a conceptual art section was also included in Tendencies 5
(1973). Vilko Ziljak exhibited ASCCI photographs, i.e. digital printouts.
Tomislav Mikulic, working for the television where he made intentional
computer animation and television graphics, created an artistic computer
movie 1973. In the early stages of the development of media art since the
1960s, we note two, at the time irreconcilable sources: modernist
(supporting the idea of progress and science) and the anarchistic-individual
approach of conceptual art (building on the achievements of the student
movements from the 1960s). Conceptual art and computer art were prominently
marked on the Tendencies 5 exhibition poster. Matko Mestrovic was the main
theorist of New Tendencies as a movement who tackled the problem of the
relationship between art and society demanding the socialization of arts,
abolishing the unique significance of a work of art and equaling art and
science. See more on Tendencies under Institutions, data bases, and the
on-line catalogue of a collection of works of early computer art by MSU
exhibited as part of the I am Still Alive project (2000).

Taking a point of view diametrally opposed to the scientification of art, we
can consider part of the conceptual art practice from the 1970s and 80s as
part of media art. Numerous works of the media-aware conceptual art were
made in the 1970s, such as a series of exhibitions with posters as sole
exhibits by Goran Trbuljak (1971-1981) and performances of listening to the
radio, watching TV, reading newspapers and talking on the phone by Tomislav
Gotovac (1980-1981). Free experiments with mixed media were part and parcel
of the poetry of the so-called Group of six authors who mixed media such as
photography, film, and photocopy in the form of visual art, art books and
(street) performance. The following input came to media art from the film
milieu. In addition to his primary interest in working with experimental
film, Ivan Ladislav Galeta created numerous photo and video works,
installations, and multimedia performances. Tomislav Gotovac made gallery
and out-of-gallery performances and photo collages inspired by movies.
Vladimir Petek set up in 1971 the FAVIT art association (film -audiovisual
research - television) and created a series of multimedia works with a
number of collaborators, mostly multivision (multi-channel video, film and
slide projections), and realized ten computer movies with Tomislav Mikulic
in 1976.

Video art is the only form of media art dating back to 1971 and having a
production that has reached critical mass. Sanja Ivekovic and Dalibor
Martinis, both pioneers of Croatian video art, create jointly and
individually a series of video works and installations and, as their
personal preference, represent a duality of interests of media art from the
position of conceptual artists. Martinis is preoccupied with media itself
and its physical and semiotic possibilities and creates a series of video
installations (video installations at table in The Supper at last, 1993,
video installation in a form of a well filled with water Circles Between
Surfaces, 1996), interactive digital video installations (Coma, 1997) and
hybrid works in electronic media (Observatorium 1/2/3 exhibitions, 1997-98).
On the other hand, Sanja Ivekovic moderates social (feminist) activity
through art by setting up an association of women, Electra. She performs
numerous video works and installations (In the Frozen Images video work, the
image is projected on the ice and in the Travel Until the End of Thought
work from 1994 the computer directs the video projection of body parts in
stellar movement). She creates works in other media, too. Project Gen XX is
a series of works published in the form of advertisements in print media in
1997 and 1998. The photographic reproductions show portraits of female top
models and the name underneath (in the graphic form of logo) comes with a
brief biography mentioned in connection to a heroine assassinated for her
political activities in the anti-fascist struggle in WWII.

In the late 1980s, the Nova Evropa (NEP, founded by Dejan Krsic) group,
Studio imitacija zivota (SIZ; Darko Fritz and Zeljko Serdarevic), Grainer
and Kropilak and the Katedrala project displayed artistic activity carried
out under a collective authorship (in the Katedrala project a computer
programmer has been included as a full-fledged author). The above-mentioned
used the media as their basic material (reproductive, electronic, digital
and mass media) and inaugurated sampling/cut-up/quotation/recycling as an
expression without specific stylistic characteristics, i.e. the rejection of
the idea about the original. The medium of photocopy in the pre-Photoshop
aesthetics of the 1980s (in the wake of experiences of copy art of the
1970s) was the prime graphic tool. In the case of SIZ and NEP more
indicative were their media projects than the produced objects. NEP
inaugurated a new understanding of equaling politics and art, not just by