[spectre] open archives

[Miloš VOJTĚCHOVSKÝ]

Open Archives. Media Art Presentation and Digital Archives 
Prague October 29th - November 4th 2007

Intermedia Institute, Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Czech Technical University in Prague (CVUT), room H24/2, Technicka 2, 16627, Prague 6 
http://www.iim.cz 

opening hours: 12 - 7 PM

The Open Archives project is focused on exhibiting and archiving initiatives mapping, re-storing and interpreting contemporary and modern art, experimental film and video, media art and industrial heritage. It is addressed to art, humanities and technical schools* students as well as to the wide public. 

The project hopes to trigger discussion concerning technical and methodological issues related to the archiving and distribution and aims to stimulate additional research in this field in the Czech Republic. Recently, various DVD anthologies have been published rediscovering various fields of culture and making so far unknown chapters from art history accessible to the public, as well as online audiovisual archives that are useful for the research and presentation. Furthermore, such archives can serve as a platform for students, teachers, curators, artists and historians to cooperate in further endeavors. 

Screening program, located in the new Lab of the Intermedia Institute, is enriched with daily program of lectures, presentations and discussions of various Czech and international digital archives. The IIM interdisciplinary institute follows the theoretical and practical research in the field of emerging technologies, visual and sound art, history and theory of moving and still image and digital culture. Public is welcome to attend the lectures of several internationally recognized artists and theoreticians and presentations of institutions engaged in the collecting and archiving of analog and digital materials. 

For example, Woody Vasulka, an eminent international video art pioneer, is presenting his electronic arts archive project (vasulka.org) he has been developing with his wife and collaborator Steina since the 1960s. Vasulka, together with media artist Thomas Thiel, present the recent exhibition project MindFrames, created in collaboration with Zentrum fuer Kunst und Media in Karlsruhe. Other initiatives and institutes planning to present are as follows: Czech - VVP AVU; Research Centre for Industrial Heritage (CVUT), shared cooperative platform Konvergence -, as well as international - Hyperkino (FAMU, Prague, NIIK, Moscow) WRO Art Center from Wroclaw; project Grauzone 8mm (Ludwig Boltzmann Institut Linz); projects 40yearsvideoart, Art_clips.ch.at.de (ZKM, Karlsruhe), or CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval) and GAMA (Gateway to Archives of Media Art). 

PROGRAM of SCREENINGS
Every day 12 - 5 PM projections of experimental film and video, documentaries and interviews by *Buffalo circle* on 2 screens, always at 3 PM commentary to individual artists 

CAVE - projection of the work by Steina and Woody Vasulka on three screens 

LECTURES (29. 10. - 2. 11., always 5 - 7 PM) 
Lectures and presentations of Czech and international digital archives 
Live on-line streaming of the lectures by radio Lemurie at rtsp://stream.node9.org/live.sdp 

29. 10. 
12 - 5 PM SCREENINGS Woody Vasulka
5 PM Opening session 
6 - 8 PM Vasulka Archives presentation; MindFrames exhibition project presentation (ZKM), Lector: Woody Vasulka http://www.vasulka.org 
konvergence, Memory of Art archive, Lectors: Michal Klodner, Lenka Dolanova, FAMU, http://konvergence.info 

30. 10. 
12 - 5 PM SCREENINGS Steina 
5 PM Hyperkino project, Lector: Natascha Drubek-Meyer, FAMU, http://hyperkino.net 

VVP, AVU, Lectors: Eva Krátká, Pavlína Morganová, Terezie Nekvindová, http://vvp.avu.cz 

Research Centre for Industrial Heritage, Lector: Petr Vorlík, http://wcpd.cvut.cz 

31. 10.
12 - 5 PM SCREENINGS Paul Sharits 
5 PM From Monument to Market: Video Art and Public Space, WRO Art Center, Lector: Krzysztof Dobrowolski, http://www.wrocenter.pl 
OASIS / AMA&NT projects and its follower GAMA; CASPAR project: multimedia archives interconnecting and the questions of long-term storage of digital data. Lectors: Viliam Šimko, Michal Máša, CIANT, http://www.ciant.cz, http://www.casparpreserves.eu, http://www.oasis-archive.info 

1. 11. 
12 - 5 PM SCREENINGS Hollis Frampton 
5 PM Grauzone 8 mm. Materialen zum autonomen Künstlerfilm in der DDR, Ludwig Boltzmann Institut. Medien. Kunst. Forschung. Linz. Lector: Britt Schlehahn, http://media.lbg.ac.at 

2. 11. 
12 - 5 PM SCREENINGS James Blue 
5 PM 
40 yearsvideoart.de: Digital Heritage
Art_clips.ch.at.de 
Lector: Thomas Thiel, ZKM, www.zkm.de 
MindFrames exhibition project 
Lectors: Woody Vasulka, Thomas Thiel 

3. 11. 
12 - 5 PM SCREENINGS Tony Conrad 

4. 11. 
12 - 5 PM SCREENINGS Peter Weibel 

PRESENTED PROJECTS
MindFrames 
Woody Bohuslav Vasulka has been a long advocate of collecting and digitizing art works and media projects with an allied circle of artists and creators. He has also advocated the free distribution of these materials through digital archives which would become the platform for cooperation among an international team of researchers. He initiated the exhibition MindFrames in ZKM centre in Karlsruhe, with co-curator Peter Weibel, led by artist and programmer Thomas Thiel. At the end of 2006, the exhibition presented a unique exhibition model that enables new ways of studying, presenting and archiving media art. It presented the work of artists and theoreticians who worked at the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York in Buffalo (founded by Gerald O*Grady in 1973). The *Buffalo group* concentrated on researching the variable concept of art and medium, and contributed to the key shift from film art towards a more general understanding and the usage of visual code. Artistic creations were thus interconnected with teamwork and scientific and/or philosophical research.  The artists involved in this project, dealing primarily with the problem of perception and the specificity of the electromagnetic medium, were actively involved in community projects and were looking for alternative forms of education. The material (120 hours of film and video) was distributed from the databases on the central server. The MindFrames exhibition is the result of long-term archiving efforts of The Vasulkas. 
Lectors: Woody Vasulka, Thomas Thiel, ZKM 

Konvergence
is a shared platform for extensive internet projects, interuniversity and outside university communication and cooperation. It consists in the implementation of free software into complex system for content management. The operator of the technology is Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU). The system contains block functionality, single projects consist of components which are in joint developed within the framework of the whole platform. It contains the users* profiles with blogs, personal information territory, annotation system for text and video, functions for cooperation, project management, and various searching tools. Free modifiability of content categories (metadata structure) as well as presentational design is suitable for emerging projects. 
The platform hosts e.g. konvergence.info portal, offering tools for cooperation in interdisciplinary environment of new media art and intermedia, communication infrastructure and an emergent archive Memory of Art which should become a test field for online cooperation among international curator group, focused on experimental film and video art. 
Lektors: Michal Klodner, Lenka Dolanova, FAMU 

Hyperkino 
is a method for academic (critical) film editions on DVD. It is a system of annotation for film comparable to footnotes in scientific text, using various media forms like text, pictures, sound.  
Lector: Natascha Drubek-Meyer

VVP AVU 
is a center for basic scientific research, the processing of source documentation, critical evaluation and reinterpretation of Czech art history after 1945. With its specific orientation of research with an emphasis on interdisciplinary crossover, VVP AVU is an import center for the study of visual culture of the second half of the 20th century in all its complexity.
The aim of VVP AVU is not only to contribute to developing knowledge of local development of fine art history, but also to place it in a wider, international context. 
VVP AVU is the first research center of its kind in the Czech Republic established within the framework of an art college. 
Lectors: Eva Kratka, Pavlína Morganová, Terezie Nekvindová 

Research Centre for Industrial Heritage 
of the Czech Republic functions as a coordinating platform for cooperation between the Czech Technical University in Prague and other institutions that are working in the fields of history, architecture, urban affairs, technological development, technical criteria in civil engineering, and the economic and ecological aspects of research, conservation, and seeking new uses for technical monuments and industrial buildings and sites.
   
A long-term project of the Research Centre for Industrial Heritage (VCPD) at ČVUT and the Institute of the History of Art and Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture at ČVUT in Prague has been to develop a register of industrial heritage buildings and sites. It is also used for the purpose of recording, storing and working with data drawn from publications, specialized studies, *building passports*, and other databases. 
The interdisciplinary focus of the long-term projects of the VCPD requires the involvement of a wide range of professionals from other fields and the participation of other cooperating parties, such as amateur enthusiasts, industrial heritage advocates, and especially students. For these collaborating researchers, who often have little or no previous practical experience with research on construction history, the register is a fundamental and essential methodological guideline. 
Lector: Petr Vorlík 

WRO Art Center - From Monument to Market: Video Art and Public Space (ed. Violetta Kutlubasis-Krajewska and Piotr Krajewski, Poland 2005) 
The collection of the video works by Polish artists on 2 DVD*s is supplemented with a series of articles inspired by this collection and written specially for this publication by international curators and critics. 
WRO Art Centre, founded as an independent formation in 1988, is the first in Poland and one of the most important organizations in Central-East Europe dealing with new media art in its broad sense, taking up issues of contemporary art in the perspective of culture and communication. Beginning in fall 2007, WRO Art Center opens its new gallery, performance and lab spaces, featuring regular presentations of contemporary art intertwined with the development of communication tools and process. Since 1989 WRO organizes the International Media Art Biennale, the 12th edition of which took place in May 2007.
Lector: Krzysztof Dobrowolski 

  
GAMA /Gateway to Archives of Media Art/ 
This project continues the OASIS projects, originally a joint venture between CIANT and the *Bremen" project. The aim is to establish a central platform that enables multilingual user-oriented access to a significant number of media art archives and their digitalized contents. The consortium comprises of a majority of the most important digital content holders for media art in Europe. The content provided constitutes approx. 55% of all media artworks presented online by European cultural archives and distributors. This amount will ensure a significant increase in use, re-use and cross-border visibility of the digital content when aggregated and accessible through one common interface. The gateway will quickly develop to be the European central online interface and search portal for any person interested in media art. 
Lector: Viliam Simko

CASPAR 
Digital information innervates modern civilization. Yet digital information is extremely vulnerable. A huge amount of precious digital information created and stored all over the world becomes inaccessible every few years at a very fast pace. Think of losing official records, a museum archive, irreplaceable scientific data, or even a collection of family photos, and we realize digital preservation is affecting us all. CASPAR is an Integrated Project co-financed by the European Union that will address the issue of how digitally encoded information can still be understood and used in the future when the software, systems and everyday knowledge will have changed.
Lector: Michal Masa 

Grauzone 8mm. Materialen zum autonomen Künstlerfilm in der DDR
Ludwig Boltzmann Institut. Medien. Kunst. Forschung. Linz 
DVD Grauzone 8 mm documents the development of video, experimental film and TV in the 1980s in DDR. 
The mission of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research is to give scholarly attention to works of media art and media theory through their archiving and publication. Bringing together science, art, technology and cultural mediation in a single facility enables the achievement of a new level of quality that speaks to the ways in which we deal with our media-shaped society. 
Lector: Britt Schlehahn 

40yearsvideoart.de: Digital Heritage 
The initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation focuses on saving, maintaining, and mediating the cultural heritage of Video Art, which has become one of the most influential art forms of the twentieth century. For the first time, such a complex, mediating and exhibiting project is carried out by five museums in the Federal Republic of Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Düsseldorf, the institutions responsible for the overall project, work together with three partners - Kunsthalle Bremen, Lenbachhaus Munich, and the Museum der bildenen Künste Leipzig. The video anthology presents 59 artists and 12 DVD, counting in total 28 hours. 

Art_clips.ch.at.de 
90 short videos from Switzerland, Austria and Germany. The DVD Edition produced by ZKM Karlsruhe maps the development of short videos in Switzerland, Austria and Germany from 2000 to 2006 (curator Gerhard Johann Lischka; project directors: Thomas Thiel and Antonia Marten).
Lector: Thomas Thiel, ZKM

Realization team: Curator: Lenka Dolanová and Woody Vasulka, cooperation: Michal Klodner, Milos Vojtechovsky, Roman Berka, Krystof Pesek, Martin Blazícek

The project was realized by Intermedia Institute, with the support of Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, AMU Principality, Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Science Foundation (GACR), Goethe-Institut

Cooperating institutions: Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Goethe Institut Prag, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Ludwig Boltzmann Institut Linz, WRO Center, CIANT, The International Documentary Film Festival Jihlava, Research Centre for Industrial Heritage 

Intermedia Institute
Address: Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT), room H24/2, Technická 2, 16627, Prague 6, Czech Republic 
Tel.: +420 608571881 
info at iim.cz 
http://www.iim.cz