Mapping the digital
cultural heritage
Digital art at the turn of
the 20th and 21st century
Aaron Schwartz wrote about how valuable it is for us to post our documents, files and materials online. The more islands of free knowledge there is, the commodification of knowledge and attempts to prevent free access to such knowledge becomes inefficient. A legal pressure on those who are most active and most visible becomes ineffective even in the cases of those who are punished as an example to others.
An example of the slow forgetfulness is also the new media practice, digital and post digital art that itself experiences an identity crisis. There is no consensus whether the media or digital art in general falls into to the corps of contemporary art, or is it a specific field within the broader context of contemporary art. Several projects that map and preserve immaterial art and practice had been initiated. To whom they address to? How do they communicate?
The aim of the project was to explore existing archives and platforms, motivation for their initiation and maintenance, as well as the conditions in which they operate. The project launched its own online archive of new media practices in Balkan region and organized a conference to gather people from the region who already work on this. This was a joint project between Interkultivator and Napon.
This project was supported by the Ministry of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunications of the Republic of Serbia.
Conference “Question of Memory” dealt with contemporary digital and post digital media art and culture. In recent years, questions of archives, memories, free access to knowledge, knowledge as a common good and the defense of the right to knowledge are becoming central themes in maintaining emancipatory projects. It was designed as a round table that dealt with the issue of slow forgetfulness of new media practices, digital and post digital art and archives of digital culture and art.
During this event invited guest presented projects such as MayDay archive (Howard Slater), Longtime archive of kuda.org practices as a cultural organization, Archives of MSUV-a (Luka Kulić), Yugoslav humanities archive (Učitelj neznalica), Portraits and memories (Andrea Palašti and Stefan Jovanović), Lecture by Isidora Todorović “One kilobyte in an age of terabyte / crisis in archiving” and a lecture by Dejan Grba “Forensics of a Molten Chrystal: Challenges preservation and presentation of generative art”
