[artinfo] open archives

["Milo” VOJTùCHOVSK¯"]

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 ·imko, 
Michal Má”a, 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 âVUT and the 
Institute of the History of Art and Architecture 
at the Faculty of Architecture at âVUT 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 (âVUT), room 
H24/2, Technická 2, 16627, Prague 6, Czech 
Republic
Tel.: +420 608571881
info at iim.cz
http://www.iim.cz