Hello Armin, Honor and All,
Armin, thanks for mentioning the Serbian story. You are quite right. The
internet had enormous importance for Serbia in war times. Its worth
mentioning that Serbia was under severe international sanctions between
1991 - 2001, and all international cultural events, and cultural and
academic exchange were prohibited. Mailing lists informed us about the
international arena, and enabled some kind of participation. In the
circumstances of civil war, break of Yugoslavia and total isolation, the
mailing lists hugely marked and defined my own life and work: helped me to
contextualise my work at the time, and and paved the continuation of my
activities in London later. (BTW - I became aware of the Syndicate and
nettime lists through meeting Geert Lovink, who lectured in Belgrade in
these difficult times).
As an active participant and - eh, yet another - pioneer, of new
media/computer art in ex-Yu/Serbia - I could write pages and pages about
this topic, of course... but I will just briefly mention:
B92 [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B92#History ],
and Cinema Rex Cultural Centre - under the Soros and B92 umbrella
[ http://www.rex.b92.net/en/about_rex/history.html ]
Cinema Rex was the internet and media art hub at the time - and naturally I
was one of the founding artists
Speaking of history and archives - in 1998, just before I moved to London,
I organised with my fellow artists at Cinema Rex a five-day symposium on
the history of electronic art in Serbia (and Yugoslavia) aiming to
establish the foundations for an archive (never happened, sadly, till these
days).
The only trace of it - is the announcement , still hanging online in the
nettime Announcer archive, and the Manifesto at the I_Can portal:
Gordana Novakovic, „A Short History of Electronic Art, Part One", April
‘98, Cinema Rex, Belgrade (14 / 30 April 98)
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9810/msg00111.html
Manifesto http://www.c3.hu/ican.artnet.org/ican/text6260.html?id_text=4 ].
One of my colleagues took home all video tapes covering the Symposium after
Cinema Rex was expelled from its premises - but I have no knowledge if he
still keeps them
I have briefly talked about these days in Art Practice in a Digital
Culture, chapter 'The garden of Hybrid Delights'
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754676232
Anyhow - Honor, or anybody who might be interested in more details - I
would be of course happy to help as much as I can
Thanks for bringing this topic into discussion,
best wishes,
Gordana
On 6 October 2013 15:34, Honor Harger <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Armin wrote:
>
> As I have tried to point out in the past, without much success, the
>> material layer of networking also matters. Arts and humanities scholars
>> have a tendency to ascribe too much importance to what you could call the
>> semantic and symbolic layer. No email from Serbia would have found its way
>> to the syndicate list withoute having a route to travel on. Those routes
>> are provided by people who also have cultural and political ideas, so that
>> those human-technical assemblages also have meaning, if you so want,
>> something that should also be considered, hwever, without tipping over into
>> a one-sided materialism
>>
>
> This is an excellent point, and one we've been trying to make through our
> work at Lighthouse in exposing the material infrastructures on which our
> experience of the internet is built. We're currently exploring this in an
> exhibition called 'Immaterials' (http://is.gd/immaterials), and the
> notion of infrastructure, how we perceive, understand it and act within it,
> was a major topic of our Improving Reality conference last month. When the
> talks are up, I'll post them here.
>
> Thanks for raising these excellent examples from the former-Yugoslavia,
> Armin. Have you got any references you could point me to for further
> reading?
>
> best,
>
>
> --
> Honor Harger
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> Phone: +44 7765834272
> http://about.me/honor
>
> Work
> Artistic Director, Lighthouse, Brighton, UK
> http://www.lighthouse.org.uk
>
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