Anna Schäffler, Friederike Schäfer, Nanne Buurman (eds.): Networks of Care: Politiken des (Er)haltens und (Ent)sorgens / Politics of Preserving and Discarding (2022) [DE/EN]

“In 2021, Networks of Care offered a platform at the nGbK enabling an exchange of ideas and information between practitioners and experts concerning strategies for dealing with artistic estates, private and public archives, or idle documentation volumes. The present contributions reflect—in their theoretical analyses and also partly fleeting or historical thoughts, notes, and reflections and through their polyphony and contradictoriness—the fact that practices of preserving and discarding are always also political and must be understood principally as unfinished processes of continuous selecting, deciding, translating, transferring, actualizing, and transforming. The publication concludes with a preliminary interim result and a proposal for next steps regarding these structural and cultural-political challenges.”

With contributions by Dušan Barok, Nanne Buurman, Amalia Calderòn, Mela Dávila Freire, Annet Dekker, Lukas Fuchsgruber, Michael Hiltbrunner, Megan Hoetger, Bettina Knaup, Christin Lahr, Anne Luther, Katalin Krasznahorkei, Laurence Rassel, Peter Rehberg, Elske Rosenfeld, Friederike Schäfer, Anna Schäffler, Olga Schubert, Cornelia Sollfrank, Ingrid Wagner, and Mark Waugh.

Publisher neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), Berlin, May 2022
ISBN 9783938515952
178 pages

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Vasulka Kitchen Cooking Reader (2020) [Czech]

“This collection of texts is being published either relatively early, or perhaps a bit late: about one year after the colloquium Art Works from the Digital Era in Galleries and Museums. Since then, unexpected events have altered our course, reframing our thinking about the overlap between art, time, entropy, duration and disappearance, and perhaps adding a greater sense of urgency than it had one year ago.

The colloquium was organized to celebrate the the first anniversary of the opening of the Vašulka Kitchen Brno: Center for New Media. The organizers discussed topics with colleagues from the Brno House of Arts and the National Film Archive in Prague, hoping to promote thinking about the state and fate of art works of an “unstable“ nature, especially within the context of Czech collections, galleries, and museums. The objective was to establish contact, and to potentially cooperate with similar initiatives in Central Europe. During the two‑day meeting, the contributions mostly touched on the orientation of artistic and expert initiatives and institutions which were already focused on this issue, or were planning to turn their attention to it. In addition to contributions from Czechia, Vasulka Kitchen also welcomed contributors from the Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and the United States, who shared their experiences of and opinions on the topic.

This publication is dedicated to the memory of Woody Bohuslav Vašulka.”

With English introduction and abstracts.

With contributions by Flóra Barkóczi, Dušan Barok, Martin Blažíček, Vannevar Bush, Lenka Dolanová, Kateřina Drajsajtlová, Jakub Frank, Joey Heinen, Jana Horáková, Erkki Huhtamo, Vít Janeček, Michal Klodner, Barbora Kundračíková, Štěpán Miklánek, Gustav Metzger, Anna Olszewska, Kryštof Pešek, Miklós Peternák, Pavel Sikora, Matěj Strnad, Barbora Šedivá, Miloš Vojtěchovský, Peter Weibel, Gaby Wijers, and Gene Youngblood.

Edited and with an Introduction by Miloš Vojtěchovský
Publisher Vašulka Kitchen Brno, Brno, October 2020
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 9788090776333
253 pages

Review: Lukáš Pilka (Flash Art CZ/SK, 2021, CZ).

Book presentation (video, 13 min, Czech)
Colloquium
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Annet Dekker: Collecting and Conserving Net Art: Moving beyond Conventional Methods (2018)

“Collecting and Conserving Net Art explores the qualities and characteristics of net art and its influence on conservation practices. By addressing and answering some of the challenges facing net art and providing an exploration of its intersection with conservation, the book casts a new light on net art, conservation, curating and museum studies.

Viewing net art as a process rather than as a fixed object, the book considers how this is influenced by and executed through other systems and users. Arguing that these processes and networks are imbued with ambiguity, the book suggests that this is strategically used to create suspense, obfuscate existing systems and disrupt power structures. The rapid obsolescence of hardware and software, the existence of many net artworks within restricted platforms and the fact that artworks often act as assemblages that change or mutate, make net art a challenging case for conservation. Taking the performative and interpretive roles conservators play into account, the book demonstrates how practitioners can make more informed decisions when responding to, critically analyzing or working with net art, particularly software-based processes.

Collecting and Conserving Net Art is intended for researchers, academics and postgraduate students, especially those engaged in the study of museum studies, conservation and heritage studies, curatorial studies, digital art and art history. The book should also be interesting to professionals who are involved in the conservation and curation of digital arts, performance, media and software.”

Publisher Routledge, 2018
ISBN 9780815382416, 0815382413
x+192 pages

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