Aleksandra Sekulić (ed.): Media Archaeology: The Nineties (2009)

Media Archaeology is a long term research and program project, initiated in Archive of alternative film and video in “Students’ City” Cultural Center in Belgrade, programs initially hosted by Academic Film Center in 2006. Dealing with media forms as symptoms of social phenomena the team of the project presented this research through a dynamic program model of screening and discussion between two hosts with participation of the audience, which turned out to be a right model to establish a communication with the generation who hadn’t have a chance to experience the appearance and transformation of particular media phenomena.

In 2007, the series of lectures which embraced particular media forms from the history of media production of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with a special program dedicated to the translation of Western pop culture in Asia, the program concept enabling communication with the younger audience, with creating an insight into their perception of contemporary media forms was established, and also opened a call for collecting material for a media archive.

In 2008, with the support of the ministry of culture and media of the Republic of Serbia, a project Media Archaeology: The Nineties was initiated, and focused on analysis of the models used for media coverage and shaping of the disastrous social crisis of the 1990’s and to remind of the depth and the long term influences of the changes still visible in media production.

Project team: Boško Prostran, Jovan Bačkulja, Stevan Vuković, Aleksandra Sekulić, Ivica Đorđević, Nebojša Petrović
Translation: Vesna Jovanović, Aleksandra Sekulić, Greg de Cuir
Publisher: Center for cultural decontamination; with Archive of alternative film and video, “Students’ City” Cultural Center, Belgrade, September 2009
35 pages

authors and project (incl. video archive)

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From Consideration to Commitment: Art in Critical Confrontation to Society (Belgrade, Ljubljana, Skopje, Zagreb: 1990-2010) (2011) [multiling]

The publication explores practices of critical contemporary fine arts – practices of research, progressive and experimental actions by contemporary fine artists from the 1990s to the present, in four countries in the region – Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia. These are practices which focus on issues such as identity aspects (national, cultural, religious, ethnic), workers’ rights, social integration of minorities, global market fluctuation trends and its impact in the local context, unscrupulousness of capital, the position of women, spatial devastation, art institution system issues, and many others.

The publication maps out and theoretically reviews critical and research practices, and contemporary fine arts practices oriented towards the contemporary civilization moment, which have been active in the context of the independent cultural scene since the 1990s, but which have also been present in the institutional frame. The authors provide only drafts of the political, social, economic and cultural changes of the local contexts, through four segments, due to a lack of space. Each segment focuses on the practices and context of a given country, i.e. the capital as the primary focus, and in addition to the introductory word by the authors, it includes interviews (with authors, theorists, curators, organizers…) who contribute to the recording of these artistic practices based on their experience, work and knowledge.

The segments deal with the Belgrade, Ljubljana, Skopje, and Zagreb scenes. All the authors devised their approaches in an effort to present the fruitful and creative production of these cities, to the greatest extent possible.

Contemporary visual art is discussed through the works and experiences of Igor Grubić, Sanja Iveković, Andreja Kulunčić and Darko Šimičić (Croatia), Stevan Vuković, Milica Tomić, Danilo Prnjat and Živko Grozdanić Gera (Serbia), Neven Korda, Marko Peljhan, Marija Mojca Pungerčar and Maja Smrekar (Slovenia), and Bojan Ivanov, Zoran Poposki, Mira Gakina and Žaneta Vangeli (Macedonia).

The book was conceived as a multilingual publication in English, in addition to the local languages (Croatia, Macedonian, Serbian and Slovenian).

Realized as part of the project Let’s Talk Critic Arts.

Editorial Board: Dušan Dovč, Vesna Milosavljević, Jasna Soptrajanova and Dea Vidović
Authors: Jasna Jakšić – in cooperation with Tihana Bertek, Maja Gujinović, Ana Kovačić, Srđan Latreza, Petra Novak, Tina Novak, Tamara Sertić and Leda Sutlović (Croatia); Nebojša Vilić (Macedonia); Miha Colner and Nika Grabar (Slovenia); Vesna Tašić – in cooperation with Vesna Milosavljević and Miroljub Marjanović (Serbia)
Publishers: SEEcult.org in cooperation with ForumSkopje; Kurziv – Platform for Matters of Culture, Media and Society; SCCA, Center for Contemporary Arts – Ljubljana / Artservis; The Association of NGOs Clubture
Published in April 2011, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Skopje
611 pages
This work is made available by the Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported unless not stated differently.

authors

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Jack Goldsmith, Tim Wu: Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (2006)

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who’s really in control of what’s happening on the Net?

In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet’s challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It’s a book about the fate of one idea–that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google’s struggles with the French government and Yahoo’s capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay’s struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them.

While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance.

Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2006
ISBN 0195152662, 9780195152661
226 pages

publisher
google books

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