Tilman Baumgärtel, Julian Weinert: Van Gogh TV’s Piazza Virtuale: The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992 (2021)

11 December 2021, dusan

Piazza virtuale by the group of artists known as Van Gogh TV was not only the biggest art project ever to appear on television, but from a contemporary point of view the project was also a forerunner of today’s social media. The ground-breaking event that took place during the 100 days of documenta IX in 1992 was an early experiment with entirely user-created content. This is the first book-length study of this largely forgotten experiment: it documents the radicality of Piazza virtuale‘s approach, the novel programme ideas and the technical innovations. It also allows, via QR codes, direct access to videos from the show, which until now have been inaccessible.”

Publisher transcript, Bielefeld, December 2021
Media Studies series, 96
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
ISBN 3837660664, 9783837660661
231 pages

Research project website
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (updated on 2023-7-31)

Paul DeMarinis: Buried in Noise (2010) [English/German]

3 May 2021, dusan

“This artist’s book is the first comprehensive monograph on sound and media artist Paul DeMarinis. DeMarinis has avidly followed the development of communication media, interested in discoveries being made in the realm of physical phenomena and the corresponding objects and devices that have been invented as well as in their cultural and social aspects. His works embody an aesthetic culture of invention permeated by a critical, yet humorous and poetic spirit. Buried in Noise is being published on the occasion of DeMarinis’s artist fellowship at the DAAD artists’ program in Berlin. The publication compiles documentation on Paul DeMarinis’s complete oeuvre since 1973 and the first published compendium of texts by the artist.”

Contributors include Gascia Ouzounian, Fred Turner, Erkki Huhtamo, Douglas Kahn, Bernd Schulz, Siegfried Zielinski, and Thomas Y. Levin.

Edited by Ingrid Beirer, Sabine Himmelsbach, and Carsten Seiffarth
Publisher Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg/Berlin, 2010
ISBN 9783868281415, 386828141X
279 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (77 MB)

Margit Rosen, et al. (eds.): A Little-Known Story About a Movement, a Magazine, and The Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961-1973 (2011)

10 April 2021, dusan

“When Zagreb was the epicenter of explorations into the aesthetic potential of the new “thinking machines.”

This book documents a short but intense artistic experiment that took place in Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s but has been influential far beyond that time and place: the “little-known story” of the advent of computers in art. It was through the activities of the New Tendencies movement, begun in Zagreb in 1961, and its supporting institution the Galerija suvremene umjetnosti that the “thinking machine” was adopted as an artistic tool and medium. Pursuing the idea of “art as visual research,” the New Tendencies movement proceeded along a path that led from Concrete and Constructivist art, Op art, and Kinetic art to computer-generated graphics, film, and sculpture.

With their exhibitions and conferences and the 1968 launch of the multilingual, groundbreaking magazine Bit International, the New Tendencies transformed Zagreb—already one of the most vibrant artistic centers in Yugoslavia—into an international meeting place where artists, engineers, and scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain gathered around the then-new technology. For a brief moment in time, Zagreb was the epicenter of explorations of the aesthetic, scientific, and political potential of the computer.

This volume documents that exhilarating period. It includes new essays by Jerko Denegri, Darko Fritz, Margit Rosen, and Peter Weibel; many texts that were first published in New Tendencies exhibition catalogs and Bit International magazine; and historic documents. More than 650 black-and-white and color illustrations testify to the astonishing diversity of the exhibited artworks and introduce the movement’s protagonists. Many of the historic photographs, translations, and documents are published here for the first time. Taken together, the images and texts offer the long overdue history of the New Tendencies experiment and its impact on the art of the twentieth century.”

Edited by Margit Rosen in collaboration with Peter Weibel, Darko Fritz, and Marija Gattin
Publisher ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011
ISBN 9780262515818, 0262515814
576 pages

Reviews: Brian Reffin Smith (Leonardo, 2012), Joanna Inglot (Slavic Review, 2012), Greg Borman (ARLIS/NA, 2011).

Book website
Exhibition (ZKM, 2008)
Publisher
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (102 MB)

See also New Tendencies and Bit International on Monoskop wiki.