Digital artists, exhibited: Marc Adrian, Jean Baptists Bedaux, Frank Böttger, Jeroen Clausman, Compos 68, Waldemar Cordeiro, Charles Csuri, D. E. Evans, Michael Fahres, David R. Garrison, Hans Köhler, Auro Lecci, Robert Mallary, Jean Claude Marquette, Gustav Metzger, Jorge Moscati, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, A. Michael Noll, Ivan Picelj, Ludwig Rase, Sylvia Roubaud, Beverly Rowe, Remko Scha, Manfred Robert Schroeder, Georg Weiss, Aron Warszawski, Arthur Veen, Rolf Wölk, Edvard Zajec, Anton Zöttl, Vladimir Bonačić, Tomislav Mikulić, Petar Milojević, Vilko Žiljak
Curator: Ekmel Ertan
Co-Curator: Darko Fritz
This exhibition aims to explore the histories of media art after the real and seemingly permanent entry of the digital into our lives. It does so beginning from the beginning and looking at the first attempts, first digital artistic products of the 1960s and 1970s. It attempts to read from the present perspective the histories that were written with each event, each research and artwork and that are part of the paradigm we live in now.
The exhibition has two main axes. The first one "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" focuses on a legendary series of performances that took place at the Regiment Armory building in New York in 1966. With performances by 10 artists, 9 Evenings is a milestone in the field of art and technology, an event where many of this field's firsts originated. The second is about the 4th and 5th exhibitions of the (New) Tendencies movement, organized in Zagreb in 1968-69 and 1973. These two vanguard exhibitions that took place in the relative periphery of Europe at an early date and the discussion they inspired meant that the computer has come of age as an artistic medium. In collaboration with the MSU - Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb and an international network of collectors and private archives, this exhibition offers the overview of the original early digital artworks including Waldemar Cordeiro, Gustav Metzger, Vladimir Bonačić, Frieder Nake among others.
There will be first time presented computer installation with anti-Vietnam war slogan "Nixon Murderer" conceived back in 1969 by Remko Scha. First time after 35 years will be publicly presented Mobilodrom - "a vehicle producing sounds in reaction to its environment" from 1979 by Michael Fahres, now in the form of multimedia documentation.
Documentary film
New Tendencies, 2008, directed by Vladislav Knežević, HRT, Croatian National TV