Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- frank [01.10.2022 18:50] – admin
+++ frank [19.02.2023 15:03] (current) – admin
@@ Line 23: / Line 23: @@
 {{frank-1.jpg?640}}
-''Jan Šépka, SEFO – Central European Art Forum. Architecture visualisation. (c)OMA.''
+''Fig. 1: Jan Šépka, SEFO – Central European Art Forum. Architecture visualisation. (c)OMA''
 However, although the museum's collections grew, other gaps in the collections became increasingly apparent as curators' interest in traditional media (especially painting and sculpture) outweighed the already rapidly expanding art production in new media and intermedia. It should be noted that this situation was and still is common in most museum institutions in the Czech Republic and is similar in the Central European region as well.[(This was confirmed by a survey on the collection and care of new media artworks in the collections of state institutions, conducted by students in the New Media Arts & Archive course within the Theory of Interactive Media programme at Masaryk University. The course was led by Barbora Kundračíková, Dušan Barok and Jakub Frank, the initiators of the New Media Museum project. The survey has not been published.)]
@@ Line 48: / Line 48: @@
 ===Stanislav Zippe – Spiral===
-{{frank-2.jpg?400}}
-''Stanislav Zippe, //Spiral, From Titian to Warhol//, 2012. OMA Collection. (c)OMA.''
 A special place in the Collection of Sculpture is dedicated to Stanislav Zippe. He belongs to the generation of pioneers of new media and his work //Spiral// is of unquestionable importance as one of the first installation artworks in Czechoslovakia. //Spiral// builds on Zippe's series of luminescent variations - environments usually made up of lights, mirrors and various objects. //Spiral// is installed in a black box or in a room lit by UV lights and black mirrors on the floor. On the mirrors are placed several spheres painted with fluorescent colours and a fluorescent circle. Above them, mounted to the ceiling, an engine rotates a suspended fluorescent wire to create impressive kinetic and light effects.
@@ Line 57: / Line 53: @@
 Zippe created the work as early as 1969 and included it at his solo exhibition at the Gallery on Charles Square, but it was not shown again until 1993, when it appeared at the //Poetry of Rationality// exhibition curated by Jiří Hlaváček at the Wallenstein Riding School.[(Hlaváček, Josef (ed.), //Poetry of Rationality – Constructive Tendencies in Czech Art of the 1960s//, Prague: České muzeum výtvarných umění, 1993, p. 97; Srp, Karel, //Stanislav Zippe – Luminous Fields 1968/1996//, Prague: Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 1996, pp. 20-24.)]
-OMA acquired the installation from the artist in 2000, when it was on loan to the National Gallery in Prague. During an exhibition there, the engine turning the spiral collapsed and damaged not only the glass parts at the bottom, but also the engine itself. During restoration work, the OMA curators and conservators were in contact with the artist, but he had no specific requests or instructions for repair or reconstruction of the work. In the end, the work was restored with the help of local technicians using components of an old photocopier.
+OMA acquired the installation from the artist in 2000, when it was on loan to the National Gallery in Prague. During an exhibition there, the engine turning the spiral collapsed and damaged not only the glass parts at the bottom, but also the engine itself.
+{{frank-2.jpg?400}}
+''Fig. 2: Stanislav Zippe, //Spiral, From Titian to Warhol//, 2012. OMA Collection. (c)OMA''
+During restoration work, the OMA curators and conservators were in contact with the artist, but he had no specific requests or instructions for repair or reconstruction of the work. In the end, the work was restored with the help of local technicians using components of an old photocopier.
 In 2012, //Spiral// was exhibited at the //From Titian to Warhol// exhibition at the OMA. The artist was consulted about reconstruction and suggested suitable dimensions for the installation, but did not specify them in detail. Neither the number nor the design of the objects belonging to the installation was specified by the artist, and the photographic documentation from previous exhibitions was of little help. Several photographs from the 1969 exhibition focus primarily on capturing the movement of the spiral instead of the technical setup of the work as a whole.[(Srp 1996, p. 26.)] The photo documentation of the 1993 exhibition //Poetry of Rationality// has not survived due to the transformation and relocation of the museum.[(The author communicated with the National Gallery in Prague, in whose current premises the exhibition took place, as well as with the former Czech Museum of Fine Arts in Prague (now the Central Bohemian Region Gallery), which exhibited //Spiral// in 1996. Neither institution possesses any photo documentation of the piece.)]
@@ Line 69: / Line 71: @@
 {{frank-3.jpg?640}}
-''Federico Díaz, //Sembion//. Installation view. (c)Federico Díaz.''
+''Fig. 3: Federico Díaz, //Sembion//. Installation view. (c)Federico Díaz''
 Probably the most complex example of all the media artworks in the OMA collections is the work //Sembion// by the Czech-Argentine artist Federico Díaz. //Sembion// has all the hallmarks of an intermedia artwork, combining an interactive software and audiovisual installation along with automatically designed objects and digital prints.
@@ Line 85: / Line 87: @@
 The visual outputs of the analysed texts, the "metablobs" - constantly changing fluid forms resembling mercurial substances - constitute an important part of Díaz's work. Their shape responds to each new input - each word in the text, every visitor in the room - and constantly adapts its form. Díaz used these digitally produced metablobs (created without the direct involvement of the artist) to create physical objects using a method called Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), a precursor to 3D printing. The method involves sintering a thermoplastic powder medium with a laser beam to create abstract sculptures. Díaz continued this method in the following projects. These small sculptures were then exhibited alongside the //Sembion// installation, either alone or as part of other installations.
+//Sembion// was offered to OMA in 2007 by the private gallery Zdeněk Sklenář as a set of works. It consisted of software on CD-R with one extra copy (both copies signed by the artist), three large format digital prints showing a metablob adjusted and signed by the artist, and a sculpture produced by SLS. The set also included a complementary element to the SLS sculpture - a luxurious looking platform made of shiny red plastic, belonging to the //Fluid F1// project, suggesting a merger of two independent projects.[(The //Fluid F1// project used the same SLS-made forms as //Sembion//, but the content of the project was entirely different. More information about the project can be found at [[http://www.federicodiaz.net|www.federicodiaz.net]] and in Díaz 2008, pp. 204-239)].
 {{frank-4.jpg?640}}
-''Federico Díaz, //Sembion//. Depository storage. (c)OMA.''
+''Fig. 4: Federico Díaz, //Sembion//. Depository storage. (c)OMA''
+Both CD-Rs contain a single file - the boot command – that should launch the Sembion software. However, the software itself is stored elsewhere. It is not clear what else (software or hardware) is needed to reconstruct the installation as it was presented in 2003-2005, nor what the exact function of the software is. This question - arguably the most problematic about //Sembion// as a collection object - belongs not only to the category of collecting and documenting new media, but also to licensing and authenticity, and in a broader sense to the ontology of digital art. This, however, appears to be a problem that is eminently museum-related, which may be one of the reasons why Díaz decided to turn to privately funded and commercial projects.
 {{frank-5.jpg?640}}
-''Federico Díaz, //Sembion//. Depository storage. (c)OMA.''
+''Fig. 5: Federico Díaz, //Sembion//. Depository storage. (c)OMA''
-//Sembion// was offered to OMA in 2007 by the private gallery Zdeněk Sklenář as a set of works. It consisted of software on CD-R with one extra copy (both copies signed by the artist), three large format digital prints showing a metablob adjusted and signed by the artist, and a sculpture produced by SLS. The set also included a complementary element to the SLS sculpture - a luxurious looking platform made of shiny red plastic, belonging to the //Fluid F1// project, suggesting a merger of two independent projects.[(The //Fluid F1// project used the same SLS-made forms as //Sembion//, but the content of the project was entirely different. More information about the project can be found at [[http://www.federicodiaz.net|www.federicodiaz.net]] and in Díaz 2008, pp. 204-239)].
-Both CD-Rs contain a single file - the boot command – that should launch the Sembion software. However, the software itself is stored elsewhere. It is not clear what else (software or hardware) is needed to reconstruct the installation as it was presented in 2003-2005, nor what the exact function of the software is. This question - arguably the most problematic about //Sembion// as a collection object - belongs not only to the category of collecting and documenting new media, but also to licensing and authenticity, and in a broader sense to the ontology of digital art. This, however, appears to be a problem that is eminently museum-related, which may be one of the reasons why Díaz decided to turn to privately funded and commercial projects.
 Since the acquisition, //Sembion// has been exhibited only once at the //From Titian to Warhol// exhibition at the OMA, where only the SLS object was on view with video documentation of the installation without interactive elements.
@@ Line 105: / Line 107: @@
 ===Roman Štětina – Babyluna===
-{{frank-6.jpg?640}}
-''Roman Štětina, //Babyluna//. Depository storage. (c)OMA.''
 The gradual change in the aims and ambitions of OMA and SEFO has led to a greater representation of contemporary progressive art forms and the introduction of artists of the younger generation in exhibitions and collections. These include contemporary interventions in exhibitions of canonical works of art, transhistorical approaches within the permanent exhibition, site-specific and public-art realisations within the SEFO Triennial, and many more. All of these reflected the tendency towards intermediality or post-media approaches and presented new technological challenges for curators, installers and conservators.
@@ Line 114: / Line 112: @@
 Among them was an artistic intervention created by Roman Štětina - Czech intermedia artist, laureate of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award and assistant of the studio of intermedia art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
-The work was commissioned for an exhibition by Jiří Kolář, which is part of the confrontage series //Babyluna//. Kolář's album, consisting of 52 individual sheets with two confronting motifs on the front and the artist's epigrams on the back of each sheet, became Štětina's inspiration in terms of semantics and form. The resulting intervention consisted of a sound installation in which a male voice (radio director Miroslav Buriánek) reads the epigrams and tries to find the correct pronunciation and intonation for each of them, while in the background we hear Štětina clicking his mouse while cutting and editing the resulting work. The articulation of the collaging process triumphed over the content of the spoken word. Another part of Štětina's intervention was his variation or appropriation of one of Kolář's confrontages - when he uses Google image search to vary one of the sheets and the result is a new confrontage, seemingly not dissimilar to the original one, but created purely by Google's algorithms.
+{{frank-6.jpg?640}}
+''Fig. 6: Roman Štětina, //Babyluna//. Depository storage. (c)OMA''
+The work was commissioned for an exhibition by Jiří Kolář, which is part of the confrontage series //Babyluna//. Kolář's album, consisting of 52 individual sheets with two confronting motifs on the front and the artist's epigrams on the back of each sheet, became Štětina's inspiration in terms of semantics and form. The resulting intervention consisted of a sound installation in which a male voice (radio director Miroslav Buriánek) reads the epigrams and tries to find the correct pronunciation and intonation for each of them, while in the background we hear Štětina clicking his mouse while cutting and editing the resulting work. The articulation of the collaging process triumphed over the content of the spoken word. Another part of Štětina's intervention was his variation or appropriation of one of Kolář's confrontages - when he uses Google image search to vary one of the sheets and the result is a new confrontage, not dissimilar to the original one, but created purely by Google's algorithms.
 The installation is intended to be invisible, playing from conventional stereo speakers mounted to the ceiling of the room, presenting only the voice and clicks. The piece thus consists only of a data file and a set of instructions that were communicated in advance via email between the curator, the artist and a member of the audiovisual team.[(The exhibition ran from autumn 2020 to spring 2021 during the Covid lockdown, so most of the communication and the installation were managed remotely.)] After much debate, the decision was made to omit any visible - or even visually appealing - sound reproduction devices, leaving the final 'form' of the work to the curator and the technological possibilities of the space.
@@ Line 133: / Line 135: @@
 ===Petr Válek – Vrrrrrzofon and Import – Export===
+As already mentioned, OMA's new exhibition formats, especially the SEFO Triennial, have sparked several new collaborations with artists from different fields of art who have created performative, site-specific and participatory projects. These formats are usually outside the regular museum context - their ephemerality and immateriality makes it very challenging to collect and preserve them, or even to exhibit them in regular museum displays. These projects have included participatory happenings with performers, lecture series, temporary artistic interventions in public space, pop-up performances and events. One of the artists with whom OMA has established a long-term collaboration during the SEFO Triennial is Petr Válek. Válek has prepared a series of performative events, sound interventions in public space using navigational speakers for the blind as a playback medium, and a kinetic object - a special attention-grabber - placed in a museum window. He has also used the museum building and its everyday life as source material for his musical improvisations, on which he has collaborated with two curators and sound theorists, Martin Klimeš and Miloš Vojtěchovský.
 {{frank-7.jpg?640}}
-''Petr Válek, //Vrrrzzophone//, 2021. (c)Petr Válek.''
+''Fig. 7: Petr Válek, //Vrrrzzophone//, 2021. (c)Petr Válek''
 {{frank-8.jpg?640}}
-''Petr Válek, //Import – Export, Válek Attacks!//, 2021. Installation view, CCA Gallery, Šumperk. (c)Petr Válek.''
+''Fig. 8: Petr Válek, //Import – Export, Válek Attacks!//, 2021. Installation view, CCA Gallery, Šumperk. (c)Petr Válek''
-As already mentioned, OMA's new exhibition formats, especially the SEFO Triennial, have sparked several new collaborations with artists from different fields of art who have created performative, site-specific and participatory projects. These formats are usually outside the regular museum context - their ephemerality and immateriality makes it very challenging to collect and preserve them, or even to exhibit them in regular museum displays. These projects have included participatory happenings with performers, lecture series, temporary artistic interventions in public space, pop-up performances and events. One of the artists with whom OMA has established a long-term collaboration during the SEFO Triennial is Petr Válek. Válek has prepared a series of performative events, sound interventions in public space using navigational speakers for the blind as a playback medium, and a kinetic object - a special attention-grabber - placed in a museum window. He has also used the museum building and its everyday life as source material for his musical improvisations, on which he has collaborated with two curators and sound theorists, Martin Klimeš and Miloš Vojtěchovský.
 Two kinetic sound objects by Petr Válek were acquired in 2022, together with the artist's video documentation of their ideal setup and functioning.[(They were made at the request of the curator as documentation of the artist's proposed installation of the work, but they also serve as independent video works and can be exhibited as such. For this reason, digital data is treated in the same way as other video or sound works)] Although materially they are more or less traditional media, their sonic element and distinct performative potential situates them in the context of the Collection of New Media and Intermedia.
-Petr Válek is a sound artist, musician, performer, painter, creator of musical instruments, synthesizers and sound effects, author of videos that he shares on social media, and above all a tireless experimenter in the field of sound and noise. Válek did not study at art school, nor does he belong to an easily definable group of creators. A common feature of his work is an interest in DIY and handmade practices, constant recycling of materials and exuberant creativity. Although Válek primarily creates kinetic objects and sculptures, their aesthetic effect lies primarily in the rhythmic and sonic element.
+Petr Válek is a sound artist, musician, performer, painter, creator of musical instruments, synthesizers and sound effects, author of videos that he shares on social media, and above all a tireless sound and noise experimenter. Válek did not study at art school, nor does he belong to an easily definable group of creators. A common feature of his work is an interest in DIY and handmade practices, constant recycling of materials and exuberant creativity. Although Válek primarily creates kinetic objects and sculptures, their aesthetic effect lies primarily in the rhythmic and sonic element.
 Válek's sound work has only recently received recognition from the art scene and in 2021 his works were exhibited at Vasulka Kitchen Brno, Bludný kámen in Opava and the East Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice, which also purchased several works for its collection. His other works are also part of the collections of the Art et Marges Musée in Brussels.
@@ Line 156: / Line 158: @@
 {{frank-9.jpg?640}}
-''Jakub Frank and Petr Válek at New Media Museums Colloquium, 2022. (c)OMA.''
+''Fig. 9: Jakub Frank and Petr Válek at New Media Museums Colloquium, 2022. (c)OMA''
-In terms of restoration, the uncomplicated construction and simple technical operation of the works appear to be relatively trouble-free. At the same time, however, their technical instability and the fragility of some elements present a challenge for conservators. In addition, the creative input of the artist, who during the interview expressed an interest in reconstructing the works himself, plays an important role in the construction process. When asked what would happen to the works after his death, he replied that they would die with him.
+In terms of restoration, the uncomplicated construction and simple technical operation of the works appear to be relatively trouble-free. At the same time, however, their technical instability and the fragility of some elements present a challenge for conservators. In addition, the creative input of the artist, who during the interview expressed an interest in reconstructing the works himself, plays an important role in the process. When asked what would happen to the works after his death, he replied that they would die with him.
 An interview with Petr Válek, devoted to the issues of the integrity of his works, their preservation and restoration, as well as their installation and the interpretation of the artist's intent, was conducted publicly as part of the New Media Museum Colloquium and has been included in [[oma|this anthology]].
@@ Line 179: / Line 181: @@
 ~~NOTOC~~
+----
+See also the video presentation [[oma|What's lying on the shelf? – What should have been done before the acquisition and what is to be done now?]] by  Jakub Frank and Petr Válek in this volume.