MSUM - "Nacija - Kultura"

VUK ĆOSIĆ: NATION – CULTURE
https://twitter.com/SonetniVenez | http://nacija-kultura.si/
New Media Lab, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova +MSUM

 
Opening: 13 October 2022, at 7 p.m.
Exhibition duration: 13 October 2022 – 15 January 2023

New media has found its way into art a long time ago. 

Social media, the digitalisation of everyday communication and administrative procedures belong amongst the more important political and cultural challenges in today’s world. However, digitalisation also brings with it the question as to how to preserve the original digital creativity in the field of culture for the future generations. The processes of restoration, preservation and ensuring the on-going operation of such works differs to a great extent from the processes that have been known to us from the pre-digital art forms.

Within the New Media Lab, the Modern Gallery addresses these issues through its central scientific research project Sustainable Digital Preservation of New Media Art. Taking care of the digital cultural heritage is one of the fundamental public services provided by the Modern Gallery in its role of a state museum for visual and contemporary art from the year 1900 onwards.

Čosič’s work Nation– Culture presents one of the possible approaches to the preservation and modernisation of new media artworks. Even though the current work is technically distinctly different from the original (2000), the work retains a rich cross-contextual network of meanings, and above all, its central idea – the detection of the cultural pulse as shown by the nation through its use of online technologies, in real time..

Nation – Culture

The original version of this project was created in 2000, to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Prešeren's birth. The National Museum prepared the exhibition A Poet, Not Rich but Renown, which collected objects, manuscripts and rare editions of the poet's works. Alongside this sentimental material, a new media reflection titled Nation Minus Culture was premiered as a modern counterpoint.

After 22 years, Ćosić - on the initiative of the Modern Gallery - revived this project, with updated components. Instead of the originally used, now no longer existing Mat'kurja homepage, he used Twitter as an inexhaustible source of sincere longings, and instead of the equally extinct flash environment, he used two essential current technologies: big data and artificial intelligence.

The artist writes in greater detail on the project on http://nacija-kultura.si, which is a part of the exhibited whole, and he also uses a Twitter bot, https://twitter.com/SonetniVenez.

Vuk Ćosić is an Internet veteran and pioneer of web art, as well as the co-founder of the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab Ljudmila. His artworks can be found in almost all international overviews of (new)media and web art.
http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/

Exhibition curator: Aleš Vaupotič
Exhibition coordinator: Jaka Železnikar

AI model: Marko Plahuta
Layout: Irena Wölle
Video: Danilo Milovanović
Sonetni Venez font: Type Salon
Frames: Okvir

Public relations: Mateja Lavrič
Photographs: Dejan Habicht
Technical coordinator: Tomaž Kučer
Technical team: Boris Fister, Vojko Kmetič, Armin Salihović

The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.