huridocs-tech Electronic media in Central and Eastern Europe's transformation

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## author     : abroeck@v2.nl
## date       : 27.03.00
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Media Revolution. Electronic Media in the Transformation
Process of Eastern and Central Europe. (German title:
Ost-West Internet.)  Edited by Stephen Kovats. Edition
Bauhaus 6, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/M.  and New York, 1999.
381 pp., illus. (All texts Engl. and German.) Trade, paper
55DM / US$30 (order from <biblio@bauhaus-dessau.de>). ISBN:
3-593-36365-8.  With CD-Rom: Ostranenie 93 - 95 - 97.
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Dessau, 1999. Mac & PC. ISBN:
3-910022-30-8.

[Reviewed by Andreas Broeckmann for Leonardo Digital Review
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/ldr.html ]

Ten years after the social and political revolutions in the
countries of Central and East Europe, this region is
increasingly coming into focus as a rich and diverse
cultural landscape. Artistic traditions that reach back to
the modernist avantgardes and before, are being re-connected
to the modernist and post-modernist historiographies of
Western Europe and Northern America, and join the
contemporary art practices characterised by cross-cultural
discourses and global connectivity.

More than anything else, the East-European socio-cultural
revolutions of the 1990s have been _media_ revolutions. The
first episode started with the often clandestine, minor
media practices of the 1980s [1], exploded into the
televised demise of the GDR and Romanian television
revolution in December 1989, and concluded with Yeltsin's
execution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. Then
followed the influx of video and computer technology into
Eastern Europe, along with the benefits and the pains of the
culture of capitalism. The second half of the decade saw the
rapid expansion of commercial television and the Internet,
influencing the perception of a region fragmenting into
superficial normality, Nouveau Richesse, Turbo Folk and
Robber Capitalism. The 90s ended with the high-tech images
and networked communication of what has been termed the
'first Internet war', as bloody and as destructive as the
earlier Yugoslav wars, but monitored by a global audience
glued to their E-mail in-boxes.

Throughout the decade and across the post-Soviet continent,
artists were following what happened, with their own eyes
and ears, with their photo and video cameras, documenting,
contextualising and transforming speedy events and slow
changes into aesthetic experiences.

This is where the book and CD-Rom publication Media
Revolution takes its departure. It collects essays and
documents artworks that span the entire decade and that
together form what is probably the richest compendium and
the broadest overview over art using electronic media and
produced in Central and Eastern Europe during the 1990s. The
basis for the project is a series of festivals and forums
which took place under the title Ostranenie in the Bauhaus
in Dessau, in the former GDR, in 1993, 1995 and 1997. [2]

The three Ostranenie forums were a showcase for
East-European artists working with new media, and a meeting
place for artists, curators, writers and philosophers
interested in the way in which the societal transformations
of the former Eastern Blok was being articulated in creative
media, art, and communication practices. The three VHS
tape-sized catalogues of Ostranenie -- now fully documented
on the CD-Rom that comes along with the Media Revolution
book -- read like a Who is Who? of innovative cultural
practitioners and artists from a region that was, for a
decade, poised between exoticism and self-conscious attempts
at normality, and that has become one of the precarious
testbeds of a globalised world order. Texts, stills and
excerpts from videos and installations, websites and CD-Rom
productions of over 500 individuals from 32 countries are
presented through an interface that is easy to use and to
search -- as soon as one realises that the main graphical
elements are sliders which are moved up and down to select
categories, names and countries.

The book itself collects texts by 23 leading media theorists
and historians and ranges from Derrick de Kerckhove's essay
about the role of television in the changes of 1989/90 (the
only text in the collection that is reprinted here, all
others are original contributions) to Geert Lovink's
real-time comments on the Kosovo War of 1999. Ryszard
Kluszczynski, Nina Czegledy and Keiko Sei recapitulate the
development of media art in Eastern Europe, while Miklos
Peternak, Gary S. Schaal, Ivo Skoric and Kostadina Iordanova
deal with aspects of the Internet in the region, and Calin
Dan, Siegfried Zielinski, Inke Arns and Marina Grzinic
elucidate some of the cultural and aesthetic strategies that
emerged from the techno-social dispositive of the 1990s. Lev
Manovich, whose new book is coming out in the autumn 2000,
has a text about Avantgarde and Software in which he
compares the aesthetic strategies of the Russian film
avantgarde with those offered by digital imaging software,
and Dejan Sretenovic writes about Video Art in Serbia [3]

It is hardly a coincidence that, ten years after the fall of
the wall, this publication project is providing such a broad
overview over the East European media art production of the
90s, exactly at the same time when the catalogue of Bojana
Pejic's exhibition After the Wall, which opened at the
Moderna Museet Stockholm in October 1999, is doing the same
for the artistic production of the region in general. [4] In
his own contribution to the book, the initiator of
Ostranenie and editor of this timely publication, the
Canadian architect and cultural theorist Stephen Kovats,
explains the artistic strategie of 'ostranenie', or
estrangement, that was introduced by Victor Shklovski in
1916 and that has been at the centre of the entire project
which, in this book and CD-Rom, has now found a convincing
conclusion.

[1] Inke Arns, Andreas Broeckmann: Small Media Normality for
the East. In: ZKP4. Ed. by Nettime. Ljubljana, 1997. (URL:
http://www.v2.nl/~arns/Texts/Media/kl-ost-e.html)

[2] URL: http://www.ostranenie.org

[3] Cf. Dejan Sretenovic (ed.): Video Art in Serbia. Belgrade: Centre for
Contemporary Arts, 1999

[4] URL: http://www.modernamuseet.se


(Berlin, 27.03.2000)




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