ArteActa 2021, 6:7-60 | DOI: 10.62804/aa.2021.012
The study "The Expanded Field of Media Art and the Policies of its Collections" traces changing strategies and lines of development of Czechoslovak and Czech media art in relation to the dynamics of society, especially after 1989 and in the 1990s, when experimental film and video art makers have stepped out of the institutional set-up of the film industry with different artistic strategies as well as ways of organizing. Sometimes they have also relied on emergent or postmaterial approaches, incorporating live and participatory processes. A more complex situation requiring historical reconstruction arises with overlaps into the visual and performing arts, such as interactive and site-specific installations, video sculptures, intermedia art, immersive drama, or performance. Institutionally and theoretically, this expanded field has been redefined several times over time. For galleries and archives, the representation of this cultural history entails a number of challenges and new specializations, which are discussed and described in the theory and practice of memory institutions in the form of professional curatorial and documentation approaches. For this reason, archival methodologies include different kinds of analysis of documentation, artists' network relations, oral histories, media, and organizational ecologies. The organization of an institutional collection must account for heterogeneous material as well as the use of personal and community collections from different social contexts. Theoretical and terminological consensus must therefore be sought even in the overlap between traditional disciplines and media.
Published: December 15, 2021 Show citation
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