Chair: Emese Kürti
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Flóra Barkóczi
Promises of a global network: The utopistic expectations towards the Internet in digital periodicals of the 1990s in Hungary
The presentation aims to reflect on the positive expectations towards the cultural transformation following the change of the regime in Hungary, through the example of three digital periodicals (ABCD, Nightwatch, Xanner). The periodicals published online (Nightwatch, Xanner) in CD-ROM format (ABCD), or as diskmag (Xanner), created as a response to the emergence of the Internet and new digital technology, had only been existing for a few years around the mid-nineties. The developers of the periodical Xanner concluded their mission in 1994 as the aim of “reconnecting Hungary to the global cultural circuit with the help of new systems of information technology”. Although this expectation seems highly naive and utopistic from today’s perspective, the emergence of a global network and the potential of distributing information and knowledge on the local art scene online in the nineties, promised the possibility of becoming part of the international art scene, thereby rewriting the peripheral position of artists of the post-soviet region. This paper aims to interpret these early digital periodicals from the perspective of publishing in a post-digital age, positioning them in the context of critical internet culture (Lovink 2009). The paper builds on the hypothesis that the optimistic attitude of the periodicals towards the promise of rewriting centre-periphery relations has been challenged in the second half of the decade by the realization of the centralized nature of the World Wide Web, and the disillusionment from the new liberal democracies and the globalization of the cultural sphere.
References
- Lovink, Geert: Dynamics of Critical Internet Culture. An Archive of Content Production, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2009.
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Camilla Salvaneschi
Global art magazines and Kassel's Documenta: Rethinking the documenta 12 magazine project
In 2007 the German quinquennial show Documenta launched the documenta 12 magazine project, curated by the editor of the Austrian magazine Springerin, Georg Schöllhammer. Involving over 90 periodicals from 50 countries to publish essays and features on the exhibition’s main themes, the project became a platform to showcase not only the knowledge produced around the exhibition but the critical potential the art magazine had acquired globally. The overall project, started 2 years before the opening of the show, resulted in an exhibition displaying the issues of the participating periodicals, an online archive and three anthological issues with a selection of the over 300 articles published since the launch of the project and titled documenta 12 magazines. While the project was strongly criticised for exploiting these periodicals to produce the knowledge behind documenta 12 (Osborne, 2007) – appropriating them with universalising assumptions (Allen, 2016) – it was also praised for placing relatively unknown and “marginal” publications under the spotlight of an international exhibition and audience. Departing from these established perspectives, the paper intends to shed light on the tensions that arose from the project’s dialogue between centre and periphery with regard to: the periodical’s intrinsic nature, its power relationship with other periodicals and its negotiation of the art system more broadly. In particular, it will look at the centrifugal force, where documenta 12’s transnational network of periodicals expanded the exhibition beyond the German venue, and its opposite, the centripetal force which instigated the centring of global periodicals under the exhibition’s umbrella.