Saturday, 6 October 2018, at 3 p.m., OSMO/ZA, Slovenska 54, 8 Floor

The lecture is a part of Vectorhack Festival. It is based on the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM exhibition Pioneers of Computer Art (2016) presenting eleven artists and groups who had created works by the use of computers in the early years of their usage from the 1960s to 1980s. The exhibition did not show their most know works but the works which announced – much ahead of their time – the ways in which media will play out its role in the society and the effect it will have on perception, physical bodies, the environment, etc. The pioneers of computer art in Slovenia worked in a socio-political and academic context that allowed them to use technical tools owned by public institutions. Their experimental works received their place on the margins of public institutions (national televisions, national radio stations, universities), yet they were not excluded for them but created autonomous zones inside the public institutions. The artists predominantly utilised technological systems to help them understand how their own culture works, to be able to test the boundaries of perception, to free the mind of its own cultural codes by the use of automated computational systems, to provoke the social, cultural and perceptual presumptions.

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Ida Hiršenfelder works at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM on projects related to digital archives. She is a coordinator and editor of Web Museum, a repository for contemporary audio-visual art. She is also the museum’s on-line editor. From 2007 to 2013 she was a digital archivist at Center for Contemporary Arts SCCA–Ljubljana, where she was co-developing DIVA Station, Digital Video Archive with a great interest for media archeology, archives and their disappearance – the digital life and the digital afterlife.