The Imaginary and the Dead Media in the Works of the Kosmoplovci Collective

Aleksandra Sekulić

doi:10.25038/am.v0i15.233

Authors

Aleksandra Sekulić

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i15.233

Keywords:

media archaeology, imaginary media, dead media, computer demo scene, radical amateurism

Abstract

Drawing from a movement which aimed to re-activate the practices of the emancipation of cultural production established in Yugoslav cine-amateurism: Low-Fi Video (1997–2003), the Kosmoplovci Collective, established in 2001, developed various interdisciplinary experiments, contesting the elements of the media framework of production. In a specific osmosis of practices stemming from the computer demo scene, video, alternative comics, electronic music and design, Kosmoplovci contributed to the contemporary explorations of the media-archaeological art, which uses archival work and historical materials related to the shifts of media paradigms. The videos, computer demos and online interactive projects of Kosmoplovci produced in the beginning of the 2000s can be seen as the projections, emulations or anticipations of the imaginary or dead media, or even a future excavation and re-invention of media (Void, Selfaware, X21, Artificial Detection). The treatment of media machines in the tension of their imagined untimely existence, as in the description of imaginary media by Siegfried Zielinsky, and the imagined future recovery from their deep death which is another form of their dislocation, destabilizes the fixed positions of the elements of contemporary media art production: the camera, the internet, but also the parallel relation of the image and the sound. The practice of this overall destabilization of fixed elements of the media system puts the Kosmoplovci Collective in the line of continuity of the experiments of radical amateurism.

Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper

How to cite this article: Sekulić, Aleksandra. "The Imaginary and the Dead Media in the Works of the Kosmoplovci Collective." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): 93–102. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.233

Author Biography

Aleksandra Sekulić

Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade
Serbia

Aleksandra Sekulić, Ph.D. candidate in Theory of Art and Media at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Belgrade; MA in Cultural Management and Cultural Policy in the Balkans, UNESCO Chair, Interdisciplinary studies, University of Arts, Belgrade and Universite Lumiere Lyon 2, Master thesis: “Archiving as a cultural form: creating video archives and databases”. Graduated in General Literature and Theory of Literature at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. Visual arts and film program curator at the Center for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD) in Belgrade since 2010. Worked in film production, curating and distribution at Academic Film Center in Belgrade 2005–2009. Member of Low-Fi Video movement (1997–2003) and the team of the Media Archaeology archive and program in Belgrade. Editor of publications: Performing the Museum – A Reader (co-editor with Dušan Grlja, Novi Sad: MSUV, 2016), Videography of the Region (Belgrade: DKSG, 2009), Media Archaeology: the Nineties (Belgrade: CZKD, 2009) and others.

References

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i15.233 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i15.233