The Absolute Report
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Association Apsolutno has finally published their book 'the absolute report'.
The late 1990s were a time of intense activity, networking and East-West collaboration in contemporary arts in the former Eastern Europe. Discovery of new fields of art practice, redefinition of one's position as an artist in a climate of changing social, political and cultural contexts, the establishment of new systems of communication and collaboration, and the emergence of new technologies in art practices all marked that period. Association APSOLUTNO was part of that wider scene, which was in stark contrast to the claustrophobic context of Serbia within which the members of APSOLUTNO lived and within which the production of the association was created.
This book is an Absolute Report of the last five years of the 20. century from the perspective of a specific artistic network that was active at that time. We present the projects that APSOLUTNO created in that period as well as reports by various artists, media thinkers and other important personalities that APSOLUTNO met within the same East-West network in the sphere of new art & media practices. In this book we find parallels between our own projects and those of others, by identifying four important themes that run through the work created at that time: time, space, code, and memory.
These themes arose in the work of APSOLUTNO as a response to the immediate social surroundings in which APSOLUTNO lived and worked. The guiding principle of APSOLUTNO was search for the sites and situations with a symbolic or metaphorical potential in relation to a wider social context. We refer to these found situations as absolutely real facts because of their hidden interpretive quality. Taking absolutely real facts as a starting point for our interventions, we turned the familiar, usual, or even marginal, which is often no longer even perceived, into something unusual, out of the ordinary, and worth further exploration.
Time, space, code and memory are also present in the works by other participants represented in this book. In spite of the variety of approaches, it is evident that this activity, taken as a whole, reflects the existence of a specific epistemological community.
See the PDF at: http://www.apsolutno.org/TheAbsoluteReport.pdf
Contributors in the book:
Andreas Broeckmann / Berlin
C5 / San Francisco
Inke Arns / Berlin
jodi / Barcelona
Konrad Becker / Vienna
R. LeE Montgomery / Oakland
Marina Gržinić Mauhler / Ljubljana
Nina Czegledy / Toronto / Budapest
PLATFORM / London
RTMark / United States / Paris
Stephen Kovats / Rotterdam
Vuk Ćosić / Ljubljana
Geert Lovink / Amsterdam
Lev Manovich / San Diego
Minja Smajić / Stockholm
Darko Fritz / Amsterdam / Zagreb
Gebhard Sengmüller / Vienna
Dejan Sretenović / Belgrade
Aleksandar Bošković / Belgrade
Florian Schneider / Munich
Rossitza Daskalova / 1967 - 2003
The book was designed by Irena Wolle from Ljubljana, and published by REVOLVER from Frankfurt. The first presentation took place in Vienna in June this year. The association APSOLUTNO was founded in 1993 in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. The production of the association is created through collaboration of its four members ( Zoran Pantelic, Dragan Rakic, Bojana Petric (and Dragan Miletic from 1995 till 2001) ). Since 1995 the works have been signed APSOLUTNO, without any reference to personal names.