ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

Address: ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Lorenzstraｧe 19, 76135 Karlsruhe, Germany

Website: www.zkm.de

Contact: General information: +49 (0)721/8100-1200, Ticket office and Membership services: +49 (0)721/8100-1200, info@zkm.de

Opening hours: Wednesday ﾐ Friday, 10 am – 6 pm, Saturday – Sunday, 11 am ﾐ 6 pm, Free admission every Friday after 2 pm

Opened to the public: 1997

Brief history: ZKM was established as a foundation incorporated under public law in 1989 and is financed equally by the city of Karlsruhe and by the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Since October 1997 ZKM has been housed in a former factory building classified as a historical monument. The impressive industrial building measuring 312 meters in length is divided into ten atriums, and also houses the St嚇tische Galerie, (Municipal Gallery), and the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design.

The factory was constructed in 1918 by Philipp Jacob Manz and, despite serving as an ammunition factory; it was not destroyed during the Second World War. A prime consideration for Schweger and Partners, the Hamburg-based team of architects responsible for the conversion of the building, was to preserve the unique qualities of the industrial architecture, and respect the inherent features of the old building. Every new addition therefore represented either an improvement on a particular detail or provided an additional feature. A key objective was to retain the open, ample features of the light wells, although enclosures were unavoidable in some areas, for example, the Media Theater. Various viewing angles offer exciting perspectives along the atriums, as well as from the catwalks that connect them.
The music studio, in the form of a glass cube, was added in front of the old building. The so-called ﾒblue cubeﾓ not only marks the entrance to ZKM, but also functions as an identification mark.

ZKM is comprised of: ZKM Media Museum, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, ZKM Media Library, ZKM Museum Shop, ZKM Institute for Visual Media, ZKM Institute for Music and Acoustics, ZKM Institute for Media, Education, and Economics, and the ZKM Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems.

Aims and objectives: ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe is an internationally unique cultural institution. It consistently creates a network that brings together the arts and new media. It unites the fields of research and production, exhibitions, events and documentation under one roof: the Media Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Media Library, the Laboratory for Antique Video Systems, the Media Theater, the Institute for Visual Media, the Institute for Music and Acoustics, and the Institute for Media, Education and Economics, all enable ZKM to develop interdisciplinary projects and international collaborations.

ZKM constantly analyzes new media in theory, as well as in practice, in order to react quickly to new developments in information, technology and the permanent change of social structures. ZKM considers itself a forum, bringing together science, the arts, politics and economics in close cooperation with the Hochschule f殲 Gestaltung Karlsruhe (State Academy of Design), and other institutions. ZKM’s goal, as a platform for experiments and discussions, is to be actively involved in working for the future, as the question of how to use technologies in a meaningful way is constantly redefined.

In addition to exhibitions, ZKM is a place for events, research and production, archives and collections. Two museums are open to the public as well as a media library. ZKM comprises over 14,000 square meters of exhibition space, rooms for events, video and sound studios, and artistic and technical workshops. A museum for all media and genres, a place for both spatial and time-based arts, the ZKM encompasses the range of developments in art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a ﾒmulti-divisionalﾓ house for all forms of art and with a special focus on media art, the ZKM presents approximately 20 exhibitions and hosts 100 events, produces around 15 publications, and organizes over 1,500 guided tours per year.

Distinct areas of
programming: ZKM Media Museum: is an interactively conceived museum, which gives pride of place to developments in new media. The installations, largely developed specifically for the ZKM itself, engage visitors directly and ask them to become co-producers of the artworks. The viewers become users in a performative museum.

Together with over 500 guest artists and guest scientists from around the world, the ZKM institutes have produced a wide variety of important works that have been acclaimed at international biennials and festivals, as well as at exhibitions, making a decisive impact on the development of media art over the last two decades. With the ongoing acquisition of these works by the ZKM Collection, initiated at the beginning of the 1990s by the founding director of the ZKM, Heinrich Klotz, and its collection of post-1945 masterpieces, ZKM Karlsruhe now has the most important collection of international media art in the world, ranging from works of early video art to Web-based and interactive works.

ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art: Since December 1999, the Museum of Contemporary Art has been housed in atrium 1 and 2 of the former munitions factory. Pioneering works in European and American art provide an insight into the development of art from 1960 to the present day.

Special exhibitions engage with contemporary and socially relevant thematic areas of international cultural production and have played a decisive role in ZKM establishing itself as a platform for discussion. Works are presented from the second half of the twentieth century through to the most recent positions in contemporary art. In this interplay between the two museums, and as museum that exhibits all genres and media, ZKM is a leading museological model in which all the arts and the continually developing media are brought into relation with one another.

Number of projects exhibited yearly (total: In-house projects, 20 per annum (approximately)

Most outstanding projects of the last 3-5 years: Die Algorithmische Revolution, (The Algorithmic Revolution), October 31, 2004 – January 6, 2008

Making Things Public. Atmosph較en der Demokratie (Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy), 2005

Lichtkunst aus Kunstlicht, (Light Art from Artificial Light), 2005 – 2006

MindFrames. Media Study at Buffalo 1973ﾐ1990, 2006 – 2007,

Medium Religion, 2008 – 2009

Imagination Becomes Reality, 2007

Klio. Eine kurze Geschichte der Kunst in Euramerika nach 1945, (Klio. A Short History of Art in Euramerica after 1945), 2007

Distinct areas of programming: Around one hundred events take place at the ZKM each year, including concerts, lectures, conferences, and gala dinners, which translates as an event every three days. Roughly sixty percent of these events are organized by the ZKM itself, twenty percent are collaborations with other organizers, and a further twenty percent are events by organizers who have rented ZKM spaces. Together with the state broadcasting institutions of the ARDand the German public radio broadcaster Deutschlandradio (Radio Germany), the ZKM has organized a five-day festival devoted to the art of the radio play, the ARDH嗷spieltage (ARDRadio Play Days), every year since 2006.

Program strands: Exhibition-related festivals with performances, film presentations, concerts, lectures, discussions, and symposia also take place on a regular basis. Examples include, the Deleuze Festival in 2003, Baudrillard Festival 2004, and the Foucault Festival in 2001 in accompanying the exhibition zwischen zwei toden / between two deaths in 2007, or the over fifty events tied to the exhibition Vertrautes Terrain ﾐ Aktuelle Kunst in & 歟er Deutschland (Familiar Territory ﾐ Contemporary Art in & about Germany) that took place in 2008.

The ZKM research institutes also regularly organize festivals. Twice a year, the Institute for Music and Acoustics presents the festival Quan-tenspr殤ge (Quantum Leaps), at which instrumental and electronic re-sources and media enter into a direct dialog. The festival Piano+, which takes place every year, is dedicated to as yet unheard sounds for piano and electronics. Every two years, the institute invites university studios of electronic and electro acoustic music from Germany and all over the world to participate in the festival next generation. The festival concerts are supplemented with a multi-day symposium.

ZKM exhibitions are frequently explored before and evaluated afterwards in symposia. Additionally, symposia are organized that are accompanied by an exhibition, such as the event and exhibition series ﾒPhilosophie und Kunstﾓ [Philosophy and Art], which is dedicated to important twentieth-century thinkers and philosophers. With its many other symposia, congresses, conventions, and conferences, ZKM fulfills its declared mission to be a platform for discourse and theory ﾐ the museum as university and location of alternative knowledge in the age of a hegemonial entertainment industry.

Number of events at the ZKM per year: 100 (approximately)

Distinct areas of programming: ZKM Museum Communication implements the educational role and mission of the museum with its innovative and interdisciplinary activities and programs, and functions as an interface between the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and its visitors. The objective is to provide an under-standing of the scholarly, scientific, and artistic works produced at the ZKM, as well as of the numerous exhibitions at the Media Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The art and media background to current exhibitions is presented in guided tours, workshops, and training courses targeting the general public, as well as specialist audiences. The diverse program offers something for all age groups and levels of prior knowledge. As the ZKMﾕs special competence is in the area of new media, the range of activities on offer in media pedagogy is unique. The infrastructure of the house, with its museums, research institutes, and the media library, has exceptional resources for investigating theme complexes in the fields of media theory, media practice, art theory, and fine arts from different perspectives.

Program strands: Private tours in a variety of languages can be arranged in addition to the public guided tours, which are offered several times per week. A wide range of thematic tours and workshops for children, youths, and adults round out the comprehensive offer of the department for Museum Communications. The museum communication not only offers a classical museum educational program, it also enables the latest technologies to be tested in MP3 guides for the exhibitions, in workshops with technical media on robotics, games programming, video and audio productions, and animation films. Here, visitor or user participation, artistically and socially, is the focus of attention. What the department offers is also to be understood as an aid for all those who have graduated from ﾒlayﾓ users to emancipated users, to media experts in the age of Web 2.0, and who with their user-generated content appear at the ZKM as equal partners. Numerous training courses for teachers are organized alongside a large school and pre-school program

Academic: Since its inauguration, ZKM has become internationally recognized as the ﾒDigital Bauhausﾓ, “Max Planck Institute for the Arts”, and ﾒMecca of media art.ﾓ It has responded to the rapid developments in communication and information technologies, along with the emerging possibilities for art and the associated social transformations, with artistic, scholarly, and scientific research, productions, and presentations. ZKM understands itself as a public forum for encounters between philosophy, science, art, politics, and commerce with the goal of highlighting possible applications and creative potential, as well as indicating the uncertainties involved in the utilization of new media.

The ZKM is a highly networked institution, which cooperates with numerous universities, research institutes, museums, archives, cultural institutions, and broadcasting stations. To cite the ZKMﾕs main cooperating institutions: the German public-law broadcasters ARD, SWR, and BR; the Experimentalstudio [Experimental Studio] of the SWR in Freiburg; the German-Turkish television company TGRT EU; the M殤chener Biennale ﾐ Internationales Festival f殲 neues Musiktheater [Munich Biennale ﾐ International Festival for New Music Theater]; Staatliche Hochschule f殲 Gestaltung Karlsruhe [Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design] (HfG); Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT); University of Konstanz; Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, T歟ingen; Akademie der K殤ste [Academy of Arts], Berlin; Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design; Getty Research Institute, USA; UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, Australia; EMPAC ﾐ The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Servi腔 Social do Com屍cio [Social Service of Commerce] (SESC), Brazil; Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique [Institute of Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music] (IRCAM), Institut national de lﾕaudiovisuel [National Institute of Visual Arts] (INA), Fondation Cartier, Centre Pompidou, France; C3 Center for Culture & Communication, Hungary; Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof誕 [Reina Sof誕 National Museum and Art Center], Spain; Santralistanbul, Turkey; The Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Ireland, and the Goethe-Institut [Goethe Institute].

Publishing-related: Since ZKM was founded in 1989 it has produced around 230 books, CDs, and DVDs ﾐ on media art, and art in general. In 2000, the ZKM set up its own professional publications department to oversee the publications produced each year at the ZKM. The team at the publications department is responsible for editing and realizing the exhibition catalogs and books on the diverse exhibition programs conceived and realized at the ZKM, as well as the DVDs and books that are independent of the exhibition projects. The department functions as a link between curators, editors, reproduction graphics, and graphic design agencies, as well as printers and publishers. ZKM publications are published and distributed by internationally renowned houses, such as Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther K嗜ig (Cologne), Hatje Cantz (Ostfildern), Birkh隔ser (Basel), Prestel (Munich), Springer (Vienna, New York), as well as The MIT Press (Cambridge, MA).

Number of activities by type per year: 60+ (estimate), including 1,500+ guided tours

Surface area/capacity: Total exhibition area of 14,093 m2

Type: Media Museum: 6,344 m2, Museum of Contemporary Art: 7,749 m2, Media Library: 774 m2, Foyer: 756 m2, Cube: 400 m2, Media Theater: 345 m2, Lecture Room: 153 m2.

Managing organization: ZKM is led by CEO Peter Weibel. Christiane Riedel is head of the general management. Both develop, implement, and oversee the ZKM Institutes, responsible for research and production, the ZKM Museums and exhibitions, supported by Bernhard Serexhe, chief curator of the Media Museum and Andreas F. Beitin, Head of the Musuem of Contemporary Art. Moreover the chairman and the general manager administer the departments for archives and communications as well as the administration and central services.

CEO: Peter Weibel

General Manager: Christiane Riedel

Andreas F. Beitin, Organizer; Bernhard Serexhe, Head curator

Contact: direktion@zkm.de

Public: ZKM is publicly funded in equal parts by the City of Karlsruhe and the Federal State of Baden-W殲ttemberg. This makes up for a basic funding of appr. ﾛ 15 Mio. per year, ﾛ 7,5 Mio. form the City and ﾛ 7,5 Mio. from the State. This funding is complemented by project-related third party funds from various insitutions, varying from ﾛ 1-3 Mio. per year beeing bound to publications, educational and scientific programs.

Third party funders are a.o. Deutsche Bank Stiftung, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, Europ格sche Kommission Generaldirektion Bildung und Kultur, Europ格scher Fonds f殲 regionale Entwicklung (EFRE), European Cultural Foundation, Fiducia, Filmf嗷derung Baden-W殲ttemberg, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung f殲 Wissenschaftsf嗷derung, funda豪o edp, Goethe-Institut, Joint Research Centre (JRC) European Commission, Kanadische Botschaft Berlin, Kultur Stiftung der L穫der, Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Kunststiftung NRW, Landesstiftung Baden-W殲ttemberg, Nederlands Fonds voor Podiumkunsten, Regierungspr郭idium Karlsruhe, Robert Bosch Stiftung, Stadt Stuttgart, Stiftung Landesbank Baden-W殲ttemberg, Volkswagenstiftung. Two main sponsor partners EnBW and LBBW, together with project related sponsors like a.o. Bosch, e&b druck, Fiducia, KVV, Wibu Systems, donate up to ﾛ 1 Mio per year.