From Monument to Market: Video Art and Public Space
The inauguration of video.wrocenter.pl
The WRO Art Center
ul. Widok 7
50-052 Wrocław, Poland
T 0048 71 343 32 40
info [at] wrocenter.pl
video.wrocenter.pl
www.wrocenter.pl
WRO is pleased to announce the launch of a new online resource dedicated to presenting its thematic collections and multimedia publications that are no longer available in physical form.
In 2005 the WRO Art Center published the first in a series of historical reviews of selected subjects in Polish media art: From Monument to Market: Video Art and Public Space. Several subsequent WRO publications (including Józef Robakowski’s 2007 monograph Energetic Images: Bio-mechanical Recordings and The Hidden Decade: Polish Video Art 1985–1995, which came out in 2010) have appeared in a similar format, featuring articles on theoretical and historical topics in book form, accompanied by a set of DVDs offering an extensive curatorial selections of video works. The objective has been to present rarely seen video art works in their historical contexts and make them available both to specialists and to the general public.
In the original publication of From Monument to Market, Dieter Daniels wrote: “The distribution of media art is in a paradoxical situation: Works of art created in electronic-media formats make only limited use of the extraordinary potential for dissemination that is inherent to those media.”
That paradox is something the initial offering from video.wrocenter.pl aims to resolve: The online version of From Monument to Market takes full advantage of the potentials of internet distribution, presenting nearly the entire content of the original hard-copy publication, and enhancing it with additional materials and updates.
WRO owns the largest collection of media art in Poland. Continuously updated since 1989, it holds both Polish and international works, including video art, recordings and documentation of audio visual performances, multimedia objects, interactive installations and internet projects. In the coming months, video.wrocenter.pl will also present video materials from two of WRO’s EU projects—Artist Talk and DCA: Digitizing Contemporary Art—as well as the video catalog of the exhibition AC/DC/IT: A Short History of Video Installations and forthcoming publications from the series WIDOK: The WRO Media Art Reader.
