Zoran Pantelic (Yugoslavia)
The presentation will focus on two positions within new media in Yugoslavia:that of the artist and that of the producer and educator. After the fall of the Berlin wall, a process of democratisation started in the countries of the East Bloc. However, social reality in Serbia was characterised by quite a different process of civil war, which started about the same time in ex-Yugoslavia.
The questioning of the social values of the previous system occurred in a
very different way as well.In the sphere of culture, national became the most
cherished value, whereas other cultural values became an instrument of
propaganda by the regime. In such circumstances,many ideas and initiatives were
born which expressed and
encouraged a critical attitude towards the system in which they found themselves
and the possibility to resist it.
One such initiative was the activity of the association apsolutno,which in
the mid-nineties deleted art from its title art association, thus
symbolically abandoning art as the dominant determinant of its activity, and
turning to explore the documentary reality of the Yugoslav everyday life.By
doing this, aA turned from artists into explorers of reality, by
using in its work absolutely real facts (arf), taken from a sociological
corpus to be moved to a field where they are read as part of an art work.