Đorđe Balmazović & Marcell Mars — RESHAPE Intensive Cluj
Channel: HowlRound Theatre Commons
Date: 2019-11-15

Đorđe Balmazović / Škart: Pits and falls of group work
and
Marcell Mars: Memory of the World / Public Library

Thursday 14 November 2019
10:30 EET (Cluj, UTC +2) / 9:30 CET (Berlin, UTC +1) / 8:30 GMT (London, UTC +0) / 3:30 a.m. EST (New York, UTC -5)

Đorđe will shortly present Škart activities: starting from the first decade, the 90's, and street actions, following 2000 – 2013 which were the years of forming new collectives, bigger than Škart itself, changing the focus from visual art to other disciplines. The main focus will be on work in and with the collective and why it is important to work in collective despite all the problems it might cause.

Škart was founded 1990 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. First decade, from 1990 till 2000 collective was mainly engaged doing little samizdat objects and giving them away in street actions. From 2000 collective was engaged founding other collectives, working in bigger groups, using visual art, poetry and music. Meanwhile, group members were engaged doing workshops with children and elderly people.

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Marcell Mars presents Memory of the World/Public Library which is the synergy of two efforts. First, it makes the case for the institution of public library and its principle of universal access to knowledge. Second, it is an exploration and development of distributed internet infrastructure for amateur librarians.

A public library is one of those almost invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they go extinct. A place where all people can get access to all knowledge that can be collected seemed for a long time a dream beyond reach – until the egalitarian impetus of social revolutions, the Enlightenment idea of universality of knowledge, and the exceptional suspension of the commercial barriers of copyright made it possible.

The Internet has, as in many other situations, completely changed our expectations and imagination about what is possible. The dream of a catalogue of the world – a universal access to all available knowledge for every member of society – became realizable. A question merely of the meeting of curves on a graph: the point at which the line of global distribution of personal computers meets that of the critical mass of people with access to the Internet. Today nobody lacks the imagination necessary to see public libraries as part of a global infrastructure of universal access to knowledge for literally every member of society. However, the emergence and development of the Internet is taking place precisely at the point at which an institutional crisis — one with traumatic and inconceivable consequences — has also begun.

Nenad Romić (aka Marcell Mars), advanced internet user, http://ki.ber.kom.uni.st. Marcell is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute - mi2 (1999) and club MaMa in Zagreb (2000). He initiated GNU GPL publishing label EGOBOO.bits (2000); started Skill sharing (2004) informal meetings of technical enthusiasts in MaMa and regional hacker gatherings ‘Nothing will happen’ (2007).

Mars started his research “Ruling Class Studies” at Jan van Eyck (2011-12), continued at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2013) and since spring 2015, he is a PhD student at Leuphana University in DCRL (Digital Cultures Research Lab). “Ruling Class Studies” is a research of corporate state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence. It looks closely at the Google, Amazon, Facebook and eBay. Since 2018 he joined the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University as a Research Fellow.

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Intensive Cluj is a meeting of art practitioners interested in creating alternative organizational models for the arts.

It takes place in the framework of RESHAPE, a research and development project that brings together artists and art workers from Europe and the South Mediterranean to jointly imagine how arts will be created, accessed and experienced in the future. RESHAPE relies on the collective intelligence and creativity of the cultural workers on the ground. A bottom-up process, it gathers artists and activists who already have experience and expertise in imagining alternative practices and transforming them into concrete actions and policy recommendations.