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Exhibition opening
Fri, January 31, 2025 7:00 pm CET
ZKM Karlsruhe
We all access the internet daily. Our web browsers determine what we see – and what we don’t see. This has fascinated artists from an early stage. Based on a research project by the KIT Institute for History of Art and Architecture on Browser Art, the exhibition provides insights into 30 years of browser development. You can discover and try out browser visions yourself via interactive installations.
Opening program
7:00–7:40 pm
Introduction at the Media Theater
- Welcome (Alistair Hudson, scientific and artistic director ZKM)
- On Browser Art (Inge Hinterwaldner and Daniela Hönigsberg, curators KIT)
- Performance <earshot> (Andrew Freeman and Jason Skeet)
- About the exhibition (Laura Schmidt, curator ZKM)
7:45–11:00 pm
Opening of the exhibition in Atrium 1+2, 2nd floor
8:15–9:15 pm
Performance Human Browser in Atrium 1+2, 2nd floor
Onsite – On surface – Online
Entanglements between Locations and Processes in Graffiti Practices
Workshop
December 8-9, 2023
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
A visual marking of a territory or an event, messages left indicating “this is my hand”, “this is my name”, “this is how far I got” can be found throughout the millennia and in a variety of cultures. The contexts vary as well as the means for the inscriptions. They can be sharp slate pencils leaving tiny comments on wall paintings, aerosol sprays covering whole trains or typed messages in computer code. In most cases, graphein/graffiare happens manually, be it in direct contact with the substrate, at a close distance, or remote with a keyboard. Each time it is a situated practice, reacting to an existing cultural setting, often emphasizing the site specificity, imagining audiences. These communicative gestures are embedded in larger cultural settings from which they draw their strength, motivation, legitimacy, virtuosity or subversive power. And to which they contribute a further layer of signification. They may allow glances into long forgotten past practices. They may open the eyes and empower for alternative channels of messaging.
In this workshop we focus on what can be learnt from processes of markings for which we find arguments to label them ‘graffiti’. As the backdrops for such cultural practices are vastly diverse, we encourage the presenters not to take the term for granted, but to make explicit in their talk what theory and concept of graffiti they build on. This can help finding the right points of contact in the discussion even when phenomena diverge considerably.
Three research groups meet with special guests and discuss their perspectives on graffiti.
Graff-IT investigates the presence of graffiti in Italy, from the 7th-16th century, and aims to develop a new interdisciplinary approach to the study of medieval and Renaissance graffiti as a historical source. The actions of writing under investigation have an extemporaneous and personal character. They are not commissioned but are acts beyond any control from the elites and authorities. As such, these written documents are exceptional and valuable complements to official writings.
(Prof. Dr. Carlo Tedeschi, palaeontology, Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio” Chieti Pescara)
INDIGO aims at the basis to systematically document, disseminate and analyse almost 13 km of uninterrupted graffiti along Vienna’s Danube Canal in the next decade. Graffiti community engagement and regular photo visits allow INDIGO to build a spatially, spectrally, and temporally accurate record of most (il)legal sprayings, engravings, and other personal expressions on the Canal’s public urban surfaces.
(Prof. Dr. Geert Verhoeven, archaeology, Universities of Ghent and Vienna and Prof. Dr. Norbert Pfeifer, geodesy and geoinformation, Technical University Vienna)
COSE deals with programmed internet art and seeks to reveal their inner workings, as well as their embeddedness in the various niches of the World Wide Web. A close inspection on artistic and activist practices that might be withdrawn from view due to different reasons is deemed necessary for providing analytical instruments and a general understanding of our media-technological condition. Here, graffiti practices may shed light onto loopholes in systems by exploiting them creatively.
