The Imaginary and the Dead Media in the Works of the Kosmoplovci Collective
The Imaginary and the Dead Media in the Works of the Kosmoplovci Collective

Summary/Abstract: Drawing from a movement which aimed to re-activate the practices of the emancipation of cultural production established in Yugoslav cine-amateurism: Low-Fi Video (1997–2003), the Kosmoplovci Collective, established in 2001, developed various interdisciplinary experiments, contesting the elements of the media framework of production. In a specific osmosis of practices stemming from the computer demo scene, video, alternative comics, electronic music and design, Kosmoplovci contributed to the contemporary explorations of the media-archaeological art, which uses archival work and historical materials related to the shifts of media paradigms. The videos, computer demos and online interactive projects of Kosmoplovci produced in the beginning of the 2000s can be seen as the projections, emulations or anticipations of the imaginary or dead media, or even a future excavation and re-invention of media (Void, Selfaware, X21, Artificial Detection). The treatment of media machines in the tension of their imagined untimely existence, as in the description of imaginary media by Siegfried Zielinsky, and the imagined future recovery from their deep death which is another form of their dislocation, destabilizes the fixed positions of the elements of contemporary media art production: the camera, the internet, but also the parallel relation of the image and the sound. The practice of this overall destabilization of fixed elements of the media system puts the Kosmoplovci Collective in the line of continuity of the experiments of radical amateurism.

• Details
• Contents