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NEW MEDIA
The Collection of New Media and Intermedia is the newest and smallest sub-collection of the Olomouc Museum of Art. It was established in 2021 as a result of the project New Media Museums: Collecting and Preserving Media Arts in Central Europe, which aimed to map and share experiences in caring for new media collections among institutions in Central Europe. In addition to managing new acquisitions, it also aims to archive and document digital media in all other sub-collections. The collection contains works created after 2000 and is currently focused on sound works and audiovisual pieces.
The creation of the new media and intermedia sub-collection was formally approved by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic in 2021. Its establishment is closely tied to the Olomouc Museum of Art’s effort to complement its collections with works of art intended for the long-term representative displays, whose medium reflects the accelerated technological development and societal changes since the 1990s and that continue to reflect these transformations to the present day. At the same time, it does not neglect early technological works and pioneering approaches developed by artists since the 1960s. Selected works from this collection are expected to become part of long-term SEFO exhibitions and to be supplemented by long-term loans.
The lack of expertise and experience with new media works, combined with their often fragile and maintenance-intensive nature, has long discouraged and still discourages curators from collecting new media works, thus widening gaps in the collecting activities of museums (not only in Central Europe). The main prerequisite for establishing the collection was the implementation of the research project New Media Museums: Creating a Framework for Preserving and Collecting Media Arts in Central Europe (supported by the Visegrad Fund), which the museum launched in early 2021 together with institutional partners from the V4 countries (Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava; C3 – Center for Culture and Communication, Budapest; WRO Art Center, Wroclaw; PAF Olomouc). This project established an international platform for sharing knowledge and experiences in collecting, caring for, and presenting new media works. It also provided sufficient groundwork for the creation of the new media and intermedia sub-collection.
In its first phase, the new sub-collection focused on reflecting on the museum’s existing collections to select key media-based works and, with the newly gained knowledge, to propose appropriate handling methods (registration, documentation, conservation, archiving, storage). Some of the selected works were transferred to the new media sub-collection. For works where registering them in the new media sub-collection did not make sense conceptually (being part of or supplementary documentation to works stored in other collections), a handling manual was created. The first new acquisitions, which took place in 2020 and 2021, served as case studies for applying the newly established approaches developed from the New Media Museums project.
The first acquisition included in the new media and intermedia sub-collection was a sound installation by Roman Štětina, created on commission by the Olomouc Museum of Art (MUO) as an intervention into the Jiří Kolář exhibition, which presented his comprehensive set of confrontages titled Babyluna. MUO acquired Štětina’s work as a data file on a hard drive, accompanied by a handling manual provided by the artist. The collaboration with Roman Štětina also established key steps for the acquisition, registration, documentation, and exhibition of other works.
“Roman Štětina was invited to communicate with Babyluna and to create an artistic intervention in the exhibition. His work includes a wide range of methods, from working with archival materials and analog technologies for processing sound and image, through minimalist spatial gallery installations, to radio productions and video. The creative method that Štětina employs in his work is, like Jiří Kolář’s, broadly experimental – often focusing on the medium itself and the technology that shapes it, with the content frequently emerging from the formal aspects of the work. In the sound composition that Štětina created for the Babyluna exhibition, composed of spoken texts from the set, an interest in language and paralinguistic and phonetic phenomena meets experimental exploration of post-production technologies. For the project, Roman Štětina collaborated with radio director Miroslav Buriánek, with whom he had previously made his film A User’s Manual for Jiří Kolář. The sound collage is complemented by Štětina’s appropriation of one of Kolář’s confrontages. It was created using the Google image search engine, which enables the search of images based on visual and thematic similarities. The confrontage Each Raised Hand Decapitates Someone is thus, with the help of a computer algorithm, transported a few years in time, with a crowd of waving workers replaced by another crowd that, roughly a decade later, welcomes John F. Kennedy. The reproduction of the painting The Beheading of St. John the Baptist at the bottom of the confrontage is replaced by a photograph of another version – a Gothic altarpiece woodcut. The striking similarity invites reflection on artistic intent and the ability of its imitation to be continuously perfected by artificial intelligence, which no longer reads images solely by individual pixels but can also recognize their themes and symbolism. Above all, however, this relationship evokes another wave of associative meanings triggered by the confrontation with Kolář’s original.”
Roman Štětina (*1986) is a graduate of the Faculty of Art and Design in Pilsen, the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He works as an assistant to Dušan Zahoranský and Pavla Sceranková in the Intermedia II studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He has participated in several international residencies, including London’s LUX and the Artist-in-Residence program in Vienna. He is the laureate of the 2014 Jindřich Chalupecký Award. Štětina has participated in numerous international and domestic exhibitions and has held solo exhibitions at venues such as Spike Island in Bristol, Cardiff Contemporary in Cardiff, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, and the Prague City Gallery. He lives and works in Prague.
Petr Válek – Vrzzzzofon, Import – Export a Rozzvuky
One of the artists with whom the Olomouc Museum of Art established a long-term collaboration during the SEFO 2021 Triennial is Petr Válek. Válek prepared a series of performative events, sound interventions in public spaces using navigation speakers for the visually impaired as a playback medium, and a kinetic object – a special attention-grabbing device – placed in the museum’s display window. He also used the museum building and its everyday life as source material for his musical improvisations, which he worked on in collaboration with two curators and sound theorists, Martin Klimeš and Miloš Vojtěchovský. This collaboration resulted in a series of sound videos called Rozzvuky. Two of Petr Válek’s kinetic sound objects were acquired in 2022, along with the artist’s video documentation of their proper setup and presentation. Although materially these are more or less classic kinetic objects, their sound element and significant performative potential place them in the context of the new media and intermedia collection.
Petr Válek (*1976) is a sound artist, musician, performer, painter, creator of musical instruments, synthesizers, and sound effects, as well as the author of videos that he shares on social media, and above all, a tireless experimenter in the field of sound and noise. His work is, in the truest sense of the word, difficult to categorize or grasp. Petr did not attend an art academy and does not belong to any easily definable group of creators. A common feature of Petr’s work is an interest in DIY and handcrafted methods, constant material recycling, and prolific creativity. Although Petr primarily creates kinetic objects and sculptures, their aesthetic impact lies mainly in their sound, and by extension, their acoustic component. He lives and works in Loučná nad Desnou.
The work Trident from 2006 was exhibited at the SEFO 2021 Triennial. It consists of two unsynchronized video loops, which the museum received in the form of files on a DVD disc, players, and monitors with wall-mounted consoles. The piece was created as a video montage from a recording of a test flight of a ballistic missile found on the internet. Three- to four-second cuts were randomly arranged into two different half-hour sequences. They are played independently, so the configuration of both images almost never repeats exactly.
Pavel Büchler (*1952) belongs to a generation that was strongly influenced in the mid-1970s by the artistic turn towards dematerialized forms and expressions. His encounter with conceptual art, especially its presence outside the official art scene, inspired the creation of his installations, conceptual works using obsolete technologies and “found objects,” as well as authorial books. In parallel with his visual art practice, he engages in theory and criticism in the areas of pedagogy, contemporary art, photography, and film. In his works, the use of language and communication through dialogue plays an important role. Büchler’s work metaphorically and literally fills the empty spaces in the complexity of senses and experiences, in terms of images, sounds, form, and material. He focuses on bridging the gap between “know” and “think.” He lives and works in Manchester.