Click here for the Reincarnation of Media Art audio guide.

For the 15th anniversary of YCAM the artist group exonemo together with the YCAM team created a unique exhibition about preserving media art and making its essence available. Works of media art using obsolete technical devices are difficult to maintain over time. Instead of developing methods of preserving or restoring the technological aspects of media installations, this exhibition-platform proposes a special approach by considering the “death” of artworks and the possibilities for “reincarnating” them in the future by means other than conventional preservation. Searching for the contexts in which ideas inherent to artworks can be kept alive, the exhibition deals with the essence of art as a transcendent vehicle for concepts.

The massive Mausoleum of Media Art, resembling a burial mound, which houses no longer functioning media works by various artists, originally exhibited at YCAM, will now be presented at the WRO Art Center to highlight objects and artworks from the archives of the pioneering Polish institution, which has been committed to media art for the last 30 years. The idea of expanding the original content to a living archive arose when a group of international media art curators came to the YCAM on a visit organized by the Japan Foundation in October-November 2018. Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka from WRO, who was part of the tour, was offered this cooperation by the YCAM curator Kazuhiko Yoshizaki.

Together with the creators of the exhibition’s original concept, we decided to use this unique format to explore the issues of art preservation in other regions, by further using the original questionnaire for interviews with Polish and international artists, the participants of the WRO Biennale. The Mausoleum placed at the WRO Art Center will deliver both the context and the content for the international symposium cells of culture, discussing the significance of the human aspect in relation to technology-based art and digital culture.

Artists: Nam June Paik, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Koichiro Eto, Nao Tokui, Masaki Fujihata, Piotr Wyrzykowski aka Peter Style, Anna Płotnicka, Gameboyzz Orchestra Project, Łukasz Szałankiewicz aka Zenial.

exonemo /Yae Akaiwa, Kensuke Sembo/ (JP) was formed in 1996 on the Internet. Their experimental projects are typically humorous and innovative explorations of the paradoxes of digital and analog computer-networked and actual environments in our lives. Their The Road Movie won the Golden Nica in the Net Vision category at the Prix Ars Electronica 2006. In 2016, their installation Fireplace was presented by the WRO at the Synthetic Nature exhibition as part of the Eco Expanded City project in Wrocław. They have been organizing IDPW gatherings and the “Internet Yami-Ichi” since 2012. They live and work in New York and have been affiliated with the first museum-led incubator NEW INC since 2015.

All artists participating in the Biennale WRO 2019, and the artists who have collaborated with WRO before: Please take few minutes to answer the attached questions.