Since more than 10 years the Croatian media artist Darko Fritz has been researching the archives of the Museum for Contemporary Arts Zagreb about the New Tendencies series of exhibitions and events in Zagreb, Ex-Yugoslavia, now Croatia, from 1961 to 1973 and the Bit International journal published by that same art movement.In 2004 this effort was joined by Margit Rosen who works on a dissertation about the beginnings of computer based art. An important role played also Marija Gatting, head of the museum archive, who helped to put together chronologies and identify people. Last year, 2007, an exhibition was shown at Neue Galerie Graz. This show, significantly enlarged, has come now to ZKM Karlsruhe (and is still running till January 2009). For the Graz exhibition a little catalogue came out with contributions by Peter Weibel, Jesa Denegri and Margit Rosen. As I use this catalogue and the direction that the New Tendencies exhibitions and events have taken for a short genealogy of media art which I am currently compiling, I had to summarise and translate those materials, and thought that other researchers might also have an interest in it, so that I publish it here, in the manner of a literature review for others to study it and draw their own conclusions. All translations from German are my translations.

Old news perhaps, but new to me and one for the notebook.

Curating can be a form of practice led research and this is perhaps the most interesting approach. Having developed my own practice as a curator through the 1990s using ‘new media’, it has by necessity been a process of learning about technology through my practice and what it can do to enhance the presentation of content; in some cases of course the technology is the content in its own right. Learning on the job during the 1990s was the only way to develop given that artists were also experimenting with new forms and with it new ideas.

In die Diskussion um den Schutz der Privatsphäre bzw. deren zunehmenden Verlust haben sich einige fundamentale Denkfehler eingeschlichen, weshalb diese Anliegen, so sie als defensive Verteidigung eines Menschenrechts aufgefasst werden, zum Scheitern verurteilt sind.