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A14 EastUnBlocChain (WT)

Format: Exhibition with accompanying screenings and talks, performance events, online presentation

Preferred time: Mid-December 2025 – February 2026

More than 30 years into the post-socialist transition in Europe, the notion that the countries which had recently overcome socialist one-party regimes needed foremost to „catch up“ with Western brethren to join modernity still echoes in people’s minds. Thankfully, recent retrospective Cold War scholarship is moving away from a view of two monolithic opposing blocs, instead exploring the concept of alternate or parallel modernities rather than the idea of lack and lag in the former Eastern bloc.
The exhibition and accompanying events of EastUnBlocChain will present experimental media art works and practices from socialist and transition-era Central and Eastern Europe as well as production contexts in which they were created and their relevance today. A key goal is to elicit guiding principles („algorithms“ metaphor) of these works and practices/processes – such as interactivity, two-way instead of one-way communication (see Brecht‘s radio theory), networking, overcoming temporal and spatial distance, automation/artificial intelligence, facilitating counterpublics etc. With these „algorithms“ we strive to investigate how these media works speak to us today and can also address pressing current issues.
The artworks will not be ordered hierarchically (chronologically or geographically) but rather grouped according to the „algorithms“ they exemplify to allow visitors to encounter works in an optional order. Vintage reproduction technology and (often obsolete) storage media will be used.
To provide background information (blueprints, sketches, secret police files, letters etc.) we will cooperate with Wiki-based arts online library Monoskop which will be interconnected with the exhibits through QR codes. Audiences will be invited to contribute to the growing knowledge base through Wiki workshops. The exhibition will be accompanied by discussions, screenings and performances.

To view videos from YouTube/Vimeo click here.