voi Cesprocess – from separation of the prima materia through the various stages of mixing to
the projection, the final stage of the alchemical process in which the transmutation
of base matter into gold is supposed to take place – was nothing other than incessant
labour on the attempt to make the impossible a little more possible.
obviously, such places were not enduring. They did not exude the same permanence
as the columned halls of the classical academies. They were temporary places, places
of passage, of taking time, surprises, of starting and breaking off, of being harried, and
sometimes of flight. if the patrons ran out of money, or the sorcerer’s apprentices
turned out to be charlatans and good- for- nothing swindlers, they were consigned to
the dungeons or, if lucky, thrown out onto the dangerous highways where they set off
for the next place that would serve them as a laboratory for a while.
particularly in the 1990s there was busy traffic between the various laboratories,
primarily among the privileged modern sorcerer’s apprentices. The hope that things
digital would prove analogous to the alchemical formula for gold created artist- in-
residence programmes, grants, and many other forms of sponsorship. The dutch
experimental group institute for the unstable media, V2, moved from provincial
hertogenbosch to the metropolis of Rotterdam, the capital of media creativity in the
netherlands, where it still resides today. The annual festival ars electronica in linz
gradually expanded its activities to take in the entire year and now has the dimensions
of a medium- sized enterprise. The iRCam (institut de Recherche et Coordination
acoustique/musique) in paris and sTeim (studio for electro- instrumental music) in
amsterdam specialized with differing emphases on investigating the worlds of sound
produced by technical means, the Centre international de la Creátion Video (CiCV)
in montbéliard- Belfort focused on the electronic processing of images. The C^3 (Center
for Communication and Culture) in Budapest, in cooperation with the hungarian
academy of arts, became a unique eastern european institution which promoted the
new processes in research and exhibitions.
That the arts which are based on, or work extensively with, advanced electronic
technology have arrived in the european mainstream is demonstrated definitively by
the project laBoral (Centro de arte y Creación industrial) in the northern spanish
town of gijón. With grand gestures and after huge investments it was launched in
march 2007 with the ambition of becoming – at least in europe – the most important
project for technologically- based design, a kind of hispanic Bauhaus, including the
occasional artistic aspect. Thousands of people attended the private view of the first
exhibition. The cost of the buffet alone would have financed several years of art projects.
art after the mediain this period after the recent fin de siècle we are again heading for an ice age in the
relations between the arts, sciences, and technologies. at the beginning of the twenty-
first century the mechanical, electrical, and electronic media through and with which
art is produced, distributed, and received are now taken for granted. They are just as
much a part of everyday life as turning a water tap on or off as needed and without
thinking much about where the content comes from, what it is made of, and how it
will be disposed of after use.^3 in the industrialized parts of the world the infrastructure
is oriented on technical media systems and dependent on them. in 2008 commercial