Đorđe Balmazović: Pits and Falls of Group Work // Marcell Mars: Memory of the World / Public Library

Đorđe presented Škart activities: starting from the first decade, the 90’s, and street actions, following 2000 – 2013 which were the years of forming new collectives, bigger than Škart itself, changing the focus from visual art to other disciplines. The main focus was on work in and with the collective and why it is important to work in collective despite all the problems it might cause.

Škart was founded 1990 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia as a collective first engaged in doing little Samizdat objects and giving them away in street actions, and later it was engaged in founding other collectives, working in bigger groups, using visual art, poetry and music.

***

A public library is one of those almost invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they go extinct. A place where all people can get access to all knowledge that can be collected seemed for a long time a dream beyond reach – until the egalitarian impetus of social revolutions, the Enlightenment idea of universality of knowledge, and the exceptional suspension of the commercial barriers of copyright made it possible. The Internet has, as in many other situations, completely changed our expectations and imagination about what is possible. The dream of a catalogue of the world – a universal access to all available knowledge for every member of society – became realizable. A question merely of the meeting of curves on a graph: the point at which the line of global distribution of personal computers meets that of the critical mass of people with access to the Internet. Today nobody lacks the imagination necessary to see public libraries as part of a global infrastructure of universal access to knowledge for literally every member of society. However, the emergence and development of the Internet is taking place precisely at the point at which an institutional crisis — one with traumatic and inconceivable consequences — has also begun.

Nenad Romić (aka Marcell Mars), advanced internet user, http://ki.ber.kom.uni.st, one of the founders of Multimedia Institute and club MaMa in Zagreb (2000). He is conducting a research “Ruling Class Studies” which looks into corporate state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence. Since 2018 he joined the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University as a Research Fellow.

Happy with what you’ve read? Send us more stuff like this!