Luigi Russolo

Art in Motion. 100 Masterpieces with and through Media. An Operative Canon at ZKM Center for Art and Media
will portray the development of media arts by showcasing pivotal pioneering works that utilize technical devices: from photography to cinematography and sound art, the theater of machines and projections, radiophonic and televisual art, the art video, media-based action and Fluxus arts, and the networked and collaborative artistic practices of the last decades.

Replica bucket-receiver by students of Martin Andersen-Nexö in Dresden, 1968

ZKM / Installation view

Banū Mūsā ibn Shākir

Marcel Duchamp

The works in the exhibition have not been selected on the basis of the classic notion of an image which is oriented on painting, for this always attempts to bend back the new media towards the traditional visual arts and hinders understanding of how the media arts have developed. The coevolution of wheel-based technologies, such as clockwork and calculating machines, transportation machines like automobiles and trains, as well as the image machines that have not only brought forth moving pictures, moving sculptures, and moving spectators, but also ushered in the changeover to electromagnetic production, storage, and distribution media, is an area that is still a mystery to the wider art world. This is why it is important to advance understanding of the development of this art genre by presenting a selection of canonical works.

David Grannys

Gilette Schneider

Eames ‘Think’ für den IBM Pavillon für die Weltausstellung in New York, 1964-1965

Sergio Prego

Zhang Peili

Zbigniew Rybczynski

In addition to well-known positions in media art such as Nam June Paik, Maya Deren, John Cage, Lynn Hershman, Sergei Eisenstein, Ulrike Rosenbach, Zhang Peili, Bill Viola and Michael Snow, the exhibition presents important pioneering achievements in the field of media art that have so far received little or no attention in art discourse, such as Mary Ellen Bute, Zdeněk Pešánek, Ivan Ladislav Galeta and Waldemar Cordeiro.

Art in Motion / 100 Masterpieces with and through Media. An Operative Canon
Curated by Siegfried Zielinski
July 14 – January 20, 2019 / ZKM Center for Art and Media
Please visit the exhibition page >