06 Feb 2010

STUK arts centre: Artefact Festival for Art & Media 2010

In On Gaps and Silent Documents international artists question the absence of documents and data in archives, data banks and memory. What is missing? Has it never been there or has it been removed? Does available information exist that is not looked at, read or used? Archives and data banks are primarily determined by these gaps and silent documents. As Sven Spieker notes, 'Archives are less concerned with memory than with the necessity to discard, erase, eliminate.' Creating archives is continual selection. As such, it reveals the priorities and blind spots of the keeper of the archives, his world and his time.

Since the beginning of time, 'forgetting' was always the norm. 'Remembering' was the exception. In this age of continuously transforming technology and worldwide networks, this balance seems to be shifting. Is it true that in our time, with its excessive storage capacity, everything is obsessively being saved? More and more, we face the question of whether we have the right to create our own gaps, to silence documents and erase our own traces. Privacy, intellectual property and censorship in our digital networked society require different and complex solutions.

On Gaps and Silent Documents uses 'new' and 'old' media and technologies, such as the Internet, websites, Google, newspapers, texts, books, film and video, photography, music scores, sound, telephones, Twitter, online newsgroups, printers, microfilm, light, computers, etc., to approach this theme from different (sometimes paradoxical) perspectives and question it in spatial installations, presentations and performances.

Artefact is initiated by provincie Vlaams-Brabant and STUK arts centre.

Special thanks to the participating artists, Wolfgang Ernst, Sven Spieker, Charles Merewether, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Rony Vissers for their inspiring texts and ideas.