On Monday, 20 January 2025, 4:15–6:30 pm (Room 201, Philosophikum, Domplatz 23), Dr. Regine Ehleiter (Berlin) will give her Fellow Lecture on the topic “’Page Not Found‘: On the (in)accessibility of artistic publication and exhibition projects in the digital age – a stocktaking” (in German):

In 1976, in a legendary issue of the New York underground magazine Art-Rite, artists such as Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and Ulises Carrión celebrated the book as a versatile medium for making art accessible to a wide range of readers at low cost without the diversions via museums and galleries. The great hopes that were pinned on artistic publishing and the networked exchange of information on the pages of books, magazines and ephemera at this time were continued in early Netart projects that made art appear accessible in real time, ‘from anywhere’ and ‘for everyone’. Ironically, numerous publication and exhibition projects from the early phase of this development are themselves barely accessible today - the servers are switched off, websites have disappeared, content stored on CD-ROM is dependent on outdated software. The book that was declared dead has outlasted the surprisingly ephemeral digital competition.

In her lecture, Regine Ehleiter takes the audience on a search for traces: starting with the Joan Flasch Artists‘ Book Collection in Chicago and the efforts of this archive library specialising in artists’ publications to independently establish a Net Art collection, she reconstructs striking examples of digital artistic publishing from the 2000s. Their obsolescence raises the question of the extent to which the ideal of a ‘dematerialisation’ of art that emerged in conceptualism has been realised in the digital age, to the point of making it untraceable. The lecture suggests breaking new ground in the documentation and preservation of digital practices of making art public by drawing on findings from neighbouring disciplines.