Vašulka's Cooking Reader #1. Beyond Media Texts: first & last

This collection of texts is being published either relatively early, or perhaps a bit late: about one year after the original colloquium Art Works from the Digital Era in Galleries and Museums. Since then, unexpected events have altered our course, reframing our thinking about the overlap between art, time, entropy, duration and disappearance, and perhaps adding a greater sense of urgency than it had one year ago.

The colloquium was organized to celebrate the the first anniversary of the opening of the Center for New Media Vašulka Kitchen Brno. The organizers discussed topics with colleagues from the Brno House of Arts and the National Film Archive in Prague, hoping to promote thinking about the state and fate of art works of an “unstable“ nature, especially within the context of Czech collections, galleries, and museums. The objective was to establish contact, and to potentially cooperate with similar initiatives in Central Europe. During the two‑day meeting, the contributions mostly touched on the orientation of artistic and expert initiatives and institutions which were already focused on this issue, or were planning to turn their attention to it. In addition to contributions from Czechia, Vasulka Kitchen also welcomed contributors from the Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway, Hungary, Poland and the United States, who shared their experiences of and opinions on the topic.

We would like to thank to authors of the texts, who provided them for this occassion for free and for share. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.