EXHIBITION
16/10 - 24/10/2020
GALLERY NOVA, TESLINA 7, ZAGREB

Conception and guidance through the exhibition: Marcell Mars i Tomislav Medak

Exhibition guided tours with the authors of the project will be possible on Saturday 17/10 and Tuesday 20/10from 5 to 8 p.m.

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The exhibition Paper struggles is an extension of the Public Library project. Since 2012 Public Library has developed exhibitions, publications, digital tools and public debate to further the cause of the universal access to knowledge and culture. The project is a critical and practical investigation of how the intellectual property regime limits that right and serves as a regulatory mechanism of uneven access to culture, science and research that results in a growing gap in education, expertise and social development between the economically most advanced countries and countries of (semi-)peripheries such as Croatia.

The exhibition features projects: Rameshwari Photocopy Services legal case, Kenneth Goldsmith’s Printing out the Internet; Monoskop’s Architercture & Anthropocene, Memory of the World’s Catalogue by Slowrotation; Walt Willis & Bob Shaw: Začarana kopirka.

The exhibition documents how struggles over access to knowledge, in the context of global economic inequalities and inequalities in the „knowledge society”, materialise in the form of print, photocopy and printout. The digital networks have expanded the volume of available text exponentially since to the days of print. So much so that if we were to printout a catalogue of books that we can store a personal computer hard-drive, the catalogue would require a couple of large volumes of fine print. Yet, in many situations and many societies, reading from paper still remains the preferred way of accessing knowledge.

Marcell Mars is are search fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb. His research Ruling Class Studies, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011), examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. He is a doctoral student at Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, writing a thesis on Foreshadowed Libraries. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World project, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.

Tomislav Medak is a doctoral student at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. Medak is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, as well as an amateur librarian for the Memory of the World. His research focuses on technologies, capitalist development, and postcapitalist transition,particularly on economies of intellectual property and unevenness of technoscience. He authored two short volumes: The Hard Matter of Abstraction—A Guidebook to Domination by Abstraction and Shit Tech for A Shitty World. Together with Marcell Mars he co-edited ‘Public Library’ and ‘Guerrilla Open Access’.

Produced by: Multimedia Institute, Coventry University's Centre for Postdigital Cultures and WHW, What, how and for whom

Supported by:
City of Zagreb
European Cultural Foundation
Foundation for Arts Initiatives
Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC)
Ministry of Culture and Media, Republic of Croatia
Kultura nova Foundation

We wish to thank: Dušan Barok, Kenneth Goldsmith,Lawrence Liang, Kaja Marczewska, Rabinda Patra, Shubigi Rao, Alex Sainsbury and Mohammad Salemy.

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