Darko Fritz: Archives in Progress [projects 1987 - 2007]

Without really dovetailing to Jacques Derrida’s Ar-chive Fever, in his Archives in Progress, Darko Fritz examines the technical mechanisms for archiviza-tion and for reproduction. Taking into account the multiplicity of regions in the psychic apparatus, this model also integrates the necessity, inside the psyche itself, of a certain outside, of certain borders between insides and outsides. This outside can also be understood in Manuel Castells’ terms, as a culture of “real virtuality”. The culture of “real virtuality” presupposes a collapse of a symbolic environment on our everyday reality. While the experience of reality has always been virtual because it is always perceived through symbols, the specificity of the system in question is that here, reality itself (that is, people’s material/symbolic existence) is entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting. In other words, a mechanism which operated implicitly, as the hidden foundation of our lives, now, with the new technology, becomes explicit. The emergence of the previously concealed “symbolic order” has crucial consequences for “reality” itself. As a result, and as Darko Fritz’s work shows, social discourse becomes reflective in triple sense: it can be traced on the level of the media texts, the level of the public sphere, and our memories af-fected by both. A culture of real virtuality brings about the mixing of tenses to create what Castells calls a forever universe, a ‘timeless time’, and this is exactly the way Darko Fritz uses media technology – to escape the contexts of its existence.

With texts by Darko Fritz, Nataša Ilic, Silva Kalcic, Leonida Kovac, Eric Kluitenberg, Vesna Madzoski, Zvonko Makovic, Susanna Paasonen and Inka Schube

302 reproductions [277 color and 25 black/white]