Born digital

The exhibition begins with a collection of data carriers from around the noughties. From floppy discs to DVDs: I know them all. This doesn't make me an expert on media art. However, it brings me closer to the decade from which the works originate.

Those who take the time and have the patience to look at the media art on display from start to finish will be rewarded with a journey back in time to the beginning of the millennium. The 23-minute work by Yves Netzhammer and Bjørn Melhus is very harmonious. The projection room is all red, as red as the blood that flows in the computer-generated film. I am fascinated by the CGI (Computer Generated Images) aesthetic of the time, whose rudimentary cone figures remind me a little of the strangely twisted limbs of today's AI-generated images, albeit on a different level.

The works in the other two rooms are shorter and reflect the society, politics and trends of the time.

In the three exhibition rooms, I searched in vain for the works of Pipilotti Rist and Zilla Leutenegger. Out of eleven works, I only saw nine. In my opinion, both the exhibition text and the catalogue are written for lovers of this art form and presuppose a specific basic knowledge. The informative exhibition catalogue explains what was originally behind "Born Digital": "Born Digital was the first conservation project at the Kunsthaus Zürich to focus specifically on the preservation of digital media carriers that were added to the collection between 1995 and 2005." It should be noted that the Kunsthaus Zürich has one of the largest media art collections in Switzerland with around 620 works.

All images (c) Kunsthaus Zürich