| Collection Title: | Postcapital |
| Identification/URL: | http://www.postcapital.org/ |
| Creator: | Daniel García Andújar |
| Abstract: | “Postcapital. Archive 1989–2001”. A digital archive comprised of over 250,000 documents (texts, audio files, videos, etc.) from the Internet compiled by Daniel García Andújar. “Postcapital” revolves around the far-reaching changes having evolved worldwide in social, political, economic, and cultural realms over the last two decades, their watershed moments emblematized in the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks on September 11, 2001. Here, Andújar views the developments subsequent to the “fall of the Wall” not as aspects of postcommunism but rather of postcapitalism. Emerging here is the question as to what extent capitalist societies have changed in absence of their erstwhile counterparts and which new walls have been erected through the global politics following events of 1989 and 2001. “Postcapital” alludes less to the utopias of a vanquished capitalism than to those upheavals affecting all areas of life that are both spawned and exacted by the networked age of information. In view of contemporary information and storage media, knowledge is, according to the artist’s theory, no longer acquired by visiting archives but rather through life in the networked archives. Thus, an essential role is inherent in the interpretation of information. In this sense, “Postcapital” is an open model for traversing archives, as metaphorical as it is practical and implementable. |
| Acquisition Information: | Courtesy of Daniel García Andújar and WKV Stuttgart. |
| Conditions Governing Access: | Available on terminal at WKV Stuttgart and in part online at the project’s website. |
| Biographical/Historical Information: | Daniel García Andújar (Almoradí, 1966) is a visual media artist, activist and art theorist from Spain that lives and work in Barcelona. Most of his art projects are based on collaborative research that explores different political, historical, social and cultural phenomena and their media representations in a critical way: body politics, corruption, censorship, xenophobia, urban developments, the cultural industries, the inclusion and exclusion of technologies, the use of public space, etcetera. Through the use of irony and strategies for presenting the new communication technologies, his work questions the democratic and egalitarian promises of the media, criticizing the controlling ambitions behind their appearance of transparency. Based on the evidence that new communication technologies are transforming our daily experience, Andújar creates a fiction (Technologies To The People, 1996) to promote awareness of our surrounding reality and the fraud of free choice promises that are in fact becoming new forms of control and inequity. He have tried to encourage different collectives projects on the Internet such as art-net-dortmund, e-barcelona.org, e-valencia.org, e-seoul.org, e-sevilla.org, e-stuttgart.org, postcapital.org, e-madrid.org, etc. Also to be highlighted from among TTTP’s activities is the construction of the vast Postcapital Archive. The Postcapital Archive (1989-2001). He has taught and directed numerous workshops for artists and social collectives in different countries. His works have been widely exhibited. |
| Subjects: | postcapitalism, political archives, networked archive as knowledge organon |