Internet Portfolio and Videodokument
at the exhibition Powered by Ljudmila

May 19–June 26, 2011
Mestna galerija Ljubljana, Mestni trg 5

The new Mestna galerija Ljubljana program guidelines, redefined last year, provide for a number of different headings under which the annual program exhibition projects can be subsumed. An important segment of the gallery program has always been exhibitions focusing on the town of Ljubljana, but now the angle has shifted slightly. While the traditional understanding saw Mestna galerija primarily as a venue for presentations of Ljubljana-based artists, our point of departure has, upon reconsideration, become the city as an architectural, urban, social, societal, and institutional fabric. This year’s exhibition dedicated to Ljubljana is an overview of the Ljubljana digital media lab – Ljudmila.

Ljudmila’s beginnings date back to 1994, when the World Wide Web was evolving: its activities included disseminating ideas and knowledge about the Internet, opening the first cyber café in Eastern Europe in 1995, producing articles and publishing a journal, creating the first Internet portfolios for Slovenian artists and providing them with technical support in producing works, organizing workshops and lectures, encouraging participation in international conferences, and collaborating in founding NetTime – to briefly enumerate some of the highlights in Ljudmila’s scope of operations. To list all of its pioneering achievements or all of the artworks produced by the creative minds of its many collaborators and sympathizers would be a tall order, so we have decided instead to present the main events on a timeline.

The exhibited artworks produced with the help of Ljudmila – hence the title of the show Powered by Ljudmila – are documents of a kind, testifying to seventeen years of work that represents an incubator of ideas, projects, knowledge, and concepts that are important for Ljubljana, Slovenia, and internationally.

The Internet Portfolio, a co-operation of Ljudmila (Ljubljana Digital Media Lab) and SCCA-Ljubljana, is taking part at the exhibition.

The exhibition presents as well the other projects of SCCA-Ljubljana, made in collaboration with Ljudmila: Videodokument (CD-ROM) and Marko Peljhan, U-COG-144 (Urban-Colonization Orientation Gear-144)(project in the framework of Urbanaria).

We are proud that the screening of Marko Peljahn video Ladomir Øaktyra: First Surface – Mikrolab V1.0 was organized with the help of Diva Station, SCCA physical and web archive of video art.

The exhibition is on view until June 26, more information and the accompanying program is available here:

http://www.ljudmila.org/dat/Powered%20by%20Ljudmila%28en%29/

[Published May 30, 2011]