Guest of Honor: Margit Rosen
Summary
In the Beginning, There Was the Analogue
Since the late 1960s, computer art historiography has been expanding its canon, yet significant gaps remain due to the focus on digital computers, overshadowing analog and hybrid systems. These overlooked technologies were integral to early pioneers, whose contributions and artworks remain largely unrecognized in art history and media archaeology.
This lecture aims to shed light on the use of analog computers in art, drawing from lesser-known historical sources. It highlights the early explorations with analog technology, which predated digital art experiments and offered real-time, intuitive operations that anticipated today’s human-machine interactions.
Biography
Margit Rosen is an art historian and curator who has been leading the department of Collection, Archives and Research at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe since 2016. For the ZKM | Archive, in collaboration with Felix Mittelberger, she has succeeded in collecting a number of archives that are of particular importance for the beginnings of digital art, including the archive of Herbert W. Franke.
Margit Rosen’s research and curatorial work focuses on the arts of the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly the history and theory of electronic media in the arts and relationship between art, technology and society. She has taught at multiple institutions, including the Karlsruhe University of Art and Design, the University of Fine Arts Münster, Danube University Krems, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and the Università degli Studi di Milano. Among her numerous publications, she is the editor of »A Little-Known Story About a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in « (MIT Press, 2011).