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handling new tools for the formulations and forms of a personal identity. The Net Art projects by Daniela Alina Plewe and Ismael Celis also embody the artistic approach to the theme of mapping text-spaces and also social relationships. These have already been published in the context of the «Survey of Media Art,» and were influential in the first phase of formulating the concept for this thematic area.
Whether their focus is historical, philosophical or artistic, in every case questions concerning the (precarious) relationship between images/sounds on the one hand and texts/language on the other are a thread running through this topic. The link with «text» in the title further refers to the important factor that theory and material related to the relationships between media and the arts have to be conveyed in the same context. Whatever media Modern artists were working in, they were operating with radical concepts of alterity and difference that have now found their contemporary form in the electronic media. Interest in databases, search engines, data visualization and cartography is a sign of artistic research in the apparently boundless field of
knowledge production. Walter Benjamin («Das Passagen-Werk») [2] and Aby Warburg («Mnemosyne-Atlas») developed models in the first half of the 20th century showing how contingencies and constellations can provide a different kind of access to conveying knowledge and insights textually and pictorially in a traditional terrain. Producing documents, artefacts, texts and images was well beyond the capacity of any individual even then. Today the dynamic and virtual configuration of archives reflects the quantity of data and also one of the production conditions for these data. In this perspective the archive does not just represent a passive store, but an active generator. Seen in this way the ‹data›, whether they are texts or images, are not just what is ‹given›, as etymology suggests, but something that is made, produced—they are ‹facts›. Tracking down these production conditions, historically, philosophically, discursively or algorithmically serves as a guiding thread through this thematic field.
The curatorial concept was considerably redefined by a series of lectures during a conference held at