Arnold Dreyblatt

Arnold Dreyblatt: PROJECT 2000 - "East European Sector Preliminary" a Proposal

During over five years of travel, performance and research in Eastern Europe I have repeatedly observed coincidental yet spontaneously generated interests and activities involving the analysis, collection and aethetic manipulation of local, amateur, or "non-professional" cultural artifacts. These efforts correspond directly to my own creative work and concern's stimulated by my personal ethnic background. While using English as an "interface" language in contacting young artists and intellectuals within the East European Countries, I have imagined the possibility of integrating these activities 'through newly available technology. There is a consistency in approach represented in these collections, which, while aesthetic and creative rather than scientific, contain authentic factual data which lend themselves to be interfaced, stored and processed by digital technologies. My interest is in the "amateur" representation of private or "micro-history" (the history of the non-protagonists) which is marginal rather than decisive: an illegitimate rather than a professional or expert interpretation. Since the advent of photographic media, the possiblity of personal "unmediated" image statements have existed yet the mountain of amateur snapshots and 'home movies' are rapidly being discarded.

Corressponding biographical Material lies forgotten in institutional archive's and personal collections: 'I therefore propose a project to be centered in Budapest, Hungary which might be considered as a "pilot" to a later global initiative from which at the vantage point of the turning of the centure in the year 2000, we might took back on the twentieth century. Such work has already begun in Budapest, curently a focal point for east-west exchange in Eastern Europe, an area that has experienced a long period of cultural isolation. Material, lies raw and uncollected, waiting interpretation. The prime sources are local yet the model is universal. In the process local material is brought to the attention of world culture.

I am interested primarily in the living creative interpretation of the materials end the realization of individual creative and artistic projects: while the methods of collection and storage represent a pseudo-scientific approach, the project focuses on the reconstruction and reinterpretation of the essence of the materials which is biased towards a personal aesthetic vision of the past, present and future. The principals are therefore practicing artists, who must continually redefine their positions within cultural, economic and political contexts. Yet there are surely multiple offshoots which will yield practical results - such as the introduction of advanced computer technology into Eastern Europe and the creation of an Image/Audio/Text data base archive which might be distributed to libraries and made accessible to scholars, students and other artists. Pictoral and data collection is now a developed technology which is used in science and government, yet it has not been pioneered in the collecting and interpretation of cultural artifacts because of logistical complications.

My generation currently faces an unparalleled dilema - the immanent disapearence of traditional and private culture. We have grown up without a past, and therefore, have no present and no future.

Arnold Dreyblatt

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https://www.vasulka.org/archive/Artists1/Dreyblatt/Project2000.pdf