Arnold Dreyblatt

PROJECT 2000- East European Sector Preliminary 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, oollection 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 mylpersonal ethnic background. While using English as an "interface" language in contacting young artists "and intellectuals twithin the East .European Countries, I slave imagined the possibility of integrating these activitie`'s 'thi~ough newly available technology . There is a consistency in approach represented in these collections, which, while aesthetic dtid 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 tthe non-protagonists) which is marginal rather than decisive : an illegitimate rather than a professional or expert interpretation . Since the advent o'f 'photographic media, the possiblit`y of personal "unmediated" mdse statements have existe-d yet the mountain of amateur sna~sl`iotS and 'home 'movies 'are rapidly being discarded.

Corresspondlrig 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 initiatiire; from which at the vantage point of the turning of the centur~r in the year 2000, we might Took back on the twentieth century . Such work' has already begun in Budapest, cuireintly 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 sourbes are local yet the model is universal. In the process local material is brought to the attention of world cultitke:

I am interested primar'lly in the living creative interpretation of th4 materigig end f2 e alizatioA of individual creative and arttstie "rb jed b: while the meth'o'ds of collection and storage re1Aeseft : a pseudo-sd"-ieiitific 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 Date??

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