Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Republic of Croatia

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the adoption of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Ministry of Culture and Media published the book Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Republic of Croatia, which is available in print and online.

Written in Croatian and English, the book presents over two hundred intangible cultural goods listed on the Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia, 21 of which are included on UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list.

The publication is divided according to the areas defined by the Convention: Performing Arts; Social Practices, Rituals & Festive Events; Knowledge & Skills; Traditional Craftsmanship and Oral Traditions, Expressions & Dialects. Each intangible cultural good is presented with a brief description and a photograph.

Darko Fritz: Digital Art in Croatia 1968 – 1984

The project Digital Art in Croatia 1968 – 1984 investigates the use of digital technologies in Croatian art, starting with the creation of the first work of digital art in Croatia in 1968 and through 1984 when the citizens in Yugoslavia were allowed to import very modest and restricted amounts of computer equipment for personal use. The presentation of the project includes a website, an exhibition held at the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum, and a book, which is now available in English.

Curator Darko Fritz, the author of the book, gives an extensive introduction, examining not only the artistic but also the technical aspects of the works and the technological context of their origins as well as the social and economic circumstances of computerization in Croatia in the 1960s and 1970s. The New Tendencies (NT)—an international movement of artists and theorists that originated in the early 1960s as a reaction to abstract expressionism—played a major role in “the initiation, first production, presentation, exhibition, criticism and theory of domestic digital art, as well as its presence in the international digital art networks and elsewhere from 1968”.

The new generation of visual artists were proponents of a rational approach. They opposed the mythologizing of artists and advocated teamwork, the use of experiments, and ideas from scientific research. Since access to computer equipment and programming skills were necessary to create digital works, it is not surprising that most of the authors of early digital art were not trained artists but scientists and engineers who, driven by creative impulses, began to produce works of art. The book includes individual chapters on the pioneers of digital art in Croatia: Vladimir Bonačić, bcd – CyberneticArt team (Vladimir Bonačić, Miroljub Cimerman, Dunja Donassy), Nikola Šerman, Miljenko Horvat, Tomislav Mikulić, Vilko Žiljak, Vlatko Čerić, Andrija Mutnjaković, and Nikola Tanhofer.

The foreword is written by Markita Franulić, the director of the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum, which has long supported interdisciplinarity and integration of science and art, taking an active part in the NT movement as the venue of the exhibition tendencies 5 in 1973.

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