With the rise of the digital media many artists made their way initially to CD-Rom before turning, sometimes in disillusionment, to the limitless possibilities of the World Wide Web. Muntadas displays a clear insight into the specific qualities and restrictions of these media in a hybrid project. His 'Anarchive#1' is a hybrid space which is at once an offline file and a gate to an online website. The CD-Rom file offers no linear summary outline of projects and installations but a conceptual framework giving various points of access to the work. Muntadas emphasizes very clearly that his projects are to be viewed rather as processes than as finished works of art. The CD-Rom attempts to trace out these processes and make them visible. Installations are opened for the user under headwords such as Concept, Theme, Media, Process. In this way connections are led and parallels brought into the foreground without ever being pegged unequivocally to specific works. The CD-Rom conjures up the image of an imaginary archive on which each space or place connects with other spaces in several ways. Navigating all links and references it becomes clear how Muntadas's work again and again concentrates on the speculative analysis of public space in the broadest sense of the word. How are facts and information contextualized, manipulated and mediated in advertising, on billboards, on television or in the cinema? Small wonder that the public space of the Internet excited his interest from the very beginning. All considered, Muntadas's projects are always more or less hybrid spaces. It's striking that in the hybrid CD-Rom 'Anarchive#1', labelled InteRom by Muntadas, the links to the web are marked as exits. The openings bored into architecture by the media, the coming of hybrid public spaces and the meaning of this for our relations with the space around us form the theme of the website 'Hybrid Spaces' which is accessed by 'Anarchive #1' Do we just join in or do we wait for 'Anarchive #2'?
– Geert-Jan Strengholt
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Antonio Muntadas ° 1942, Barcelona (Spain)
Lives and works in New York (USA) and Barcelona (Spain)
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