2021
Initial research of early netart projects in Bulgaria.
Net Art in Bulgaria - The First Decade
2021
“It is not the end of the process nor the beginning of it, but a step in a longer term strategy to build a self-sufficient local scene in an extremely unfriendly environment of total lack of infrastructure, market and policy in the field of contemporary art and culture in Bulgaria.”
After the introduction of measures to control the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, when galleries, museums, theatres and cinemas were forced to close for months on end, artists saw their projects cancelled and their income dry up. Since then, hundreds of Bulgarian artists have, encouraged by funding from local and national government, started creating art intended to be shown and distributed online, often for the first time in their lives.
To understand how much of this work will be accessible, even in 10, 15 or 20 years from today, all we have to do is look at the net art created in Bulgaria in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The above quote from the M.A.P. case study 02 catalogue may have sounded ambitious in 2002. Surveying today, barely two decades later, what remains of the first decade of net art in Bulgaria, we have to conclude that depressingly little has changed.
Of all the works produced in the decade we review here, only one is publicly accessible today. One other work is in the artist’s archives and is accessible, while a few other works exist as source code in the artists’ archives but cannot be run today due to technological constraints. For many of the remaining works, the original files should be considered as probably lost forever.
