# 1
Welcome!
agora8 has been set up as a digital research station holding examples of Contemporary Art practices that generally have enjoyed limited exposure. This is due on one hand to constraining political contexts and location, and on the other to the marginalisation by the culture industries of context driven and ephemeral art practices. This is a matter agora8 aims to address through curating artifacts from its digital archive, and complemets the physical activities that PAC undertakes.
agora8 can be understood methodologically as a chronotope, a gate through which (historical) acts and (performed) events, take on flesh. It provides access to past events through adoption of a particular behaviour towards archival culture that generates a re-animation and examination of Contextual Arts practices. It engages with works that happened in other places in other times while simultaneously providing access to an audience that could not be physically present in the space and time of production.
The primary focus at the moment is on activity from what is often referred to as Eastern Europe and the Balkan peninsula. There have been many projects in the recent past where art and artists from throughout these territories have been presented at home and abroad. While there have been the occassional exceptions - 'Blood and Honey', 'Body and the East', and 'In Search of Balkania' - mostly they tend to have been marked with the anthropologic gaze of others and otherness. The problem with such models of curation is that they present a dangerous quest to define a pan-aesthetic and so ultimately mark unique production restrictively. On the other side there has been a lot of money invested in exposure and notions of self-determination and identity with very little result. More often it is the independent artist run organisations that provide the most supportive context.
agora8 hopes to avoid this gaze by understanding that different places and different times have very different requirements of the artist. The particularities of one regions Avant Garde will surely vary for another region where the institutional and historical construction of identity, politics, culture, and society is markedly different one from the other. What all the works do share in common is an index of social engagement and context as material and all operate with duration and ephemerality.
Global media and electronic landscapes are exciting and new territories for PAC. While the site has been tested on different browsers and OS there may be broken links, text running off backgrounds, and some things simply just might not work. Your comments and feedback are most welcome. Discussions around agora8 content and beyond can take place online at blog.agora8.org Most pages have a link to the blog, just open it and register your email to take part. Issue #2 will be published sometime around July and will include a programme of online video and audio broadcasts.
If you are interested in contributing to agora8 please see the ongoing Call for Work. There are many other ways to support the project - just drop me an email. And please take a minute to subscribe.
Finally, my sincere thanks go to all the artists.
I hope you find issue #1 useful, informative, and above all, inspiring in its content.
be strong,
love life,
Kenny McBride
Krakow 03/2006
