Tomislav Medak

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Tom Medak in Zagreb, 2017.
Born Zagreb, SR Croatia, SFR Yugoslavia
Lives in Zagreb, Croatia

Tomislav Medak (1973) is a founding member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA, Zagreb since 2000, a co-initiator of the Pirate Care project, and was part of the performing arts collective BADco. He got his PhD at Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures, focusing on the political economy of technology and the planetary ecological crisis.

With his colleagues at the Multimedia Institute/MAMA, since 2000 he has organised talks, conferences and exhibitions, and edited publications in political economy, tactical media and the commons. His own research interests are in technology, capitalist development and post-capitalist transition, with a particular focus on environmental crisis, political economy of intellectual property and unevenness of techno-science. At times, he also writes on theatre, dance and politics.

He authored two short books: The Hard Matter of Abstraction – A Guidebook to Domination by Abstraction (V_____erlag für Handbücher, 2016) and Shit Tech for A Shitty World (Aksioma, 2015). He also co-authored several edited volumes: Public Library (with Marcell Mars, WHW/Multimedija Institute, 2015), Guerrilla Open Access (with Marcell Mars, Post-office Press, 2018), The Idea of Radical Media (with Petar Milat, Multimedia Institute/Arkzin, 2014), and Time and (In)Completion: Images and Performances of Time in Late Capitalism (with Goran Sergej Pristaš, BADco., 2014).

In parallel, he worked as a performer, dramaturge and director with the Zagreb-based experimental theatre collective BADco. With the collective he has created a number of artworks, including performances Correcting Rhythm (2017), Spores (2016), A Pound of Histeria, Acceleration… melodrama (2014), The League of Time (2010) and 1 poor and one 0 (2008). Some of those have toured widely around Europe, while the interactive installation Responsibility for Things Seen was presented in 2011 Venice Biennal.

With Marcell Mars he organized a number of activities around the Public Library project, including HAIP festival (Ljubljana, 2012), the exhibitions at Württembergischer Kunstverein (2014), Galerija Nova (2015) and Raven Row (2019), as well as coordinated digitization projects Written-off (2015), Digital Archive of Praxis and the Korčula Summer School (2016) and Catalogue of Liberated Books (2013ff). (2021)

Publications[edit]

  • Medak, et al., System.hack(), Zagreb: Mama, 2006, 96 pp. Exhibition catalogue. (Croatian)/(English)
  • editor, with Petar Milat, Prospects of Arkzin / Izgledi Arkzina, Zagreb: Arkzin and Multimedia Institute, 2013, 48 pp. With DVD Arkzin Digital Archive / Digitalna arhiva Arkzina. (English)/(Croatian)
  • with Marcell Mars and Manar Zarroug, "Public Library (An Essay)", Memory of the World blog, 27 Oct 2014. On the idea of public library.
  • with Marcell Mars and Dubravka Sekulić, "Taken Literally", in We Need It - We Do It: Croatia at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition / La Biennale di Venezia 2016, eds. Emina Višnić and Miranda Veljačić, Split: Platforma 9.81, 2016, pp 228-235. (English)
  • with Valeria Graziano and Marcell Mars, "Pirate Care: Against the Crisis", in ...Of Bread, Wine, Cars, Security and Peace, Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, and Zagreb: What, How and for Whom/WHW, 2020, pp 103-109. [3] (English)
    • "Pirate Care: Gegen die Krise", in ...von Brot, Wein, Autos, Sicherheit und Frieden, Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, and Zagreb: What, How and for Whom/WHW, 2020, pp 101-109. [4] (German)
  • with Mladen Domazet and Andro Rilović, "Degrowth", in Encyclopedia of the World’s Biomes, Elsevier, 2020, pp 287-295. [5] (English)

Translations[edit]

Interviews[edit]

  • "From Independent Cultural Work to Political Subjectivity", in The Art of Civil Action: Political Space and Cultural Dissent, eds. Philipp Dietachmair and Pascal Gielen, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017, pp 207-227. [7] (English)

See also[edit]

Links[edit]