Wires will strangle the sluggish paper

Künstler_innenbuch und Artist Talk mit Nika Kupyrova (in Englisch)

A lot has been said about the obliteration of printed matter - however what we presume to be a contemporary phenomenon is more of a recurring prophecy. The presentation takes its title from the chapter of Alessandro Ludovico?s book Post-digital print, where he relates how already the invention of the telegraph and the telephone in the late 19th century brought about the visions of paper-free society. Paper survived the rise of television and the 80?s dream of a paperless office (as a matter of fact, mostly marketing strategy for information technology). Nika Kupyrova deliberates how in the current age of digital normality, the paper-based medium mutates, but prevails, in a precarious state of oscillation between digital and analogue. The curious attachment to the pronounced physicality of the book as an object; the irony of the ?page flip effect? on electronic devices. In other words: while the makers of the Encyclopedia Britannica announced in 2012 that they will be discontinuing their print edition, around the same time Wikipedia introduced an option of ?printed page? layout for its entries.

Nika Kupyrova will show a selection of books she has created in the recent years and talk about their re-appearance and transformation in her artistic practice.

Nika Kupyrova, born 1985 in Kiev, Ukraine, is a visual artist and curator working with three-dimentional, two-dimentional and textual mediums. After previous studies at the Edinburgh College of Art and Iceland Academy of the Arts she has recently completed her MA at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Exhibitions include ?Re-? at Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna; ?WYSINWYS? at SODA Gallery, Bratislava; ?Invonclusive Analysis? in the National Centre for Contemporary Arts Moscow; ?Earwax? at Meetfactory Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague; ?Factory Installed? at the Mattress Factory Art Museum, USA