with Tereza Havlíková (netzkunst.berlin) and Andreas Broeckmann (curator and researcher)

Mailing lists played an important role in net art in the 1990s. They were tools for sharing open calls, organising events and circulating art news. But they were also public spaces for fostering connections and building discourse around media art. In 1996, the Syndicate mailing list was started as an „East-West Network“, exploring the possibilities of collaboration and explicitly reaching out to artists in the newly „reconnected“ Eastern Europe. As the name suggests, the members of the mailing list saw themselves as part of translocal relationships and a wider community.

The EastUnBloc exhibition argues that net art is shaped by storytelling. Therefore, Tereza Havlíková invited Andreas Broeckmann, one of the initiators and administrators of the Syndicate mailing list, to share the stories of this particular network. Together, they revisit the term „Deep Europe“, which was associated with the Syndicate network and fostered a European identity that transcended national borders, „enmeshed in a complex ‘felt’ of layers“. By exploring the Syndicate archive and viewing net artworks created in close proximity to this art and culture network, we hope to capture some of the spirit that drove net artists in Europe in the mid-1990s, a time of political and technological transition.

Andreas Broeckmann is an art historian and curator who lives in Berlin. He is a Visiting Professor in the PhD Program at Malmö Art Academy, and he teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig (HGB – Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst) where he holds an Honorary Professorship. He was a member of the Berlin-based media association mikro. In 1996 he initiated, together with Inke Arns and others, the Syndicate mailing list which was intended as an East-West network for artists, activists and journalists working in and with new media.

Tereza Havlíková is an art historian and curator based in Berlin and Bochum. Her research focuses on net art and digital art within the broader context of internet history and culture. She is a founding member of the Zentrum für Netzkunst (ZfN) initiative in Berlin, which reconstructs, archives and presents early net art, with a particular focus on the Berlin scene. Since 2024, she has been a research assistant at Ruhr University Bochum, focusing on new media art. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis about the localities of net art.