Unwritten Histories of Extinct Media Art in Lithuania:

From the 2000s of Great Promise to the Multidirectional

2010s
Vytautas Michelkevičius and Lina Michelkevičė

Abstract
Before everybody forgets that the (new) media art scene existed in Lithuania, Vytautas
Michelkevičius and Lina Michelkevičė, participants, activists, initiators and finally researchers,
look back at recent history and analyse the birth, development and defragmentation of media
art in Lithuania. Some aspects of it corresponded with the international (dis)integration of me-
dia art into the art scene; some were rather specific for the local scene. This article is based on
participatory, as well as academic research since both authors took part in many events and pro-
cesses at the same time as writing PhD theses on issues relevant here. The paper unfolds paral-
lel narratives of media art and its defragmentation along with an analysis of the most prominent
as well as emerging artists from the field.

Keywords: local (new) media art, post-Soviet art scene, participation, collaboration, artistic re-
search

This article aims to map the genesis and development of the field formerly known as (new) me-
dia art in Lithuania in order to evaluate the current condition of the scene. Among the objec-
tives are: presenting the local (new) media art scene, analysing its key artworks, and highlight-
ing idiosyncrasies; providing preliminary conclusions about what happened to media art after
its beginnings and in what directions it moved in the course of development; identifying and
analysing offsets of the field, and thus foregrounding probable links between some of trends
that prevailed in the Lithuanian contemporary art scene starting in the mid-2000s.
First off we should highlight a couple of factors that impact on the way we talk about
the former media art in Lithuania. First of all, the article relies very much on participatory
research, i.e. our subjective experience of events and participation in the scene as observers,
artists, curators, researchers and critics. Secondly, it is not so much a chronological account but
rather an analytical narrative that attempts to highlight the key points in the discussion about
media art as a field.
One more important thing to take into account is the density of (historical) time, medi-
ums, concepts and movements in the Lithuanian post-Soviet art scene. Isolated from interna-
tional development during the Soviet period (1940–1990), after 1990, Lithuanian artists and
art discourse faced both an abundance of artistic freedom and the simultaneous burst of vari-
ous unfamiliar art movements, which in the Western world had arisen successively throughout
the decades and in various social, technological and economic conditions. Instead of gradually
embracing new mediums on the art scene, the post-Soviet world had to cope with the advent of
all mediums and trends at once: the condensed historical time, which encapsulated the bigger
part of art development after modernism into less than two decades, is among the core post-
Soviet conditions. Due to this, the arrival and development of “(new) media art” in Lithuania
was quite different in comparison with the Western world.

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Economy of the Medium: Video Art as a Forerunner of Media Art

The cultural changes in the 1990s provided Lithuanian artists not only with new expressive
forms and notions on what art is and how it is made, but also with new technologies. As the
electronics revolution made relatively low-cost video cameras available for the general public,
numerous artists abandoned their primary disciplines so as to plunge into experiments with
video as the major medium (to name but a few: Evaldas Jansas, Gintaras Makarevičius, and
Jurga Barilaitė from painting, Deimantas Narkevičius, Dainius Liškevičius from sculpture,
etc.). So the main condition for the emergence of video art was the affordable initial invest-
ment and low production budget. As one of the main Lithuanian art critics of the time Lolita
Jablonskienė stated: “…[the] expansion [of video art] has been conditioned by a whole set of
premises: from the going stream of moving images in everyday life (TV, internet, computer,
[video] games, moving ads, mass usage of video and digital photo cameras, video and DVD
players in private space, etc.), relative cheapness of the production of video, to the intellectual
challenges of contemporary art itself ” ( Jablonskienė, 2005, p. 14). The video was the new me-
dium of the 1990s: economic reasons combined with the changes in the art context and the
temptation of the new drew artists out of their practices, and often times studios, to fieldwork
with cameras. As videotechnology was introduced into the art field at least a decade after it was
in the West, the computer-related technologies showed up even later, so until the 2000s the
computer and the artist was still a pretty mismatched combination.
In Lithuanian art critique there were no discussions about video art as a part of the media
art scene, however, some critics noted the medium-specificity issues: “as soon as an artist grabs a
video camera she or he immediately passes from the space of medium-specific art to discourse-
specific practice.” ( Jablonskienė, 2005, p. 14). We would like to disagree with this statement
because, due to the lack of practice and skills, most of the artists used video in a very rough
and sketchy way where the specifics of the medium were very present. Also, most of the video
works had a narrative and documentary nature. Of course not every artist was working with
the medium-specific issues of video art and reflecting them, but the medium qualities of video
were quite present in the late 1990s – early 2000s artists’ work (like Deimantas Narkevičius
and others).

Early attempts of the Media Art (Scene) in Lithuania

The very first attempt to produce and institutionalize (new) media art was Instituto Media
(www.o-o.lt), launched in 1998 by a group of young artists, Mindaugas Gapševičius, Kęstutis
Andrašiūnas and Darius Mikšys. “The main task of the virtual institution was to gather and dis-
seminate information on the Internet in various formats: sound, image, text, search engines and
links. The institution’s structure consisted of a focused electronic mailing list, a media resource
base, an electronic journal and Internet radio and TV” (Šukaitytė 2007, p. 175). The collective,
however, was active only for a few years before it split into personal practices, some of which
can be still browsed online. Though the project was very timely in relation to the international
developments of new media, it did not have any bigger impact on the local art scene. One of
the biggest achievements of Instituto Media on the local level was the media art exhibition
Metamorphosis. Net Art Presentation, curated in collaboration with Kristina Inčiūraitė at the
Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius (2002–2003).1

1 More at: http://cac.lt/en/exhibitions/past/02/1533

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 Among the first artists in Lithuania to fall under the category of (new) media art were
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, who not only used new media and relative concepts in their
artistic practice but also advocated for it to a larger community of artists and other profes-
sionals and to funding bodies. In 2004 they initiated VILMA (Vilnius Interdisciplinary Lab
for Media Arts) as a potential media lab in Vilnius: “VILMA addresses the desire for a space
of experiment related to the issues of technology that define new media, and orients media to
artistic practice, and onto culture and society. VILMA is scripting of a voice from relations
between international and local situations.”2 A little bit earlier the Jutempus NGO, run by the
same artists, entered the Nordic-Baltic network of media labs and organisations, which at the
time were organising a series of events in Nordic and Baltic countries abbreviated as RAM
(Re-approaching New Media)3. The series continued for a course of four years starting with
RAM1 in Visby and ending with the last, unofficial RAM7 in Minsk in 2005. Most of them
laid the foundations for the integration of local (new) media art scenes into the international
one. In August 2004 Vilnius hosted RAM6 under the title Social Interaction & Collective Intel-
ligence: around 40 participants4 were brought together to experience a packed 4 day schedule5.
The event involved both artistic and educational programmes, and intense networking. It was
the first and the last such large gathering of (new) media art scene participants and followers
in Lithuania. Afterwards most of Lithuanian participants sooner or later moved on to more
specific fields like experimental film, photography, VJing, etc., whereas many international par-
ticipants carried on their media art practices.
A number of the Lithuanian participants continued to collaborate in some way for five
more years (2005–2009) on an online platform – a journal on media culture entitled Balsas.
cc, initiated by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas and edited by Vytautas Michelkevičius. The
journal aimed to facilitate discussions on media culture in Lithuania and introduce worldwide
discourse into the local context by translating the most challenging essays, interviews, reviews,
etc. The main impetus behind the project was the wish to grasp the expansion of the digital,
new media and technologies and the way they were operating upon culture. The platform also
served as a meeting point both for art and media critics and theorists, communication theo-
rists, philosophers, anthropologists, semioticians, artists, authors, and IT geeks.
The journal organised several art events as well as a series of socially and politically en-
gaged discussions – Vilnius Media Seminars (VMS)1, together with Belorussian activists
(Alexei Krivolap and others). At the end of the fifth year from the inception of Balsas.cc, se-
lected essays and translations were published in a book entitled Medijų kultūros balsai (Voices
of Media Culture, ed. Vytautas Michelkevičius, Vilnius: MENE, 2009)7, which coincided with
the closing down of the journal as an active entity. The reasons behind the choice to termi-
nate the project were twofold: on the one hand, (new) media had become integrated into the
dominant culture so that it did not need advocacy any more, and the very term media culture
had become oxymoronic and absurd; on the other hand, “media culture” had not managed to
establish itself as a field and had been defeated by the conservatism and traditionalism of the
cultural scene in Lithuania. The journal however had fulfilled an educative role and facilitated

2 http://www.vilma.cc/en_index.php?mid=11&nid=58
3 More at: http://monoskop.org/RAM
4 See: http://vilma.cc./en_index.php?mid=83&nid=0
5 See: http://vilma.cc./en_index.php?mid=0&nid=117
6 More at: http://www.vilniusmediaseminar.org
7 Download the book here: https://www.academia.edu/3423524/Medij%C5%B3_kult%C5%ABros_balsai_teori-
jos_ir_praktikos_only_LT_The_Voices_of_Media_Culture_Theories_and_Practices

72
discussions on (new) media culture for a considerable period of time. One may take the closing
down as a fairly natural process that corresponded directly to the development of international
media art and culture; beside that, in-depth discussions limited to the Lithuanian language
turned out to be impossible due to a very small local scene. The five years of editorial work at
Balsas.cc could well be considered participatory research into the local media art scene as well
as an attempt to curate both the actual and imaginary media culture in Lithuania.
Since the beginning of the 2000s the early shoots of media art in Lithuania have gradually
evolved into various parallel discourses, with artistic research and participatory and collabora-
tive practices being the most prominent. Continuing the discussion in more detail we move
to an analysis of several selected projects within each of these directions so as to support the
statement.

Artistic Research Shift: from Media Art to Research in Art

Artistic research here means an artist’s practice that embraces both artistic and scientific meth-
ods and/or their derivatives and purposefully contributes to the knowledge and understanding
of a particular field. Presenting the work of (an) art(ist) in an exhibition, performance or any
other public form is considered as sharing research outcomes. Artistic research, both as a crea-
tive strategy and an institutionally recognised field, is now fully established in Lithuania with
a good many Lithuanian artists readily falling under the category. Although only few of them
emerged from the former (new) media art scene, one may assuredly claim that precisely these
practices were among the major factors that conditioned the local scenery of artistic research
as we see it today.
Julijonas Urbonas drifts between critical and speculative design and contemporary art
with his projects. Being one of the few Lithuanian artists who started in the field of “(new)
media art”, he has recently gained in international popularity among curators of contemporary
art. One of his early works, Wind orchestra (2006)8, is a good example of a media artwork
where interactive technology enabled social participation. The installation invited you to join
the collective blowing session; yet in order to make Urbonas’ constructed instrument work in a
harmonious way one had to engage in social negotiations of a certain degree. The participation
efforts were represented by live graphic visualisations that were changing depending on how
strong one was blowing into a microphone, and by doing so added an aesthetic dimension to
the installation.
With the artist’s more recent project, Talking Doors (2009), that in 2010 earned him
the Prix Ars Electronica (in the category of Interactive Art), his research on interactivity and
sound instruments took a more elaborate turn. The artist claims: “It was researching the door’s
poetic power of organising and provoking various psychological, conceptual, and social events
in public space. Part of this project — five doors to well-known public buildings in Lithu-
ania’s capital Vilnius were transformed into interactive installations. Equipped with electronic
devices, the doors became a portal to Lithuania’s Democracy Index, a musical instrument, a
kinetic sculpture and even the source of an earthquake. … The project became an analytical
“door slaughterhouse” and a critical playground.”9
Certain versions of the talking doors were rather technological illustrations of interactiv-
ity, yet others opened a way to question and investigate social and political issues related to

8 More at: http://www.migaa.eu/migrating-reality/exhibition/julijonas-urbonas

9 http://julijonasurbonas.lt/talking-doors

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 the buildings they were installed in. Take, for example, the Hesitating Door (“The door that is
neither closed nor open, never confident about its position”10) that was installed on the actual
door of the church: it brought together belief and doubt, so often accompanying each other
and so present in religion and mundane life. Moreover, it became a public art piece to be expe-
rienced both by regular church goers and the art public. Imagine yourself approaching a very
common door (of the school, shop, bakery, hospital, etc.) which starts slowly moving as if it was
in doubt whether to open or to close, and one can see no apparent power behind its movement.
What thoughts would it evoke in you?

Figure 1. Sounding Door Photo Session in Action (the door was temporary removed from Lithuanian
Music and Theatre Academy). Julijonas Urbonas, 2009. Photo: Aistė Valiūtė & Daumantas Plechavičius.

The most recent practice by Julijonas Urbonas has gradually moved towards “artistic research”.
In relation to this domain one can list such projects as Euthanasia Coaster (2010), “a hypotheti-
cal death machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and
euphoria – take the life of a human being”11, Oneiric Hotel (2014), “a pop-up hotel equipped
with special dream-directing equipment — an artistic reconstruction of the few successful psy-
chophysiological sleep experiments that managed to induce and direct lucid dreams”12, and
others. In his artistic research Urbonas combines art, design, and science so as to create more or
less hypothetical models for specific domains of human experiences. As the art critic Jurij Do-
briakov has claimed, these phantasmagorical technological inventions by Urbonas, “are meant
for the society that got used to adrenalin, endorphins, and other happiness and pleasure induc-
ing matters to the extent that it needs ever radical pleasures and entertainments and ever higher
gravitational lift above the surface of the physical world” (Dobriakov, 2016). Since 2007, along
with his practice-based research (a PhD in Design Interactions) at the Royal College of Art,
Julijonas Urbonas turned from creating separate media art pieces to extended longitudinal re-
search on what he himself has termed “gravitational aesthetics”. Although “playing” and ex-
perimenting with technologies is still very present in his work, the exaggerated way he does it
makes us think of his work as research on technology, its role, and ideology, desires and fairs
behind it, rather than technological research.

10 http://julijonasurbonas.lt/hesitating-door
11 http://julijonasurbonas.lt/euthanasia-coaster
12 http://julijonasurbonas.lt/oneiric-hotel

74
 Figure 2. Scale model of the Euthanasia Coaster. Julijonas Urbonas, 2010. Photo: Aistė Valiūtė & Dau-
mantas Plechavičius.

The artist duo Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas had employed (new) media art strategies in
their projects since the beginning of the 2000s. Two of their early projects were manifesta-
tions of media and art coming together through a creative use of technologies and their criti-
cal analysis and application to culture. The first of them, Transaction (2000–2004)13, was a
project that traced a script of a victim through the history of media, inviting the institution
of psychiatry, film and female intellectuals into a triangular dialogue. It “utilise[d] collective
memory and situate[d] it in relation to different media so as to deconstruct a script through
which to reflect on the state of ‘transition’” (Urbonas, 2008, p. 15). A few years later the artists
realised RR: Ruta Remake (2002–2004)14, a project (and instrument) that navigated through a
study of social construction of the female voice, weaving together layers of gender, technology,
performance and fashion. At first sight, both of these projects represented “classical” strategies
of (new) media art where experiments with art and media technologies made the core struc-
ture and content of the work. “Transaction” was constructed as the remix of a media (i.e. film)
archive on the basis of several notions from psychiatry. It was rendered into a work of art with
the aid of “unpacking strategies”, that is, in every different exhibition space, be it physical or
online, the artists unpacked the archive and exhibited it in an altered visual and spatial constel-
lation. The logic of a persistently remixed archive was among the aesthetical axes of Transac-
tion, whereas Ruta Remake embraced different formats, mediums and technologies. The major
object, instrument and medium in the Ruta Remake project was the voice that was researched
throughout a vast range of formats: exhibitions, conferences, workshops with emerging female
artists and composers, remixes of women’s voices from a movie archive, fashion collection, etc.
The still present web version of the Transaction project overtakes the logic of the media
field and is built around the concepts of script, staging and representation which are connected
together into a visual drama triangle (visualization of the navigation, i.e. interface). The mate-
rial of the old media (archives of film, voice and interviews) meets here the interface of the new
media (website programming): “Here the interface amplifies the norm, the framework and the
technologies that come into play” (Urbonas, 2008, p. 21). The project itself can be seen as be-
ing of a multi-media nature since its inputs and outputs are of different media: from film and
voice archives as inputs to an online platform as the output. “The voice archive is understood
as a sound project that shapes a psycho-geographical space consisting of samples. The voices
of the participants suggest a norm and logic for a notation of sounds that works as a platform
and connects the threads of the voice archive up with lines – and routes – of information”

13 More at: http://transaction.lt

14 More at: http://www.nugu.lt/dossier

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 (Urbonas 2008, p. 19). The project here is described as a certain information machine that
produces experiences by employing different forms of media art: from interactive art to sound
art. Collaboration with different professional communities was vital for Transaction: “Writers,
linguists, experts in semiotics, musicologists, singers and activists joined the Transaction pro-
ject in order to investigate women’s role in the construction of a ‘victim scenario’” (Urbonas,
2008, p. 19). It also emphasized the curatorial role of the artists who were not (only) making,
but also (or rather) connecting things, ideas and people into a certain “apparatus” that worked
semi-independently. Therefore one can claim that already in the Transaction project the Urbo-
nas had started to slowly drift away from the regular understanding of media art by adding a
vivid social, political and collaborative dimension.
The critical reconsideration and deconstruction of the media archive also continued in
Ruta Remake. Here the mediated memory was disclosed and analyzed so as to identify the role
of the female voice (both in a direct and metaphorical sense) within media. Artists revealed
that the archive of voice samples and personal memories “has developed a type of logic typical
of machines, which has turned out to be essential for the project” (Urbonas, 2008, p. 33). The
metaphor of machine places this at the very core of media art discourse. The project is described
as having a “contemporary media interface”, the logic of which “refers to concepts relating to
patterning and mixing” (Urbonas, 2008, p. 33), thus employing all the “obligatory” vocabulary
of the 2000s media art hype, including its popular version in DJs venues. The main interface of
the project evolved from artists’ research into the history of voice machines. The Theramidi, a
digital version of Thereminvox (an instrument, which was played by the movement of hands,
and which resembled the human voice), adopted a new media interface that connected the
voice archive to the shadows of the spectator’s hands moving over the round table and so trans-
formed movements into sound. Besides the technological interface, the “machine-like” project
had a score to deal with the content, which proposed different ways of remixing the voice ar-
chive.
Both projects referred to media art knowledge and discourse of the time and resonated
in the media art as well as in contemporary art scenes as exhibited repeatedly in various venues
and shows. They also paved the way for Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas to enter the net-
works of European media art organizations and festivals, helping them to become important
players, who in end organized a media art festival – RAM6 – themselves. On the other hand,
looking from today’s perspective their practice from 2005 onwards can be put under the cat-
egory of artistic research, despite the term entering the vocabulary of the artists themselves only
recently15. Each of projects discussed above had a defined research question and hypothesis,
set goals, objectives and methods, and employed artistic means within a specific domain of
research. Putting media at the core of their early collective practice, the Urbonas did so not
in order to exploit technology for artistic purposes, but in order to research media by artistic
means.
Participatory Shift: Media Art(ists) Going Social

The mid-2000s also marked a manifest migration of (media) artists towards the social: research-
ing and employing media not so much as technological empowerment, but rather as a device
for instigating actual relations between humans, here and now interactions and participatory

15 For instance, their talk in the AA Think Tank Symposium Plan the Planet, March 20, 2015, AA Architectural
Association London, was entitled “Proposition Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas: artistic research at the techno-social
moment”, see the video record here: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=2755.

76
formations – this became the primary focus of the field.
One should be clear here: using media as a trigger for social interactions is not just another
form of interactivity so common in some of early media art. Art historian Christian Kravagna
distinguishes the terms ‘interactivity’, ‘collective action’, and ‘participation’ as defining different
relationships to the structure of the artwork and to the distinction between producer and re-
ceiver. Interactivity, first of all, is a possibility given to the spectator to operate upon an artwork
without fundamentally changing or co-determining its structure: these gestures are mostly
temporary, can be retracted or repeated. This means that interactivity usually defines not the
interaction among people, but between a spectator and the matter or certain attributes of an
artwork, and is characteristic of kinetic and media art, as well as of art objects that allow be-
ing touched, worn, or moved. Controlling Theramidi by hand movements in “Ruta Remake”,
blowing into microphones in “Wind Orchestra”, or making a door move and sound by ap-
proaching it in “Talking Doors”, this is interactivity. “Collective action”, Kravagna says, “means
the conception, production and implementation of works or actions by multiple people with
no principle differentiation among them in terms of status” (Kravagna, 2010, p. 241). This defi-
nition in its fundamental sense is, however, to be applied only when talking about permanent
artist collectives where partly anonymous labour guarantees (at least in theory) the equal en-
gagement in the whole creative process (and collectives used to be quite common in media art
practice, take for example the Urbonas duo or Instituto Media). Meanwhile the project-based
collaboration between artists, non-professionals, and communities usually involves much more
complex social and work relations and attribution problems. Nevertheless, the attributive ‘col-
lective’ circulates in the art discourse rather freely, hardly ever referring to something more than
the multiple authorship and/or incorporation of other professional fields.
The last of three terms, participation, for Kravagna is based on differentiation between
producers and receivers, with the latter taking part in an art project by implementing a substan-
tial portion of the work in a certain stage of the creative process (that of conception, produc-
tion, implementation, etc.) (Kravagna, 2010, p. 241). Right away this notion becomes relevant
for the art issues at hand: the eagerness for interactivity as human-machine communication
steps aside to be replaced by aspirations for human interactions, with media staying at the pro-
ducers’ side, as a condition that facilitates the involvement of “receivers”. And this distinction
between the two sides remains relevant even when the attributive ‘collective’ comes to reign in
the descriptions of the art projects of this type.
We will discuss four projects from the mid-2000s here. Varied in scale and duration, they
all took different ways to employ media as a social trigger and to question or to research col-
lectivism, involvement and collective action. The brief analyses below look to the extent media
are still present here and how (if ) it contributes to a project’s goals.
The Pro-test Lab project (from 2005)16 by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas was initi-
ated as a multi-layered movement aimed at preserving public spaces in Vilnius. It questioned
post-Soviet models of savage privatization that put many objects previously owned by the state
under private property, thus significantly reducing the number of spaces meant for cultural and
public use.
The impulse behind the project was the privatization case of the Lietuva (in English
Lithuania) cinema theatre. In spring 2005, the artist duo Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
established a lab in the cinema’s former ticket office that had been abandoned for some time.
According to the project description, the project aimed to pursue and analyse possible and im-

16 More at: http://www.vilma.cc/LIETUVA

77
 possible forms of protest and invited both individuals and groups dissatisfied with the present
situation of public spaces (students and professors of Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy
and Vilnius Academy of Arts, The Architecture Students’ Club, the Greens and Leftist move-
ments, schoolchildren, cultural employees and intellectuals, etc.) to join. Several ‘protest zones’
in the lab space allowed for different forms of engagement: a reading-room, kitchen, modelling
zone, greenhouse, wishes zone, bar, TV zone – they hosted such various activities as screen-
ings, architectural projects, concerts, food making parties, public discussions, TV and Skype
discussions, excursions, and other irregular events. The project also had a very important virtual
side – a mailing list, which helped the coordination of actions, sharing news, writing petitions,
negotiating events or meetings; on the other hand it turned often enough into a polemical,
even a conflictual space.
The Pro-test lab project was an important shift in the Urbonas’ practice from so-called
media art to participatory and socially-engaged practice, and also the shift in the very notion
of collaboration. If the previous projects by the Urbonas were based on professional collabora-
tion, this one was a truly participatory project that relied on the general notion of the common.
To understand the nature of this ‘common’ we focus here on the commonality as defined by
the sociologist Rudi Laermans. The aim at collaboration is not common for the participants of
a collective project, but what is already given: “Artistic collaboration presumes the existence of
a common, consisting of a series of generic capacities or potentials that are collaboratively put
to work. Those who creatively cooperate can act together because they share generic human
abilities to think, to feel, to speak, to move.” (Laermans, 2011) Though this notion of artistic
collaboration by Laermans may at first sight seem a banality (for it is obvious that if one wants
to collaborate, one needs to think, feel and express this in verbal or whatever language!), yet
precisely it tracks down an important aim of the project at hand: that is, to employ universal
rather than specialised skills by participants (differently to Transaction or RR: Ruta Remake as
analysed above) in order to generate individual expression forms. The project invited anyone
(from the citizens of Lithuania) to join and to propose a protest scenario that needs nothing
more than generic human abilities “to think, to feel, to speak, to move” (“The form of scenario
is open: audio or video interview, texts, schemes, posters, performances or other expressions
that represent the wishes of the citizens, finally – the circumstances of the impossibility of such
a scenario, contexts and reasons.”17
This participatory turn happened hand in hand with another one, a shift in the Urbonas’
notion of media. As the description of the project reads, “The pro-test lab charts a scenario
of possible forms of protest, and employs media apparatus to exercise the understanding of
why such protest is or is not possible. … The pavilion, a former ticket office at the cinema Li-
etuva is converted into a pro-test lab to perform the function of recording device. Referring to
the brothers Lummiere’s early model of camera, that performed a twofold function (filming
and screening), this recording device generates an action, registering the scenario of protest.”18
The project used the widest range of media compared to the previous projects by the Urbonas
(from various recording devices and media products (photo, film, sound records) to mass and
social media – TV, radio, and online broadcasts, mailing list)19, yet the fundamental turn was
towards the metaphoric notion of the entire project being a medium capable of simultaneously

17 http://www.vilma.cc/LIETUVA/en_index.php?l=LT&mid=186
18 http://www.vilma.cc/LIETUVA/en_index.php?l=LT&mid=186
19 Tadas Šarūnas analysed the role of media and networking in social movements in his MA thesis with Pro-test lab
being his major case study (Šarūnas, 2006).

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initiating, recording and “screening” the collective action.
The one-day project Trolleybus No. 0 (part of the larger project PB8_001_V, 2006) by
Andrius Rugys (a.k.a. PB8) is an example of how the migration of an already existing media
artwork into the public sphere becomes an instigation of social interactions. On October 26,
2006 the “zero” trolleybus, provided by the Trolleybus Depot, was doing rounds on a circular
route devised by the artist. The route intersected different zones of the city divided by the au-
thor into active (work), passive (leisure) and absent (uninhabited) zones. The artist meanwhile
mixed a live soundtrack for the passengers, which consisted of commissioned works by com-
posers and sound artists, each representing one of the aforementioned city zones. The sound
compilation had already been presented before in a “static mode” in the Contemporary Art
Centre.

Figure 3. Trolleybus No. 0, a part of the project PB8_001_V.

Andrius Rugys a.k.a. PB8, 2006. From archive of Andrius Rugys.

With its predetermined schedule and trajectory, the passengers were mostly the visual and
sound art audience prepared for a habitual social gathering much like those at the art exhibi-
tion openings – “leafing through the extraordinary maps of the extraordinary trip one could
be recognised as a participant of a collective action” (Bajarkevičius, 2009, p. 139). At the same
time this custom-created exhibition space was an integral part of the public transport system:
the trolleybus was not booked, it stopped along the devised route, its movement was limited
to the existing public transport network by the trolleybus wires, and its route was listed on
the public transport schedule website, though as a temporary one. In the video record of the
performance one can identify the random passengers: some intrigued and involved in the col-
lective entertainment, some confused by the sonic background and the trajectory of the trol-
leybus, others confidently heading for the free seats as if on a regular trip. It is obvious that the
project took advantage of the random passengers as a direct access to mundane reality, from
which events in exhibition or concert spaces are relatively distanced.
The artist, who was present but did not participate in the interactions as he was mixing
the soundtrack, seemed to be the principal passenger (and due to all mixing equipment the
most visible one as well), yet at the same time he stayed aside, leaving the central stage to the
simple pleasure of travelling together. His performance was so pointedly non-aesthetic that
it was not even worth watching, and thus the very forms of collective movement themselves
ended up in the spotlight: the participants of the “exhibition opening” were observing those
who were actually travelling from point A to point B, while the latter were in turn watching the
former, who were not travelling anywhere but were simply gathering together. So despite the
fact that PB8’s project seemed to revolve around a material media product (the sonification of
city zones), when presented as an event (performance) it withdrew into the background, sur-
rendering the foreground to mundane social interactions.
The Joy Is Not Mentioned, a project from 2007 by Eglė Budvytytė, Goda Budvytytė, and

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 Ieva Misevičiūtė, invited everyone willing to move around the city to “import” the street dance
culture from the 1980s West. Over a span of several days the artists guided the participants
around the city with boom-boxes on their shoulders: they danced and exercised to a special
broadcast made up of a soundtrack and workout instructions. This worked as a reference to
morning radio workouts – the autocratic radio voice urging the imaginary audiences to obey
by precise repetition of particular movements; and the image of dancers and those exercising
around different places of the city reminded one of mass choreographies in song and dance
festivals or the openings of the Olympic Games. Dancing to a radio track instead of a personal
record potentially broadens the crowd of project participants from volunteer dancers gathered
together at a particular time and place to occasional radio listeners. Their supposed existence
fascinated the artists even more than those dancing together in the here and now: “I would
have loved to see what was happening in places where we were absent, since the radio frequency
covered a large part of Vilnius. I like to think that people were doing stretching exercises and
gazing through their windows at home as instructed in the radio program” (Schuster, 2008, p.
14).
The street dances were followed by the second part of the project – a radio studio in
CAC – open for contributions by any visitor with some of them being broadcasted on the
actual radio station. Anything could become the content of recordings with expectations for
something abrupt and unruly, as the artists remember: “At the end of the evening a few street
kids appeared from somewhere and sang a wicked contribution to the program. It was interest-
ing to slip this kind of program into the schedule of a normal radio station” (Schuster, 2008,
p. 16). Thus, the radio medium was employed as a condition for a collective leisure: in the first
part of the project it guided a collective dance, in the second part instigated and distributed a
collective creativity. There again, this “empowering” of the radio seems to be rather a nostalgic
anachronism: in the era with radio being rather a medium of car drivers only, an image of exer-
cising audiences and the aim to “activat[e] new possibilities in the present” (Schuster, 2008, p.
14) was likely condemned to remain a mere fantasy.
The last of our examples, the CAC TV project, is interesting to mention here as it was
not an artist’s project (individual or collective), but an institutional experiment with notions
of media and collaboration. CAC TV was a 25 min long TV program broadcasted weekly on
the national commercial channel TV1 from 2004 to 2007. Within a TV context it had a rather
exceptional position in that its creative control, from the concept to final cut, was given out
to CAC curators and their collaborators: every show was brought to the TV studio on DVD,
without being censored or even previewed by the station (O’Reilly, 2006). So the content and
the format relied entirely on the direct initiators of the program.

Figure 4. The making of CAC TV, 2004.

Photo: Thomas Manneke, archive of CAC TV.

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The project claimed to aim at the subversion of TV spectatorship with such slogans as: “A pro-
gram (or a TV) for each spectator”, “The spectator must be a creator”, “Everybody can be a TV
maker”, etc. During the shows one would often hear encouragements to contribute to the mak-
ing of the program, as the net site of CAC TV claims: “[CAC TV] dreams of turning audi-
ence members and spectators into an active public, possibly even producers.”20 The promise to
involve as many collaborators as possible was partly redeemed: a number of shows were given
away to be entirely produced by artists, curators, and whoever; most of the shows had new co-
authors; and (nearly) everyone was invited to take part in the inaugural CAC TV party and
to contribute to the making of the trailer for a yet non-existent broadcast. There again, while
leafing through CAC TV archive it becomes obvious that “everyone” here includes basically
the same “actors” of the art world that one would meet in every opening party at the CAC: TV
instruments hardly helped the CAC, as an institution, to reach new audiences or participants.
Interestingly enough, the CAC TV started its broadcasts shortly before such user-gener-
ated media-sharing platforms as Vimeo and YouTube emerged (in late 2004 and 2005 respec-
tively). The interactivity promise of new media that everyone could not only consume but also
create the content rarely reaches the ideal stage of “acting in common”. The “participation of
everyone” too often means not a certain model of collaboration but rather parallel channels of
content that meet but accidentally. Such “participation” can ultimately turn into something
entirely contrary to the primary notion of spectatorship, when distributing my own content
becomes more relevant than watching (listening, reading, using) the content of others. “Every-
body can be a TV maker” may also mean that in order to understand TV you must be its maker,
or to make a program for yourself, i.e. to produce auto-casting, or self-casting, as Tadas Šarūnas
has named this extreme form of narrowcasting in his review on CAC TV21 (Šarūnas, 2009, p.
111). In this way collaboration and participation turns from being the opposite of individual-
ism as defined in many collaborative art projects into its ultimate: you must integrate into the
existing structures not in order to contribute to a certain “acting in common”, but in order to
make a customised product for yourself.
“Parasitizing” within a given TV structure, CAC TV forged a certain symbiotic relation-
ship between two institutions that allowed for mutual satisfaction: for the commercial TV
channel, because of the tiny slot within the regular program it gave away for culture; for the art
institution, because of the parallel entertainment it offered for its regular audience. CAC TV
not so much criticised TV as a medium, as identified with it and embraced its given models,
forms, genres, and conventions in order to create its own content and own spectators.

Conclusions

One can name a few reasons why media art has not become established as a field in Lithuania,
and why it resolved into several directions almost right after its inception. One of them was
stated at the beginning of the article: the post-Soviet rush to “live through” the art history of
more than a half of the 20th century in less than two decades. To put it simply: driven by the
urge to try out ever new artistic means, mediums and concepts Lithuanian artists didn’t have
time to dwell upon a certain art genre or direction. The other, less general reason which can
be named is the low level of institutional support for media art due to relatively strong institu-
tions of cinema and visual and fine arts. Despite no less than a dozen yearly graduates from

20 See “FREQUENTLY given responses” at: http://cac.lt/tv/lt.php/smc_tv_log/2111

21 Šarūnas, op. cit.

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 the Photography and Media Art Department (at the Vilnius Academy of Arts), hardly any
turned to work in the media art field not only as an artist but also as a curator or organizer who
might have facilitated the field. And a number of those who started their media art practices
have emigrated. The lack of local researchers also contributed to the weak identity of the field.
In 2007, Renata Šukaitytė defended the first and up until now the last doctoral thesis in the
field – Media Art in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in the Second Part of the 20th Century – 21st
Century: Institutional and Artistic Development – yet soon after abandoned the topic so as to
focus on film studies.
The gravestone to media art in Lithuania was laid down by the young curator Jurij Do-
briakov in 2015. He curated a show Remediation calling it a “medium to contact Lithuanian
media art” (Media Arts and Music Festival Centras in Kaunas, Lithuania). Dobriakov collected
a number of historical art pieces – certain “relics” of Lithuanian media art; a number of art-
ists, however, who were active in the (new) media art scene in the 2000s did not respond at
all or refused to take part in the exhibition: apparently this period of their practice did not
look relevant for them anymore. According to the curator, the retrospective look “allows the
viewer to have a better sense of how rapidly the means and ideas related to what we call “the
new media” at one point or other become obsolete” (Dobriakov, 2015). The analyses above
have highlighted several directions which the artistic thinking about (new) media has taken
in Lithuania (artistic research and participatory art); in each of these, technologies and media
remain a background, prism, or channel, whereas the actual focus is on communal formations,
social values, human desires and fairs.
The present-day condition is still waiting to be evaluated and perhaps named (as the titles
‘post-medium’ as coined by Rosalind Krauss (Krauss, 2000) or ‘post-internet’ have become ob-
solete as well). One is obvious: since the late 2000’s the local art scene in Lithuania has adjusted
much more to the global pulse and kept pace with the international art developments, counting
in the changes in the (new) media art scene.

Author Biographies
Vytautas Michelkevičius is a curator, art and media researcher, publisher, and associate professor at Photography and
Media Art department in Vilnius Academy of Arts. There he is also holding the artistic director position at Nida Art
Colony. He received a PhD in Communication studies (Thesis on Critical media theory and photography) from Vil-
nius University. In 2013–2015 he was holding a postdoctoral fellowship on doing inquiry on artistic research and its
methodologies (the book is forthcoming in 2016). Vytautas has authored or edited more than 10 catalogues and books
on media theory, art and photography since 2002. He is mostly curating group shows and in 2015 he was a curator of
Lithuanian Pavilion in Venice Biennale with artist Dainius Liškevičius artistic research project “Museum”.

Correspondence contact information:

vytautas.michelkevicius@vda.lt

Dr. Lina Michelkevičė is an art researcher and translator with previous background in philology and semiotics. In
2014 defended her PhD thesis on participatory aspects in Lithuanian contemporary art at Vilnius Academy of Arts,
Lithuania. Currently works as a researcher at the Institute of Art Research of Vilnius Academy of Arts. Simultane-
ously conducts independent research and art projects; among her last projects was the research on children art schools’
cultural and socio-political participation in society, carried out with an interdisciplinary team (2014–2015). Research
interests: modes of cultural participation; representations of thinking; new forms of art, communication and research.
Correspondence contact information:
lina.michelkevice@vda.lt

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Artist and project websites

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nugu.lt: website by the artists Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas.
Transaction: project website (http://transaction.lt/).
Pro-test Lab: project website (http://www.vilma.cc/LIETUVA).
VILMA: project website (http://www.vilma.cc).
Vilnius Media Seminar: project website (http://www.vilniusmediaseminar.org/).

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