The Center for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe

The Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe brings the arts and new forms of mediatagether in theory as weil as in practice. ZKM aims at fastering the creative possibilities of a connection between traditional forms of art and new media technologies, to achieve results which anticipate the future. The goal is to enrich the arts, not to amputate them technologically. ln this vein, the great potentials in traditional kinds of art and those of media arts must be measured together. Both of these areas, individually and in collaboration, will be promoted and supported in ZKM.

The Bauhaus, founded in 1919 in Weimar, serves as a model for ZKM. Bauhaus was the first to remove craftsmanship from art and replace it with an orientation towards the machine. ln line with the state of technology, now nearing the end of the 20th century, ZKM will orient art towards digital technologies. Just as Bauhaus avoided replacing artistic creation with machine production, ZKM, too, will prevent the technological processes from upstaging the artist's creativity. Just as painting has not been made redundant since the advent of computer graphics, the grand piano will not be disposed of, merely because the synthesizer exists. ln order to fulfill the goals set down in the following pages, the Center will have to pave new ground, in terms of its substance and its organizational structure. A place must be established in Germany in which the attempt is made to advance artistic and media technological issues and to anticipate for the future, a place in which the goal is a synthesis of the best creative forces in the arts and media technologies. ZKM aims at making multi-media "Gesamtkunstwerks" possible, as weil as exploring special technologies, promoting the new, and equally weil, providing critique of a blinded media euphoria. The facilities and equipment at ZKM will be made accessible to artists and scholars, and also to the general public, in order to achieve the goals in mind. ln contrast to the existing institutions and schools, which can only improvise in their attempts to reach these goals, ZKM will interrelate the previously separate areas of art and of media technologies. Especially promising findings are expected in the combination of various kinds of visual and acoustic media, as can arise from a coupling of electronic music, Iaser, video and video animation. Moreover, works created using new media should  refer and relate to those made using traditional artistic techniques. This will provide a desired tension between media technological production methods and conventional production methods of consumer goods and artwork. A solution in the form of an institution must be found for the possibilities and issues presented here. The establishment of the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe will, for the first time, provide facilities which can enable the study of new media and the creative coming-to-grips with it, as an artistic and scientific discipline.

Heinrich Klotz, 1992