Artpool was founded by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay as an art archive project in 1979 in Budapest. continuing its operation as an ngo under the name Artpool Art Research Center from 1992 on, Artpool started to use the web as a platform for distributing the information available in the archive at the end of 1995, relatively early in the context of Hungarian Internet culture. The first drafts of the website designed by Galántai from 1995 recall the same approaches that Artpool used for collecting information on the international art scene: the invitation sentence “Please send me information about your activity!” welcomed visitors to the homepage, evoking Galántai’s call from 1978. The conceptual use of the possibilities of the Internet was the result of Galántai’s conscious strategy of setting up the website as the extension of the archive, and at the same time as a place for creativity and his curatorial activity, thereby also following the concept of building a parallel platform for the collection. Considering the whole website as an art project, Galántai has imagined the virtual space as the continuation of the archive’s offline activities.
Literature
BARKÓCZI FLÓRA: AZ ARTPOOL WEBSITE MINT INTEGRÁL-PROJEKT. INFORMÁCIÓS TÁRSADALOM. TÁRSADALOMTUDOMÁNYI FOLYÓIRAT, NO. 3. 2019: 60. [url]
BARKÓCZI FLÓRA: KÉPZŐMŰVÉSZET ÉS KOLLEKTIVITÁS A KORAI MAGYAR INTERNETEN. AZ ARTPOOL, A C3 ÉS AZ ÉJJELI ŐRJÁRAT 1990-ES ÉVEKBELI WEBLAPJA ÉS TEVÉKENYSÉG. IN: TÓFALVY TAMÁS, ED. A MAGYAR INTERNET TÖRTÉNETEI. BUDAPEST: TYPOTEX KIADÓ, 2021. 161–73. [url]
Barkóczi Flóra: The “dynamic storage” of an “active archive” – Artpool’s strategies for storing and distributing information on underground art over the past 40 years, Le Temps des Médias, No. 38, 2023. [URL]
Bodor Judit – Roddy Hunter: artpool.hu: a user’s guide: Remediation, Digitization and the Networked Art Archive. In: Emese Kürti, Zsuzsa László (eds.): What Will Be Already Exists. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2021, pp. 171-190. [URL]
URL: https://artpool.hu/
netartdothu (beta) 