ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie)
As a worldwide unique institute of culture, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media is both museum and more than a museum. It is house for all media and genre, a house for both spatially-based art such as painting, photography and sculpture as well as for time-based arts such as film, video, media art, music, dance, theater and performance. The ZKM was founded as a museum in 1989 with the mission to perpetuate classic arts in the digital age – the reason for its also being referred to as »Electronic or Digital Art Bauhaus«. The ZKM also houses institutes and laboratories in which research and development is carried out. Alongside the classic guiding principle of the museum, namely, to protect works or art from deterioration and finally disappearing, the ZKM has also taken on the task of creating the conditions under which works of art arise. It achieves this, firstly, by way of the »artists-in-residence« program, and secondly, by way of the house’s colleagues. This is why it is called center and not museum. Due to its high-profile technical development and production work, the ZKM is considered the »Max Planck Institute of Arts«.
With the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Media Museum, the Media Library, the Institute for Visual Media, the Institute for Music and Acoustics, and the Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems, the ZKM has at its disposal a multiple range of possibilities for developing interdisciplinary projects and international collaboration. In its work, the ZKM unifies production and research, exhibitions and events, education programs and documentaries. The ZKM is, therefore, capable of responding adequately to the rapid development of information technology and the transformation of social structures. As »Mecca of Media Arts«, the ZKM treats the innovative communications and information technologies along with the options these opens up for art and the resulting social transformations, at both theoretical and practical levels.
By combining archive and collections, exhibitions and events, research and production, the ZKM is in a unique position to adequately illustrate the development of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and not least because the ZKM‘s collection, exhibition and research activities are accompanied by symposia and other platforms of theoretical discourse in philosophy, science, art, politics and the economy.
(Source: http://zkm.de/en/about-us)
