CRAC - Liljevalchs

There is some art that you manage to pull off and some that you don’t. CRAC (Creative Room for Art and Computing) is one of the reasons why so much of contemporary art in Sweden is pulled off, brought off, carried through, realized, fulfilled, completed, brought to fruition—or however you want to put it.
CRAC is not a high-profile player in the art world but for whoever is trying to get a grasp on the different facilities and forms of production available to contemporary Swedish art, CRAC is a given. “An artist-run media lab for various forms of digital technologies” is a description of CRAC as bone dry as it is accurate. But to describe the role CRAC plays in contemporary art, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s old rhizome really fits the bill again. These two French gentlemen used the rhizome as a metaphor for a non-hierarchical network—one now adopted by the Internet, among other places. In the case of CRAC, however, the metaphor will serve to emphasize something that is not always visible but whose existence is vital for what shoots up to the surface, the surface here being the Swedish and international art scenes and their audiences.
CRAC is itself an indicator of how the geography and hierarchy of the art world has changed in recent years. Artists no longer see any good reason to wait around for invitations from others with more initiative. The time of artists as wallflowers is past; they are now creating their own networks to make things happen. There are also no longer any clear-cut reasons for an artist to relocate to a major metropolis. Contemporary art has become local and global at the same time and artistic work can happen both at the center and at the periphery. And as far as CRAC goes, if a problem, a good idea, and a promising space all meet on a windy street in Stockholm, then artists will take things into their own hands. And that is roughly how CRAC started once upon a time.

For artists working with digital technologies and production in the 90s, the equipment was painfully expensive. A few people in Stockholm were saying that none of them had the money or even the desire to make their studios or apartments into a mini technologyland. One solution, they thought, was to split the costs and maybe create a shared space where for a nominal fee you could have access to the most advanced equipment. Said and done! In 1997, the work was complete and CRAC could start to accept members. From a few founding members and work stations, CRAC now has 30 cutting-edge work stations and roughly 350 active artist members from both Sweden and abroad. News of CRAC and the people who make it possible has slowly but surely spread. Today, there are many contacts between CRAC and other Swedish and international groups. These contacts comprise both massive institutions and lone individuals active in art, technology, and research. In this way, CRAC has developed from a quite local concern to a national and international space for both the production and the discussion of digitally-based art.

During CRAC’s lifetime, Sweden has undergone what the media has named ”the IT Revolution.” From CRAC’s point of view, it must seem somewhat strange to see how society and capital have now suddenly opened their eyes to the digital tools and forms that artists have been familiar with for a long time. To be working in such an interim period has been, and still is, both pleasant and laborious for CRAC. In the era of IT in Sweden, CRAC is one of the few places within the sphere of art that offers room for a both critical and enthusiastic examination and discussion of what the Internet and related phenomena mean for art and communication.

What happens at CRAC is above all about multiplicity and avoiding uniformity. CRAC seems every now and then to function as the least common denominator for the many and very different members and artistic concerns. There are people here who use digital media as an essential part of their artistic practice and others who do not let the technology have a prominent place in their final output. Here we find both the groups whose work is shown in prestigious international exhibits and the circles who work is visible in the national and local art scenes. There are people who practically live in front of the work stations and others who show up a couple of times a year. We could go on, but the point is that CRAC is characterized by the members’ diversity rather than their similarity. CRAC is far from being a trademark for a certain kind of art or a certain kind of artist.
It is nevertheless true that several of the younger Swedish artists that are now attracting a great deal of attention on the international art scene are CRAC members. Success is hardly the main criterion within the walls of CRAC but artists of such caliber are nevertheless important ambassadors for an organization that welcomes all practicing artists to apply for membership. In return for membership, CRAC ask for a small annual fee, a heavily subsidized hourly fee for using the equipment, and a minimal fee for materials used. And CRAC would certainly be grateful for any acknowledgement from better-funded institutions which receive massive discounts on the production costs of so much contemporary work because the artists have individual memberships in CRAC. But that is a whole other discussion, as they always say whenever questions of cultural politics come up.

Annika Hansson
Editor-in-chief, CRAC in Context www.crac.org
Translation: Sina Najafi