archivuminternetwork
30 years of artpool.hu

22 May – 14 August 2026
Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest

Installation / event
curated by Judit Bodor and Roddy Hunter

➤ OPENING EVENT WITH PERFORMANCE 

Thursday, 21 May 2026, 18:00 pm (CET)

Opening speech: Beáta Hock, researcher (Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe)

Performance: Roddy Hunter: a u t o m a t i n g {a r t p o o l . h u} 

➤ ASSOCIATED EVENT

Thursday, 21 May 2026, 16.00-18.00 pm (CET)

HISTORY/REALITY #4: from The Garden of Communication to the Dark Forest of the Internet
An afternoon of presentations, performances, and discussion

Partly hybrid event held in English

For online participation booking is essential. Free tickets via Eventbrite.

More info

archivuminternetwork
30 years of artpool.hu

archivuminternetwork marks 30 years of Artpool Art Research Center’s presence on the internet. Since its launch in December 1995, artpool.hu has expanded György Galántai's idea of the ‘active archive’ into digital time and space, where art and information exist in flux and flow, becoming, at times, indivisible. Hence the exhibition’s portmanteau title, archivuminternetwork

The visual, sound and video installation situates artpool.hu within a broader history of artistic engagement with emerging communication technologies in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly during the rapid political and social transformations of the late twentieth century. As one of the few cultural websites to have operated continuously since the early days of the public internet in Hungary, artpool.hu reflects Artpool’s commitment to open access and the circulation of ideas beyond physical boundaries. 

archivuminternetwork reaches forward and back through this history to explore the archive itself as an information technology across analogue and digital media from telephone-based works to decentralised networks. Archival materials, including hand-drawn sitemaps, appear alongside later works that explore systems theory, computation, and ‘digital thinking’ through assemblage sculpture.

Looking beyond social or cultural interpretations, archivuminternetwork presents artpool.hu as a way to understand György Galántai’s view of the world wide web as cosmological, as a ‘random galaxy’ or virtual universe. In this space, art functions as information, circulating and flowing through time and space, and inviting us to reflect on broader metaphysical questions about reality and existence, and on how such systems continue to reshape the ways we create, share, and understand knowledge today.

By examining how Artpool developed ways of working with once-unfamiliar technologies, such as the internet, archivuminternetwork also invites reflection on the present. How might artists, archivists and curators continue to develop new approaches in an age of automation and superintelligence - systems we are still only beginning to understand?

➤ The visual and sound installation is open to the public from May 22 to August 14, 2026, on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. by appointment (artpool@szepmuveszeti.hu).

Opening performance by Roddy Hunter: (back)

a u t o m a t i n g {a r t p o o l . h u} is a live performance exploring digital preservation as both an act of care and an act of anxiety. Hunter, performing as an ‘insecurity guard’ within the museum, patrols the exhibition archivuminternetwork. paying particular attention to a screen recording of an unseen hand preserving random, unarchived webpages of artpool.hu—the long-running website of the Artpool Art Research Center. Beyond documenting the process of webpage preservation, the video recording simulates preservation in an age of automated systems, such as AI.

a u t o m a t i n g {a r t p o o l . h u} is the third in a series of performances exploring the conceptual and material reality of digital culture. The first, D I G I T I S I N G (2018), combined live streaming with video feedback to speculate upon the transformation of human presence through its multiplication and incremental, eventual erasure. The second, R E - R E C O R D I N G (Pete Horobin's 'Digestive Biscuit Action', 1986) (2024), extended this investigation into live and mediated presence through reactivating a performance by Pete Horobin in The Attic Archive.