[spectre] EastUnBloc: Networks of Net Art – Syndicate and Deep Europe, 13 Jan 2026, Berlin NGBK

[Andreas Broeckmann]

EastUnBloc: Networks of Net Art – Syndicate and Deep Europe

Tue, 13.1.26, 7.00 pm

nGbK
Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 11, 10178 Berlin, 1st floor
Admission: free

with Tereza Havlíková (netzkunst.berlin) and Andreas Broeckmann (curator
and researcher)

Mailing lists played an important role in net art in the 1990s. They 
were tools for sharing open calls, organising events and circulating art 
news. But they were also public spaces for fostering connections and 
building discourse around media art. In 1996, the Syndicate mailing list 
was started as an „East-West Network“, exploring the possibilities of 
collaboration and explicitly reaching out to artists in the newly 
„reconnected“ Eastern Europe. As the name suggests, the members of the 
mailing list saw themselves as part of translocal relationships and a 
wider community.

The EastUnBloc exhibition argues that net art is shaped by storytelling. 
Therefore, Tereza Havlíková invited Andreas Broeckmann, one of the 
initiators and administrators of the Syndicate mailing list, to share 
the stories of this particular network. Together, they revisit the term 
„Deep Europe“, which was associated with the Syndicate network and 
fostered a European identity that transcended national borders, 
„enmeshed in a complex ‘felt’ of layers“. By exploring the Syndicate 
archive and viewing net artworks created in close proximity to this art 
and culture network, we hope to capture some of the spirit that drove 
net artists in Europe in the mid-1990s, a time of political and 
technological transition.

Andreas Broeckmann is an art historian and curator who lives in Berlin. 
He is a Visiting Professor in the PhD Program at Malmö Art Academy, and 
he teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig (HGB – Hochschule für 
Grafik und Buchkunst) where he holds an Honorary Professorship. He was a 
member of the Berlin-based media association mikro. In 1996 he 
initiated, together with Inke Arns and others, the Syndicate mailing 
list which was intended as an East-West network for artists, activists 
and journalists working in and with new media.

Tereza Havlíková is an art historian and curator based in Berlin and 
Bochum. Her research focuses on net art and digital art within the 
broader context of internet history and culture. She is a founding 
member of the Zentrum für Netzkunst (ZfN) initiative in Berlin, which 
reconstructs, archives and presents early net art, with a particular 
focus on the Berlin scene. Since 2024, she has been a research assistant 
at Ruhr University Bochum, focusing on new media art. She is currently 
working on her doctoral thesis about the localities of net art.