<nettime> The New Art Foundation opens the New Art Centre in Reus (Catalonia, Spain) with the inaugural exhibition Hello World!

[Vicente Matallana via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hello, dear nettimers,

A public service anouncemnt!

On October 2, 2025, the New Art Foundation opens the New Art Centre in Reus (Catalonia, Spain) with the inaugural exhibition Hello World!

This is not the launch of another museum: the Centre is explicitly conceived as public-service infrastructure for the artistic community. It is a 3,000 m² working organism with 700 m² of galleries, 500 m² of workshops and labs, and 1,500 m² / 4,000 m³ of dynamic, specialized storage, designed to put tools, knowledge, and time within reach of artists, technicians, institutions, schools, and collectives. Here conservation, production, documentation, and exhibition happen in continuity and are available to those who need them: what usually stays invisible, repairs, calibrations, curatorial trials, forms part of the Centre’s public metabolism, activated with and for the community.

The opening is not a beginning ex nihilo but the visible result of two decades of collective work. Since 2003, the New Art Collection (formerly BEEP Collection) has commissioned, produced, and preserved works of technological art. We do not “own” this collection; we steward it as common infrastructure, a reservoir of practices and prototypes that would otherwise have disappeared. It belongs to the artists who made it possible, to those who kept it alive, and to the communities who will reuse it. The Centre crystallizes those efforts: not a vault, but an operational node where continuity is sustained through open workshops, shared protocols, and an active storage (1,500 m² / 4,000 m³) prepared to preserve, activate, document, and lend.

The inaugural exhibition Hello World! brings together 27 works spanning six decades of technological art. That figure is just a threshold: the show mutates with the Centre’s daily operations, incorporating new works, restorations, and re-activations. Here, exhibition is a live service: a dynamic protocol inseparable from the work of keeping artworks alive and transferring know-how through technical support, short trainings, residencies, and co-productions.

The framework engages Humberto Maturana’s matristic orientation (non-hierarchical cooperation, trust, care), Heinz von Foerster’s cybernetic reminder that the observer is part of the system, and Donna Haraway’s account of hybrid assemblages of humans, machines, and organisms. In this sense, technology is not neutral equipment but a political medium that shapes what can be seen, said, and imagined; our task is to make its practices sustainable as a common good.

Why now, why here? Because technological art remains precarious. An estimated 70% of works with physical components produced over the last forty years have already disappeared. Markets did not step in, many institutions looked away, and artists had to self-conserve, often unsuccessfully. The New Art Centre therefore defines itself as an essential service: preserving by activating. Works live when they can be switched on, tested, diagnosed, updated, and circulated; that is what the workshops and the operational storage of 1,500 m² / 4,000 m³, along with living documentation protocols, interoperability, mediation, and access programs (residencies, loans, technical advisory), are for.

Thus, Hello World! is not a decorative title. It is both a greeting and an operational statement: the Centre as a language in use, rewritten with every interaction. Twenty years of practice are condensed here, not as private property but as shared cultural infrastructure in service of the artistic community, and, at the same time, a new cycle begins.

We look forward to seeing you here.

We are waiting you here.

Vicente Matallana
New Art Foundation 
NewArt Centre 
Director
www.newartfoundation.art
info@newartf.org
Carretera de Constantí, Km.3, TV-7211
43204 Reus – Tarragona – Spain

 

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