RTRU is committed to the expanding universe of technical images in contemporary art practice. Our central premise is that art and emerging media don’t pre-exist culture, but instead emerge from it. The feedback loop between media and its reception, between technics and culture, suggests a transductive relationship: bodies, images, technologies, and aesthetic modes merge in relation to and co-determine one another. It is only through engagements with and mediations of contemporary culture that we can effectively investigate and observe the technoculture that augments and shapes our world. We value and hope to display artwork and writing that is invested in the sub-perceptual effects that result from the contemporary regime of images.

By revealing novel ways art and technology affect one another, RTRU critiques the contemporary framing of emerging media/technology as entirely aligned with an economy of representation, and pushes back against the notion that born-digital art, NFTs, and Web 3.0 are de-facto emancipatory technologies. We situate emerging media in pre-histories that are recognizable, rather than as the unique products of contemporary transformations.

By invitation only, RTRU commissions and gathers materials from culture workers—artists, curators, writers—that present multifaceted engagements with current theoretical trends while also questioning the hegemony of techno-positivist paradigms. RTRU is looking for something in present modes of visualization that are functions or signs of things to come—evidence of the ways we are starting to see ourselves more dynamically. Furthermore, RTRU emphasizes a focus on the particular localities of Riga, Latvia, the Baltics, and New York City, US, as well as the historical and cultural perspectives immanent to them.

Published on a seasonal basis, RTRU will take on a different theme that will guide the work commissioned for each iteration. At RTRU, rigorous, thought-provoking and decidedly niche content manifests as an educational depository. Though the name of the site denotes a possible connection to an existing technical university, it is more likely to occupy an informal, elective, and “passive” pedagogical model.

RTRU’s look-body is created, designed, and programmed by Becca Abbe. Not only does it reveal the inner workings of its indexically-designed, web-based framework, but through its grid-based guiding structure, further activates the thematic arc conducted by our contributors, giving us a chance to peer “from behind.”

Yours,
RTRU