Potential infrastructures: An unaccomplished project of a computer database of artistic culture at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, 1985–1995
Potential infrastructures: An unaccomplished project of a computer database of artistic culture at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, 1985–1995

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with a forgotten chapter in the history of museum informatics and digital museology in Poland. It presents the development of a nationwide computer database of information on the artistic culture at the Centre for Information and Documentation of Contemporary Art (CIDCA), established in 1985 within the structure of the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (CCA), Warsaw. The study focuses on the factors responsible for the emergence and the ultimate failure of this pioneering initiative between 1985 and 1995. Subsequent attempts to develop digital databases at the CCA, from the mid-1990s to the present, are also addressed. The analysis combines the perspectives of infrastructure studies and potential history. Based on archival research and interviews with the institution’s staff, the purpose and the structure of the database are traced and the economic, technological, institutional, organisational, legal and political infrastructures of the late socialist and transitional period in Poland that were negotiated in the process of its development are reconstructed. The effort to build the database infrastructure is shown to be both an example of the local infrastructure fetishism and a gesture that maintains the existence of a productive potential and transfers it over time.

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