Témoin Considérable

Tomislav Medak

Témoin considérable (significant witness) is a term from medieval jurisprudence that referred to a witness whose testimony was more important than that of others. During a trial, for example, the testimony of at least 30 laymen was needed to compete with a bishop’s statement. Tomislav Medak, the témoin considérable of this event, will listen attentively to the proceedings, waiting until the end to respond from his own perspective to Hans Blumenberg’s question: “What was it that we from the outset wanted to know?”

Tomislav Medak’s theoretical interests are in contemporary political philosophy, media theory, and aesthetics. He is a free-software advocate and project leader of the Croatian Creative Commons team. He earned a degree in philosophy and German studies in 1997 from the University of Zagreb in Zagreb, Croatia. He has coordinated the theory program and publishing activities of MaMa – Multimedia Institute in Zagreb since 2000. Medak (co)curated and (co)organized a number of conferences and exhibitions dealing with political theory, commons, or cultural policy, most recently the international conference Economy of Crisis Capitalism and Ecology of the Commons in Zagreb (2012), the international conference Open Institutions – Institutional Imagination and Cultural Public Sphere, in Zagreb (2011), and an exhibition on the history of hacking, System.Hack, in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Novi Sad (2005–2007), which he created in collaboration with Marcell Mars. In 2012 he helped organize and coordinate the Croatian protests against the international intellectual property treaty ACTA.

Since 2001 he has been working with the Zagreb-based experimental theater collective BADco.; most recently he conceptualized the theater production A Pound of Hysteria, Acceleration… Melodrama (2013), worked as performer and dramaturge of the theater production The League of Time (2010), and as codirector and performer of the theater production 1 poor and one 0 (2008). With the collective he has created an interactive installation work, Responsibility for Things Seen, initially presented at the Croatian exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and since then in Oslo; Zagreb; Rijeka, Croatia; and Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is also a volunteer for the urban activist initiative Right to the City Zagreb. Medak is currently a fellow in the field of Performing Arts at Akademie Schloss Solitude.