IOCOSE
All of Your Base

Exhibition
1 December 2021–14 January 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Curated by
Claudia D’Alonzo

The artistic practice of IOCOSE collective focuses on the failure of narratives about the future and technological innovation while producing new interpretations of imaginaries, iconographies and rhetorics, sabotaging their original meanings through often surreal poetics. All of Your Base presents the video animations Pointing at a New Planet (2020) and Free from History (2021). The works are the first two chapters of in-progress research on the NewSpace Economy, the movement of extraterrestrial colonization through private investments that is expanding its scope from Silicon Valley to outer space.

In Pointing at a New Planet, a male hand crosses an alien landscape, pointing at an invisible destination. The lone limb is that of Elon Musk, one of the main protagonists of NewSpace. In order to bring it to life, IOCOSE has collected online videos of his public appearances as SpaceX’s CEO, creating a 3D casting and reconstructing the proxemics used by the entrepreneur to push our imagination towards unknown planets through pointing with his forefinger. This gesture has long been investigated by the collective for its multiple symbologies: within the iconographic tradition it is used to indicate knowledge, scientific progress or the future, but also as an image of command, deception and illusion. The journey of the hand is accompanied by a karaoke that mixes some of Musk’s most sensationalist statements with the voice of Albertine Sarges, author and performer of the melody.

In the sequel Free from History, the hand arrives on Mars and begins a process of adapting the planet to human life. Albertine Sarges once again gives voice to the mashup of texts taken from websites and statements of investment funds urging the expansion of markets beyond Earth’s borders. Through the double click on the landscape that the mouse pointer typically performs in terraforming video games, the hand makes trees, buildings and rollercoasters appear out of nowhere, as well as marvels of science and new forms of interplanetary entertainment. Among the constructions generated by the creating hand is a complex of geodesic domes, a form that IOCOSE also physically presents in the exhibition space through its installation. The geodesic dome was made famous in the 1950s by Richard Buckminster Fuller who used it as a structure to symbolize a sense of confidence in progress, technology and the future. Its use spread rapidly in diverse sectors, initially in institutionalized science and the military to then gradually enter mass culture. In the 1960s, thanks in part to the growth of the myth of Fuller, for many a visionary and innovative guru, the geodesic dome was appropriated by counter-cultural circles: its model was used for the self-built constructions of hippie communes, such as Drop City, the radical architecture of Archigram or Cedric Price, and the ephemeral structures hosting happenings and Expanded Cinema, the first expressions of multimedia art. Like the videodomes by Stan VanDerBeek, a visionary media art pioneer who in the late ‘60s saw in the geodesic dome the representation of “Cultural intercom”, a model of knowledge of the future based on a global network of interconnected links and nodes. The exhibition All of Your Base evokes some of the cultural references used by the NewSpace Economy gurus that hybridize individualism, libertarianism, neoliberal economics, counterculture and utopianism. IOCOSE brings out how their narratives about the future actually tell us very ancient stories, rooted in western collective imaginaries. The figure of the male genius, able by himself to create worlds from nothing and conquer new wild territories, now pushes – by his own hand – the progress of humanity beyond the borders of the Earth.

THE AUTHORS

IOCOSE are a collective of four artists: Matteo Cremonesi (Brescia, IT), Filippo Cuttica (London, UK), Davide Prati (Berlin, DE) and Paolo Ruffino (London, UK). They have been working as a group since 2006. IOCOSE investigates how the narratives surrounding the future of technology leave traces on the present. They work mostly with video installations and digital images and have been exhibiting internationally at several art institutions and festivals, including MAMbo (Bologna, 2018), OGR Torino (2018, 2021), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland, 2017), The Photographers’ Gallery (London, 2016, 2018), Tate Modern (London, 2011), Science Gallery (Dublin, 2012), Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2011), FACT (Liverpool, 2012), MACRO (Rome, 2012, 2017) and Transmediale (Berlin, 2013, 2015). Their work is featured in publications such as Wired magazine, The Creators Project, Flash Art, Liberation, Der Spiegel, El Pais, Adbusters, Neural and Vanity Fair, and on television channels RAI and France4.

THE CURATOR

Claudia D’Alonzo is an independent researcher and curator with a PhD in Audiovisual Studies and a Master’s degree from the Modena Photography Foundation. She teaches at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and the Accademia di belle arti G. Carrara in Bergamo. He has curated projects for Centrale Fies, Cimatics, Careof, Digicult, ICA Milano and the Subtle Technologies Festival and written for Alfabeta2, Digicult, doppio zero, Exibart and Motherboard. Her essays have been published by Mimesis International and Amsterdam University Press.

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