Chora

Gaia Radić
Gaia Radić
Chora

Curated by
Maja Burja

Exhibition
2–24 October 2024
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 2 October at 7 PM

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists


With her immersive video installation Chora, artist Gaia Radić introduces a new chapter in the body of virtual worlds that perform as perceptual narratives and transform the spaces they inhabit into autopoietic worlding systems.

In Chora, the space waits in stillness for a visitor. Upon their arrival, a split point of view emerges within the expansive virtuality. Through two opposing apertures, a geological terrain, seemingly unbound by any specific site, begins to unfold. The world, comprised of interconnected lagoons, appears to overflow with an ethereal primordial liquid, keeping the space in constant flux.

This steady stream guides the visitor’s eye along the creased topology that is, in turn, slowly winding its way through the viewer as well. In this encounter, the viewer’s perceptual organs become channels through which the space reflects upon itself. Chora both shapes and is shaped by its material host and realises its generative potential when the physical and virtual realms meet through the viewer’s perception.

The heterotopic space functions as a sieve where one world is reflected and refracted into another, producing a self-referential reality that continually reforms itself. For as soon as self-formulation begins, dissipation follows. When the viewer leaves, the landscape settles, and Chora returns to its dormant state until the arrival of a new body.

THE AUTHOR

Aleksandar Selak

Gaia Radić is a new media artist working with computer graphics and spatial installation. She holds a BA in Sculpture from the Academy in Rijeka. Currently, she is pursuing her master’s studies in Video, Animation and New Media as well as studying architecture at the University of Ljubljana. She has exhibited in many solo exhibitions and over thirty group shows across Croatia and Slovenia and was the recipient of the ERSTE Award at the 36th Youth Salon in Zagreb.

THE CURATOR

Maja Burja is a curator and producer of new media art. Her work is characterised by a critical engagement with emerging and obsolete technology and an interest in cybernetics, metafiction and emergent gameplay. She has curated and produced several art exhibitions and projects, artist residencies, lectures, workshops, meetups and festivals. She has been collaborating regularly with Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory since 2018 and Aksioma since 2022.

CREDITS

Author: Gaia Radić
Curator and author of the text: Maja Burja
Music and sound: Gašper Torkar
Technical assistance: Oskar Kandare

Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2024
Part of the U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Financial support: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana and The Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia

Thanks: Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory, Projekt Atol Institute, Andrej Škufca

The final projection was rendered in cooperation with the Czech National Supercomputing Center IT4Innovations, VSB – Technical University of Ostrava.

Končna projekcija je bila upodobljena v sodelovanju s Češkim nacionalnim superračunalniškim centrom IT4Innovations, VSB – Tehniška univerza v Ostravi.

    Tactics&Practice [podcast]: The Future Behind Us

    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

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    We have lived alongside dogs for thousands of years. How close have we grown to each other since we first domesticated them? In one of her performances, artist Maja Smrekar biologically manipulated her body so that she could use her own breast milk to feed an Icelandic Spitz puppy. Behind its spectacular and, for some, controversial guises, Smrekar’s exploration of transpecies motherhood probed uncomfortable issues such as the instrumentalisation of female bodies, the problematic position of the human species at the top and centre of ecosystems, the ambiguities of biotechnological promises and the prospect of a post-human world.



    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: Maja Smrekar

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The Future Behind Us | Ep. #9: When an AI Governs Your City [w/ Pinar Yoldas]

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    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: Pinar Yoldas

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The Future Behind Us | Ep. #8: Taming AI, Playing AI [w/ Sanela Jahić]

    Can everything – including vision, flexibility, imagination and other skills often associated with creative practices – be turned into data? Should artists feel threatened by AIs that compose music, make animation movies or write novels? Or is there something intrinsically uncomputable in the artistic mind? Are predictive algorithms creators’ friends or foes? Can you automate artistic processes and gestures?

    Artist Sanela Jahić collaborates with engineers, lecturers in creative and social computing as well as experts in health informatics to investigate workers’ subordination to machinery, the possible automation of artistic practices and the role of algorithms in the transition towards authoritarianism.


    Additional content

    Sanela Jahic
    https://sanelajahic.com

    NO TO AI, YES TO A NON-FASCIST APPARATUS
    https://sanelajahic.com/works/no-to-ai-yes-to-a-non-fascist-apparatus

    Books and authors mentioned in the conversation:

    Matko Meštrović
    https://monoskop.org/Matko_Me%C5%A1trovi%C4%87

    Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, 2007 (Basic Books)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

    Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, 2022 (Bristol University Press)
    https://danmcquillan.org/pages/book.html


    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: Sanela Jahić

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The Future Behind Us | Ep. #7: Solidarity, Perils and Ethics on Darknet Markets [w/ !Mediengruppe Bitnik]

    Darknet markets, identity shielding, bots and cryptocurrencies have revolutionised commerce and society, each in its own way. What happens when you bring all these disrupting ingredients together? Doma Smoljo and Carmen Weisskopf from !Mediengruppe Bitnik created a piece of software that randomly buys goods and services on the darknet and then gets them shipped to an art gallery. Alongside the passport scan and the odd pair of fake designer sneakers, the artists gained insights into who or what is legally responsible when a bot buys illicit goods, the emergence of new grey zones and the quality of the services provided by sellers on darkmarkets.


    Additional content

    !Mediengruppe Bitnik
    https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org

    Random Darknet Shopper
    https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/r

    What Happens When a Software Bot Goes on a Darknet Shopping Spree?
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/software-bot-darknet-shopping-spree-random-shopper

    ISSA – Island School of Social Autonomy
    https://issa-school.org


    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: !Mediengruppe Bitnik 

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The Future Behind Us | Ep. #6: Chasing the Physicality of the Internet [w/ Evan Roth]

    Internet has obliterated borders, distances and other hallmarks of geography, making us forget its material reality: its data centres, wires, routers, processors and a vast network of intercontinental cables. Artist Evan Roth has travelled the globe to make infrared videos of coastal landscapes where fiberoptic submarine cables emerge from the sea to enable communication across oceans.
    Contemplating the infrastructure that makes and shapes the internet helps us see through the digital noise, find new ways to share space with people we’ve never met and delineate a more complex picture of the vulnerabilities and complexities that shape the dynamics and geopolitics of 21st-century communication systems.


    Additional content

    Evan Roth
    https://www.evan-roth.com

    Red Lines
    https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/red-lines

    Books mentioned in the conversation:

    Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, 2012 (Ecco)
    https://www.andrewblum.net/tubes-2

    Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, 2014 (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company)
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250062598/thepeoplesplatform

    Arden Reed, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell, 2019 (University of California Press)
    https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520300583/slow-art


    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: Evan Roth 

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The Future Behind Us | Ep. #5: Social Justice, Satire and Video Games [w/ Paolo Pedercini from MOLLEINDUSTRIA]

    Can you make video games about environmental justice or labour? How about religion, the military, gun violence, mass incarceration, immigration or the Anthropocene? Can you entertain players with such hard-hitting matters? Can you use games to make players reflect on ethics, politics and the economy? Since 2003, MOLLEINDUSTRIA has been devising “artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games”. What started as a project to create mordant parodies soon became one of the most iconic pioneering works of critical video games



    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: Paolo Pedercini from MOLLEINDUSTRIA 

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The Future Behind Us | Ep. #4: Up-Close and Personal with Impersonal Power Structures [w/ Jill Magid]

    What does it feel to infiltrate or work alongside structures of power that most of us find impersonal and intimidating? How do you capitalise on the systemic loopholes and quirks inherent to institutions of authority such as intelligence agencies, corporations, bureaucracies and law enforcement agencies? Artist, author and filmmaker Jill Magid makes use of small institutional quirks to establish an intimate connection with people “on the inside” and probe the emotional, philosophical and legal tensions between the individual and the institutions that govern our lives.



    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: Jill Magid 

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The Future Behind Us | Ep. #3: How Much is Your Democracy Worth? [w/ UBERMORGEN]

    In 2000, during the presidential race between George Bush and Al Gore, a group of “Maverick Austrian Business People” launched a platform that gave US voters the possibility to auction off their votes to bidders on the internet. Thirteen US states attempted to shut down the project with temporary restraining orders and injunctions. The media circus around the project was mind-boggling. As for the maverick business people behind the scandalous proposal, they were not entrepreneurs, they were artists: Liz Haas and Lúzius Bernhard from UBERMORGEN. Their artistic intervention went viral long before “becoming viral” was part of our vocabulary. What does this say about the enduring confusion between fact and fiction, the opacity of democratic institutions under capitalism and the ease with which a duo of provocateurs can manipulate the attention of the mass media?



    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: UBERMORGEN

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The Future Behind Us | Ep. #2: Decolonising Museum Collections [w/ Nora Al-Badri]

    The discussion about the growing list of looted and illicitly acquired museum treasures is one that most Westerners would rather not think about. Unless a scandal, a protest, a movie or a contemporary artwork forces ex-colonising countries to confront the firm grip that their institutions maintain on access to knowledge, cultural materials and the global narratives of history. Since 2016, Nora Al-Badri has been developing artworks that use AI, deepfake technology and 3D scanning to spark debates about power imbalances and ethical museum practices.



    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: Nora Al-Badri 

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The Future Behind Us | Ep. #1: PsyOps and Other Secret Military Programmes [w/Trevor Paglen]

    Over the years, Trevor Paglen has documented operations, locations and activities that were meant to remain hidden from the public. He has tracked and photographed the world of secret satellites, flew in a helicopter over the NSA headquarters with the express purpose of taking aerial photographs of it and, in the early 2000s, investigated the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme which consisted of kidnapping, disappearing and torturing people that the agency accused of terrorism.

    The artist, author and geographer discusses suspicious activities in the night sky, classified programmes and the weaponisation of human perception in the context of military and civilian influence operations.


    Additional content

    Trevor Paglen
    https://paglen.studio

    Doty
    https://paglen.studio/2023/05/10/doty

    Trevor Paglen, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World, 2008 (Melville House)
    https://paglen.studio/2020/04/22/symbology-patches


    COLOPHON

    Host: Régine Debatty
    Guest: Trevor Paglen 

    Recording: Régine Debatty
    Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

    The Future Behind Us podcast series

    Curated by: Régine Debatty
    Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

    Produced by: Marcela Okretič

    Production:
    Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

    Part of:
    PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

    Conceived and co-organised by:
    Aksioma

    For:
    Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

    Produced and co-organised by:
    Nova Gorica Arts Centre

    In the framework of:
    GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

    Supported by:
    the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

    The Kawayoku Tales: Aestheticisation of Violence in Military, Gaming, Social Media Cultures and Other Stories

    Noura Tafeche

    Kawayoku, a hybrid research area, explores the intersections of cuteness culture, digital warfare and the aestheticisation of violence in an era of semiotic ambiguity and post-truth. From the fetishisation of Weapons Grade Waifus and anthropomorphic warships in games like Azur Lane to the “Israeli” Defense Forces’ TikTok strategies, the essay reveals how cuteness and entertainment serve as tools of domestication, converging state-nationalism with the impish, and the uniform with the algorithm.

    Noura Tafeche is a visual artist and independent researcher with a focus on net.art and radical entertainment. Her research delves into phenomena related to online visual cultures, aestheticisation of violence on digital platforms, linguistic experimentation and visual representation
    of speculative imaginaries.


    Colophon

    Noura Tafeche
    The Kawayoku Tales: Aestheticisation of Violence in Military, Gaming, Social Media Cultures and Other Stories

    PostScriptUM #51
    Series edited by Janez Fakin Janša

    Publisher: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
    Represented by: Marcela Okretič

    Editorial assistant: Rok Kranjc
    Proofreading: Miha Šuštar
    Design: Federico Antonini
    Layout: Sonja Grdina

    Cover image: Noura Tafeche’s 2024 collage based on images from Azur Lane, licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA: Dace, illustrated by 梦咲枫; Monarch, illustrated by Liduke; Juno, illustrated by 梦咲枫; screenshot of a “fleet build” by Reddit user niteshumo57

    © Aksioma | All text and image rights reserved by their respective authors
    Ljubljana, August 2024

    Published in the frame of the project .expub funded by the European Union.
    https://networkcultures.org/expub

    Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not
    necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education
    and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor
    EACEA can be held responsible for them.

    Additionally supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.

    This publication expands on the video essay published by the Institute of Network Cultures in THE VOID on 26 September 2023. https://networkcultures.org/void/2023/09/26/kawayoku-inception/

    The PostScriptUM Anthology (2010–2023)

    Essays on Art, Technology, Society and the Environment

    Language: English


    … AI, airports, algorithm, anthropocene, asset-based protocols, authorship, belonging, big data, bio art, blockchain, bot, calligraphy, capitalism, carbon footprint, CCTV, citizenship, classes, climate change, collaboration, computing infrastructure, cookies, criticism, crypto, cryptography, custumisation, DAOs, data mining, death of the author, debris, deep state, deep web, delegation society, digital capitalism, ecology, encryption, entreprecariat, fake/prank, finance, gender, gig economy, growth, hacking, hacktivism, hidden landscapes, human/nature, humor, hyperobjects, identity, images, incorporation, indie game, infrastructures, institutions, intelligence agencies, internet, labour, language, Luther Blissett, media culture, media event, memes, microplastics, military, names, nature, net art, new extractivism, NFTs, obfuscation, observing, offshoring, overidentification, ownership, peer-to-peer, performance, piracy, platform economy, politics, poor image, portrait, post-capitalism, post-growth, post-human, power, precarity, predictive algorithm, privacy, production, pseudoevent, radical geography, readymade, recycling, re-enactment, repurposing technologies, scale, secret operations, security, seduction, seeing, self-exploitation, software, speed, stateless machines, steganography, story/narrative, storytelling, surveillance, tax havens, temporality, theatre, utopia, visibility, waste, world building …

    What can an anthology on art, technology, society and the environment tell us about the future? In a period of a prolonged generalised crisis, to what extent can critical texts and culture at large offer tools for thinking and acting? Overwhelmed with the feeling that we have no agency to affect what happens in the world nowadays, the only way to step forward might be to look back without losing our desire and urge to affect the present and shape the future.


    Colophon

    The PostScriptUM Anthology (2010–2023)
    Essays on Art, Technology, Society and the Environment

    Contributors: Aude Launay, Bojana Kunst, Clémence Seurat, Daniela Silvestrin, Dušan Kažić, Eva & Franco Mattes, Felix Stalder, Florian Cramer, Geoff Cox, Ida Hiršenfelder, Inke Arns, James Bridle, Jaya Klara Brekke, Jon Lackman, Lev Kreft, Marc Garrett, Martin Zeilinger, Matthew Fuller, Mojca Kumerdej, monochrom, Nika Mahnič, Paolo Ruffino, Primož Krašovec, Régine Debatty, RYBN, Silvio Lorusso, Steve Rushton, Tomislav Medak, Trevor Paglen, Valentina Tanni, Vuk Ćosić

    Editors: Daphne Dragona, Domenico Quaranta
    Editor in chief: Janez Fakin Janša
    Editorial assistant: Rok Kranjc

    Language editor: Miha Šuštar
    Design and layout: Federico Antonini, Simone Cavallin
    Print: Collegium Graphicum
    No. of copies: 350

    Published by: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
    Represented by: Marcela Okretič

    Ljubljana, April 2024
    © Aksioma, the authors

    Promotion and distribution: Sonja Grdina

    Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana

    Sprawl

    Blaž Miklavčič
    Blaž Miklavčič
    Sprawl

    Curated by
    Maja Burja

    Exhibition
    28 August–27 September 2024
    Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

    Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists


    Morphogenesis has begun. The system, temporarily halted at an indistinct point between growth and decay, is occupying its surroundings with a totipotent force of transformation. The latter opens up an unpredictable area, with individual vortices in the structure that subside and then, transformed, seep at another, distant point in this anomalous complex …

    Sprawl is a spatial organisation of forms that establishes an asemic taxonomic practice as a radical departure from the linear and hierarchical understanding of evolution. In the setup, classification is recursively embedded into the formation process to activate the performative productivity of the diagram as an organism. The system, which is both a taxonomic model and an organism, operates horizontally and in dynamic interdependence of its parts. These occupy states in between the processes of growth, folding, differentiation and decay, which emerge from different directions simultaneously and materialise at the nodes as strange remnants.

    If the system is observed as a process where technology mutates into a body – the physical material of an organism – the artefacts are the sediments of specific temporalities and dimensionalities of the processes of procedural generation, which, much like taxonomic practices have historically done, hallucinate entirely new (and non-existent) evolutionary branches and organisms. As a process where the body mutates into technology, however, it is permeated by an uncanny tension between the structure and its non-transparent operation. The system resists dispersal through self-interpretative feedback loops, producing new forms of organisation of its material, which in turn restructure the parameters of the emergent self-cognitive logic.

    The affect of ambient horror, usually neutralised by a taxonomic or diegetic operation that links the unclear to the tangible, is thus never resolved, as the system continues to develop new states, relentlessly resisting entropy and further expanding its productive orbit.

    THE AUTHOR

    Blaž Miklavčič studied fine arts and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. He currently lives in Amsterdam (NL), where he works in the field of visual effects and digital media. The primary focus of his artistic research are simulation of organic and biomorphic systems and the aesthetics of horror and science fiction. His work has been presented in various exhibitions and festivals, including Simbiome, Plaza Protocol, 2020; IFCA – International Festival of Computer Art, Maribor, 2019; CTM Vorspiel, Lighthouse of Digital Art, Berlin, 2023.

    THE CURATOR

    Maja Burja is a curator and producer of new media art. Her work is characterised by a critical engagement with emerging and obsolete technology and an interest in cybernetics, metafiction and emergent gameplay. She has curated and produced several art exhibitions and projects, artist residencies, lectures, workshops, meetups and festivals. She has been collaborating regularly with Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory since 2018 and Aksioma since 2022.

    CREDITS

    Author: Blaž Miklavčič
    Curator and author of the text: Maja Burja

    Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2024
    Part of the U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

    Financial support: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana

    Thanks: Andrej Škufca

    Handmade Networks

    Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré

    Handmade Networks presents a body of research-based artworks by Steffen Köhn and Nestor Siré. Their collaborative projects explore how the Cuban people have compensated for their lack of internet connectivity by building massive alternative infrastructures, such as grassroots community computer networks or offline “sneakernets”. They document how Cubans defy material scarcity by recycling or appropriating obsolete technologies, creating digital exchange platforms on messenger applications, or engaging in play-to-earn blockchain games. By examining the resilient and resistive potentials of these vernacular infrastructures, Köhn and Siré’s work also reimagines such networks as viable alternatives to the capitalist, consumerist digital infrastructures controlled by an oligopoly of Big Tech companies that have homogenised the global internet. 


    Colophon

    Handmade Networks
    Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré

    Contributors: Bani Brusadin, Erick J. Mota, Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré

    Editor: Janez Fakin Janša
    Editorial assistant: Rok Kranjc
    Copyediting: Miha Šuštar
    Design and layout: Federico Antonini, Simone Cavallin

    Print: Collegium Graphicum
    No. of copies: 300

    Published by: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

    Represented by: Marcela Okretič

    Ljubljana, June 2024 | © Aksioma, the authors

    Promotion and distribution: Sonja Grdina

    The research for and publication of this book were generously funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), project number 428086777.

      U30+ | Poziv mladim umetnikom

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