Ben Grosser
Software for Less

Exhibition
25 May–22 June 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #12: New Extractivism

The last twenty years have been characterised by the rise of software. Software has made the web possible, animated the smartphone and, in the words of one big tech CEO, enabled a world that is “more open and connected.” However, the software that is now used every day by billions of people all over the world has embedded within it the capitalist ideologies of those who create it. Today’s software, which has its roots in the growth-obsessed corporate culture of Silicon Valley in the United States, wants what its creators want: more. This desire is fundamental because it determines how software works, what it does and what it makes (im)possible. The result is a global populace now dependent on software platforms that deliberately activate within users a “desire for more,” a need that software meets with its “like” counts, algorithmic feeds and endless notifications, all in the service of what big tech is most keen to achieve: more users, more data and more profits. And though wealth and fame has come to those who craft the platforms, their relentless focus on growth and scale has left a trail of destruction in society. Mental health, privacy and democracy are all casualties – diminished, while authoritarianism, racism and misinformation are emboldened. Twenty years after the rise of software, big tech’s drive for more has transformed its most lauded asset into its biggest liability.

For more than a decade, artist and programmer Ben Grosser has worked on projects meant to define, examine, reveal and defuse how software activates the desire for more: to “demetricate” social media (Facebook Demetricator, 2012), to defuse emotional surveillance (ScareMail, 2013), to confuse big data algorithms (GoRando, 2017), and to track and trace how the politics of interface become the politics of humanity. The exhibition presented at Aksioma focuses on his more recent work, the outcome from a new experiment aiming to generate a “Software for Less”. How would users feel if software platforms actively worked to reduce engagement rather than to produce it? What if software interfaces encouraged conceptions of time that are slow rather than fast? Why can’t software want less instead of more? Utilising custom methods such as software recomposition, techniques like data obfuscation and genres that include video supercuts and net art, Software for Less introduces functional applications and media-based artworks that tackle those questions, presenting works that produce less profit, less data and fewer users. It includes a social network that aims to limit compulsions to use it, systems that make AI-driven feeds less attractive to those they profile, and artefacts from investigations that reveal how a tiny few manipulates a broad public into a hyper state of more – and how disrupting that manipulation could point the way towards an alternative future. Not software for more, but Software For Less.

THE AUTHOR

Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines and systems that examine the cultural, social and political effects of software. Recent exhibition venues include the Barbican Centre in London, Museum Kesselhaus in Berlin, Museu das Comunicações in Lisbon and Galerie Charlot in Paris. His works have been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, El País, Libération, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegel. The Chicago Tribune called him the “unrivaled king of ominous gibberish.” Slate referred to his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” Grosser’s artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, Critical Code Studies and Technologies of Vision, as well as volumes centered on computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art and Digital Art. Grosser is an associate professor in the School of Art + Design and is co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

PUBLICATIONS

Valentina Tanni
The Great Algorithm
PostScriptUM #43

► eBROCHURE (PDF)
► PRINT ON DEMAND
► LIST ON ISSUU

New Extractivism

Interviewer: Mojca Kumerdej

Interviewees: Joana Moll, Vladan Joler, Disnovation.org, Ben Grosser

Editor: Janez Fakin Janša

WORKSHOP

Recomposing the Web: Tools and Techniques to Regain Agency in a Software-Driven World
ALUO, Ljubljana
25 May 2022, 2 PM–5 PM

In the framework of:
konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art

DISNOVATION.ORG
Post Growth Toolkit (The Game)

Workshop
20 April 2022, 2 PM-5 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Language: English

Aimed at:
art and design students, young artists, professors of visual art, new media and design, students and professionals in the fields of sociology, cultural anthropology and philosophy

Part of Tactics & Practice #12: New Extractivism
In the framework of konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art

The Earth’s ecosystems are undergoing irremediable changes as a result of human development, the source of a number of crises whose consequences can be measured on the scale of the planet. Rethinking our way of coexisting with our environment requires us to re-evaluate the continuous growth of our energy footprints. These prototypes of critical games “Post Growth Toolkit” are invitations to reprogram ourselves out of the economic growth orthodoxy. The series highlights the material conditions necessary to maintain our current standard of living in order to better understand how we may reproduce these differently. At the intersection of science and speculative fiction, the “Post Growth Toolkit” game proposes to literally reshuffle our world-views and to share stories, concepts and objects that we may re-examine how we are programmed and to thus stimulate new modes of understanding. It takes the form of a tactical card game: small groups of players are invited to explore a number of key notions. The game becomes a means of transmission and collective debate intended to help participants find their bearings in a period of radical change.

Takeaways: 

• better knowledge and critical thinking abilities about the flows of energy, matter and products in a globalised society 
• basic notions on cradle-to-grave analysis of commercial products
• basic notions on the links between infrastructure, industry, socio-cultural choices and ecosystems

DISNOVATION.ORG
Life Support System

Exhibition
20 April–20 May 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #12: New Extractivism

It is common to describe our relationships with society, the world, and the biosphere with metaphors from economics, which has specific understandings of value. With regard to the biosphere, today’s prevailing economics conventions are unable to recognize intrinsic value to the ecosystems on which all life depends. In cultures overdetermined by concepts from economics, we are left without adequate discursive instruments to socially or politically address the importance of the work of the biosphere.

The Life Support System experiment consists of 1 square meter of wheat, cultivated artificially in a closed environment. All inputs such as water, light, heat, and nutrients are measured, monitored and displayed for the public. This one square meter unit of Life Support System is capable of furnishing 1 day’s worth of necessary caloric nutrition for one human adult every 4 months. To feed a single human adult all year would require approximately 100 such units running concurrently. This procedure makes palpable the orders of magnitude, of material and energy flows, that are required to reproduce human nutritional requirements in closed or artificial environments, in contrast to outdoor agriculture on arable land. This indoor farm experiment is a counter-example which points to the vastness of the ecosystem contributions involved in conventional agriculture, that defy conventional economic reductionism.

By attempting to grow, in a closed environment, a staple food like wheat, which has historically provided the greatest proportion of necessary caloric intake for humans in Europe, this experiment provides a sense of scale of ecosystem contributions that are poorly acknowledged under the current economic conventions. The empirical “true-cost estimates” obtained through this indoor experiment are about 200€ per kilogram of wheat, an extravagant cost compared to the 15 cent per kilogram current market price. Though Hydroponics can be used for certain plants, for necessary caloric nutrition there is as yet no economically justifiable replacement for conventional agriculture embedded radically and immanently in the biosphere.

This experimental farm foregrounds the incalculable ecosystem services demands of conventional agriculture which we expect to access for free. On the other hand, closed environments must artificially reproduce these services at high social, energy and ecosystem costs which are mostly not accounted for. From a much broader perspective, this art experiment provides a speculative reference for a reckoning of the undervalued and over-exploited “work of the biosphere.” Ecosystem processes provide the primary value at the core of each of our daily economic interactions within society!

THE AUTHOR

DISNOVATION.ORG is a research collective set up in Paris in 2012, whose core members include Maria Roszkowska (PL), Nicolas Maigret (FR), and Baruch Gottlieb (CA). They work at the interface between contemporary art, research and hacking, and compose tailor-made teams for each investigation together with academics, activists, engineers, and designers. More specifically their recent artistic provocations seek to empower Post Growth imaginaries and practises by challenging the widespread faith that ‘economic growth’ and ‘technological fixes’ will solve the ecosystemic disruptions they produced in the first place. They recently co-edited A Bestiary of the Anthropocene with Nicolas Nova, an atlas of anthropic hybrid creatures, and The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy.

Their works have been exhibited, performed, published and reviewed worldwide, including at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), transmediale (Berlin), the Museum of Art and Design (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), FILE (Sao Paulo), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Strelka Institute (Moscow), ISEA (Hong Kong), Elektra (Montreal), China Museum of Digital Arts (Beijing), and the Chaos Computer Congress (Hamburg). Their work has been featured in Forbes, Vice, Wired, Motherboard, Libération, Die Zeit, Arte TV, Next Nature, Hyperallergic, Le Temps, Neural.it, Digicult, Gizmodo, Seattle Weekly, torrentfreak.com, and Filmmaker Magazine among others.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

PUBLICATIONS

Dušan Kažić interviewed by Clémence Seurat
No One Has Ever Produced Anything
PostScriptUM #42

► eBROCHURE (PDF)
► LIST ON ISSUU

You can also read it in French:

► eBROCHURE (PDF)
► LIST ON ISSUU

New Extractivism

Interviewer: Mojca Kumerdej

Interviewees: Joana Moll, Vladan Joler, Disnovation.org, Ben Grosser

Editor: Janez Fakin Janša

WORKSHOP

Post Growth Toolkit (The Game)
ALUO, Ljubljana
20 April 2022, 2 PM–5 PM

Vladan Joler
Anatomies of a Black Box

Workshop
16 March 2022, 2 PM–5 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Language: English

Aimed at:
art and design students, young artists, professors of visual art, new media and design, students and professionals in the fields of sociology, cultural anthropology and philosophy

Part of Tactics & Practice #12: New Extractivism

Taking New Extractivism, Nooscope and  Anatomy of an AI system as the starting point, the participants to the workshop are led into a roller coaster trip through the simple internet packet delivery system, following with Facebook’s sophisticated algorithmic factory, and going even deeper into fashionable corporate devices that actually operate as planetary-scale systems of knowledge extraction under the futurist label of machine learning and the likes. As 21st century cartographers, participants are encouraged to journey both in time and space: from the deep time of mineral formation to the fast future of dystopian social media, from the nano scale of battery molecules to the planetary scale of contemporary production and distribution supply chains. As a matter of fact, the main purpose of this workshop is finding ways to represent such a scaling issue, focusing on either the big or the tiny, either the slow or the superfast.

The Anatomy of an AI system conceptual map then appears as a narrative strategy that reduces complexity, magnifies details, follows narrative trails or establishes links where apparently there are none. Participants move from there, using their skills to dive, for instance, into site-specific research or follow the lifespan of one specific element.

Takeaways: 

In the process, participants find new lenses to focus on invisible phenomena or, on the contrary, zoom out and plot a whole new cosmo-technological cartography. Mapping is to be explored as a form of non-linear poetry or storytelling, where both technical tools (such as network graphs, metadata analysis, patent investigations, interface scraping) and a conceptual approach (assemblages, maps of errors, approximations, biases, faults, fallacies, vulnerabilities, etc.) are necessary.

Vladan Joler
New Extractivism

Exhibition
16 March–13 April 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #12: New Extractivism

In the information age, everything becomes a potential frontier for expansion and extraction – from the depth of the DNA code in every single cell of the human organism to the vast frontiers of human emotions, behaviour and social relations, and nature as a whole. 

At this moment in the 21st century, we are witnessing a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. The stack behind contemporary technological systems goes well beyond the multi-layered “technical stack” of data modelling, hardware, servers and networks, as described by Benjamin Bratton in 2015. The full stack reaches much further into capital, labour and nature, and demands an enormous amount of each. The true costs of these systems – social, environmental, economic, and political – remain hidden and may remain so for some time to come. 

It is necessary to move beyond a simple analysis of the relationship between an individual human being, their data and any single technology company to tackle the truly planetary scale of extraction. From the cosmological model of the universe to the world of human emotions interpreted by the slightest muscle movements on the human face, everything becomes subject to quantification. There are deep interconnections between the literal hollowing out of the materials of the earth and the biosphere, and the data capture and monetisation of human practices of communication and sociality. 

New Extractivism by Vladan Joler is a cartographic project that can be understood as a titanic effort to outline these interconnections and to make sense of our contemporary reality. The project can be understood as an “assemblage of concepts and allegories”, drawn from a variety of resources: statistical research and data mining, ancient and contemporary philosophy, media theory and fiction, sociology and economics. Pierced together, these fragments take the form of a map, a manual and a video animation that guide the viewer through the traps, tunnels and slippery corridors of a world-scale infrastructure designed to extract, collect, quantify, analyse and connect all aspects of reality and turn them into capital: new accumulations of wealth and power concentrated in a very thin social layer dominated by a few global mega-corporations.

THE AUTHOR

Vladan Joler is an academic, researcher and artist whose work blends data investigations, counter-cartography, investigative journalism, writing, data visualisation, critical design and numerous other disciplines. He explores and visualises different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labour exploitation, invisible infrastructures and many other contemporary phenomena in the intersection between technology and society. He is the author of Anatomy of an AI System (with Kate Crawford) and Facebook Algorithmic Factory. 

Vladan Joler’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Design Museum in London, and as a permanent exhibition of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz. His work has been exhibited in more than one hundred international exhibitions, including institutions and events such as: ZKM, XXII Triennale di Milano‎, HKW, Vienna Biennale, V&A, transmediale, Ars Electronica, Biennale WRO, Design Society Shenzhen, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, MONA, Glassroom, La Gaite Lyrique, the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and the European Parliament in Brussels. He has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Design of the Year Award by the Design Museum in London and the S+T+ARTS Prize ’19 Honorary Mention by the European Commission and Ars Electronica.

He has given lectures at numerous educational and art institutions, including the University of Oxford, Museo Reina Sofía, CCCB, the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen, HfG-Karlsruhe, MG+MSUM, Aarhus University, Somerset House, Hangar Barcelona, Mucem Marseille and at numerous events such as Re:Publica, transmediale, Ars Electronica, The Influencers, CCC, etc.

Joler’s work has been profiled and covered in many international media such as BBC, CNN, WIRED, The Independent, The Times, Wallpaper*, Le Figaro, The Verge, Fast Company, +ARCH, ArtForum, Neural, LesJours, WeMakeMoneyNotArt and many others.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

PUBLICATIONS

Felix Stalder
Escape Velocity. Computing and the Great Acceleration
PostScriptUM #41

► eBROCHURE (PDF)
► PRINT ON DEMAND
► LIST ON ISSUU

New Extractivism

Interviewer: Mojca Kumerdej

Interviewees: Joana Moll, Vladan Joler, Disnovation.org, Ben Grosser

Editor: Janez Fakin Janša

WORKSHOP

Anatomies of a Black Box
ALUO, Ljubljana
16 March 2022, 2 PM–5 PM

Joana Moll
The Hidden Life of a Browser

Workshop
16–17 February 2022, 2 PM–5 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Language: English
Max. number of participants: 25

Aimed at:
art and design students, young artists, professors of visual art, new media and design, students and professionals in the fields of sociology, cultural anthropology and philosophy

Part of Tactics & Practice #12: New Extractivism
In the framework of konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art

Although most of our daily transactions are carried out through electronic devices, we know very little about the apparatus that makes such interactions possible, or in other words, the factory behind the interface: massive infrastructure, intensive data extraction processes and opaque business models. Ad Tech (AT) is the main business model within the so-called Digital Economy, yet it remains alarmingly obfuscated. “AT is the cornerstone of the modern internet: the source of wealth for some of the biggest and most important companies in the world: Google earns more than 80% of its revenue from advertising; Facebook, around 99%, and it is the mechanism by which almost every ‘free’ website or app makes money.” The AT business model heavily relies on monetising user activity by extracting and sharing user data with advertisers in order to provide tailor-made ads. These processes are carried out by cookies and other supporting technologies embedded in websites, apps, videos and other formats of digital media. When a user visits a website using a browser, tracking software automatically triggers the collection of all types of user data, which is now owned by the tracking company (e.g., Amazon, Google, Facebook) – and which it has the legal right to exploit. Moreover, all the energy required to load this relatively large amount of information is effectively demanded from the user, who ends up bearing not only part of the economic cost of these hidden monetisation processes, but also a portion of its environmental footprint.

Takeaways
The workshop will analyse and trace back through the many companies that extract and monetise user activity, together with the technologies they use, and will focus on the material and geopolitical dimensions of AT intensive data extraction processes. The main goal of this workshop is to deepen the understanding of the multiple vectors that converge in the configuration of the Digital Economy and to provide participants with the technical and analytical skills to regain agency on AT abusive business model practices.

[1] Gilad Edelman, Wired, https://www.wired.com/story/ad-tech-could-be-the-next-internet-bubble/

Joana Moll
Carbolytics

Exhibition
16 February–11 March 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #12: New Extractivism
In the framework of konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art

Carbolytics is a project at the intersection of art and research that aims to raise awareness and call for action on the environmental impact of pervasive surveillance within the advertising technology ecosystem (AdTech), as well as to provide a new perspective to address the social and environmental costs of opaque data collection practices. Online tracking is the act of collecting data from online user activity, such as reading the news, purchasing items, interacting on social media or simply searching online. It is well known that tracking and recording users’ behaviour has become a major business model in the last decade. However, even though the societal and ethical consequences of abusive online surveillance practices have been a subject of public debate at least since  Snowden’s revelations in 2013, the energy and environmental costs of such processes have been kept away from the public eye. The global data collection apparatus is a complex techno maze that needs vast amounts of resources to exist and operate, yet companies rarely disclose information on the environmental footprint of such operations. Moreover, part of the energy costs of data collection practices is inflicted upon the user, who also involuntarily assumes a portion of its environmental footprint. Although this is a critical aspect of surveillance, there’s an alarming lack of social, political, corporate and governmental will for accountability, thus a call for action is urgent.

AdTech is the primary business model of the data economy ecosystem or, in other words, the “money-making machine that fuels the Internet”. [1] In 2021, the global ad spending across platforms reached $763.2 billion, and it is expected to rise 10% in 2022. [2] Moreover, in 2020, 97.9% [3] of Facebook’s and 80% of Google’s global revenue was generated from advertising, and, excluding China, these companies, together with Amazon, will dominate 80% [4] to 90% of the market in 2022. [5] Yet, despite the extraordinary importance of AdTech within the global economy, its methods and processes are extremely opaque and thus incredibly difficult to control and regulate.

In a nutshell, AdTech analyses, manages and distributes online advertising. It encompasses a wide array of players, tools and methodologies, such as ad exchanges, real-time bidding and micro-targeting, which heavily rely on user data in order to effectively target and deliver advertising. Hence, data collection is a key resource to its global supply chain. But how is user data actually being harvested?

Typically, data is collected through a user’s device through cookies and other tracking technologies integrated into devices, web pages, apps and all kinds of interactive and audiovisual digital content. Despite being created and stored in the user’s device, tracking technologies are mostly undetectable to the average user, which makes extracting large amounts of user data a relatively easy task. Moreover, despite their “invisibility” and relatively small size, tracking technologies are responsible for triggering millions of algorithmic processes that ultimately facilitate trading in data on a global scale, nurturing an ever-growing ecosystem that densely relies not just on exploiting user data but also on sucking out the power of the user’s device to actually function.

The research behind Carbolytics identifies and analyses the carbon emissions of the total number of cookies belonging to the top one million websites. The investigation identified more than 21 million cookies per single visit to all these websites, belonging to more than 1200 different companies, which translates to an average of 197 trillion cookies per month, resulting in 11,442 metric tonnes of CO₂ emissions per month. It’s important to understand that this number reflects only browser-based cookie traffic and does not include other behavioural advertising tools, so we estimate the actual number of emissions by tracking technologies to be dramatically higher.

Carbolytics is an interactive web-based installation that shows the average global cookie traffic in real time, or in other words, displays how cookies are parasitizing user devices to extract personal data and feed it into a massive yet obfuscated network of organisms.

Finally, by introducing this analysis on climate and collective rights, Carbolytics seeks to add an often unexplored but critical layer to the traditional individual rights-based criticism of the AdTech industry, while providing strong evidence to inform the many communities that advocate for tech and climate change accountability.

[1] Hwang, T. (2020). Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet. New York: Fsg Originals X Logic, Farrar, Straus And Giroux.
[2] Hayes, D. (2021, December 7). Advertising’s Robust Recovery This Year Will Be Followed by Double-Digit Gains in 2022, Media Agencies Predict. Deadline. Retrieved January 25, 2022, from deadline.com/2021/12/advertising-recovery-2021-covid-forecast-2022-digital-1234885438
[3] Facebook Ad Revenue 2009–2018. (2021, February 5). Statista. Retrieved January 25, 2022, from www.statista.com/statistics/271258/facebooks-advertising-revenue-worldwide
[4] Graham, M., & Elias, J. (2021, May 18). How Google’s $150 Billion Advertising Business Works. CNBC. Retrieved January 25, 2022, from www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-advertising-business-breakdown-.html
[5] Adgate, B. (2021, December 8). Agencies Agree; 2021 Was a Record Year for Ad Spending, with More Growth Expected in 2022. Forbes. Retrieved January 26, 2022, from www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2021/12/08/agencies-agree-2021-was-a-record-year-for-ad-spending-with-more-growth-expected-in-2022

Joana Moll
The Hidden Life of an Amazon User

Exhibition
19 January–11 February 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #12: New Extractivism

Buying a book on Amazon is usually a simple, fast and seamless process. You enter a title or author in the search bar, select the item when it appears and click “Buy now”, and if you have an account with shipping and billing data, the book is just a few clicks away from your shelf; meanwhile you can lurk into what people who bought it also purchased. Behind this functionality and apparent simplicity, there are in fact hundreds of pre-programmed processes, happening instantly and invisibly in the background as we wander through the store, recognising us when we enter from any device, making suggestions based on our previous purchases and collecting more data about us based on what we search, click and buy. 

According to media theorist Wendy Chun, on Amazon and any Web 2.0 platform, we are usually controlled as we read online, and not unlike how an author controls the characters in a novel, readers become “characters in a drama putatively called Big Data.” (Chun 2016) 

The Hidden Life of an Amazon User is a web-based project offering one of the many versions of this drama, with the Amazon User as its protagonist. The project aims to shed light on Amazon’s often unacknowledged but aggressive exploitation of its users, which is embedded at the core of the business strategies of so-called internet companies. Such strategies rely on seemingly neutral, personalised user experiences enabled by attractive interfaces. These interfaces obfuscate sophisticated business models embedded in endless pages of indecipherable code, all activated by user labour. These strategies have a significant energy cost, part of which is involuntarily assumed by the user. In other words, the user is not only exploited through free labour, but is also forced to bear the energy costs of such exploitation. 

By analysing the otherwise trivial experience of buying Jeff Bezos’ book The Life, Lessons & Rules for Success (2018), the project makes transparent what is usually opaque: 1307 different requests for all kinds of scripts and documents, totalling in 8724 A4 pages worth of printed code, adding up to 87.33 MB of information, with a total energy consumption of about 30 Wh.

THE AUTHOR

Joana Moll is a Barcelona/Berlin-based artist and researcher. Her work critically explores the way techno-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include internet geopolitics, data materiality, surveillance, techno-colonialism and interfaces. She has presented her work in renowned institutions, museums and universities around the world, such as at the Venice Biennale, MAXXI, MMOMA, CCCB, ZKM, Ars Electronica, transmediale, ISEA and the British Computer Society, among many others. Her work has been featured in The Financial Times, Der Spiegel, National Geographic, Quartz, Wired, Vice, The New Inquiry, Netzpolitk, O’Globo, La Repubblica, Fast Company, NBC and the MIT Press. She is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona] and co-founder of The Institute for the Advancement of Popular Automatisms. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Universität Potsdam and Escola Elisava.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Data Extraction, Materiality and Agency
Cukrarna, Ljubljana
16 February 2022 at 7 PM
Registration required! Apply at info@cukrarna.art

Our so-called networked society has so far failed to bring the logic of interconnectedness into our lives. Citizens are becoming more machine-like and data-dependent, threatening the connection between humans and their natural habitats. Although most of our daily transactions are carried out through electronic devices, we know very little about the apparatus that facilitates such interactions, or in other words, the factory behind the interface. In this talk, we discuss the interface as a well-engineered capitalist machine that disconnects users from the material complexity of global chains of commodity and data production — and also social reproduction — in order to  maximise economic profit. It is therefore necessary to trace the connections that exist between things — as well as the workload involved in the basic maintenance of these connections — if the user is to fully understand the systems in which they operate, in order to balance and repair the profoundly asymmetrical distribution of agency, energy, labor, time, care and resources within these planetary networks.

In collaboration with:
ALUO – The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana
MGML / Cukrarna Gallery

WORKSHOP

The Hidden Life of a Browser
ALUO, Ljubljana
16–17 February 2022, 2 PM–5 PM

CARBOLYTICS [exhibition]

Joana Moll
Carbolytics
Exhibition
16 February–11 March 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Tactics & Practice #12:
New Extractivism

Exhibitions | Artist talks | Workshops | Publications
January–June 2022
Various locations

Curated by
Janez Fakin Janša

Part of the Tactics & Practice series

In the information age, everything becomes a potential frontier for expansion and extraction – from the depths of the DNA code to the vast frontiers of human emotions, behaviour and social relationships, and nature as a whole.
— Vladan Joler

Tactics & Practice, the discursive cultural programme dedicated to contemporary investigative art, society and new technologies that has been held regularly in Ljubljana since 2010, this year brings together the efforts and resources of various local institutions to offer a transdisciplinary programme focused on the theme “New Extractivism”.

In economics, the term “extractivism” is used to describe a model based on the extraction of natural resources – from minerals to metals and fossil fuels – from the Earth, to then sell on the global market. More recently, the terms “neo-extractivism” (Hans-Jürgen Burchardt, Kristina Dietz 2014) or “New Extractivism” (Henry Veltmeyer, James Petras 2014) emerged to describe how the model of extractivism has been deployed in the neo-colonial context of neo-liberal economies, where the extractive industry has developed into a specific growth-oriented development path, with a global regulation of the allotment of resources and their revenues, and a promise of growth and welfare for the countries where extraction occurs that is largely betrayed. 

In their book The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019), scholars Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson focus on the relationship between different forms of extractive operations in contemporary capitalism and show how extractivism has been applied not just to the exploitation of natural resources but also humans, labour, data and cultures. Drawing from here, since 2019, artist and researcher Vladan Joler has been using the term “New Extractivism” in the context of contemporary techno-capitalism to portray a form of extractivism that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Based on the enclosure of biodiversity and knowledge and the privatization of cultural commons, the New Extractivism occurs when different fields of human knowing, feeling, action and every form of biodata – including forensic, biometric, sociometric and psychometric – are regarded as raw materials, a new gold to be excavated and used to feed databases for machine learning and AI training. 

This is the starting point of the twelfth edition of Tactics & Practice, which opens on 19 January with a “warm-up” event at the Aksioma Project Space in Ljubljana: the presentation of The Hidden Life of an Amazon User, a web-based project by artist and researcher Joana Moll that sheds light on Amazon’s often unacknowledged but aggressive exploitation of its users, both through free labour and by forcing them to bear the energetic costs of this exploitation, which is embedded at the core of the business strategies of so-called internet companies.

On 16 February, the Catalan artist will be in Ljubljana for the launch of the first of four sub-clusters that make up the entire initiative, each of which consists of a solo exhibition at the Aksioma project Space, an artist talk at the Cukrarna Gallery, a workshop at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design and the publication of a new essay for the PostScriptUM series.

This first sub-cluster is of particular relevance, as it hosts the world premiere of Carbolytics, Joana Moll’s latest artistic-investigative project commissioned by Aksioma as part of the konS ≡ Platform for Investigative Contemporary Art and developed in collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and in partnership with the Sónar festival (ES). For this work, the BSC calculated the number of tracking cookies present within the world’s top 1 million websites and the average energy consumption attributable to them. The project therefore provides a new perspective to address the social and environmental costs of pervasive surveillance by exploring strategies to increase public awareness of the environmental impact of data collection.

In March, the programme continues with academic, researcher and artist Vladan Joler, internationally recognised for his research on the current platform economy, who will present his most recent work, the mapping project New Extractivism, a titanic effort to delineate the social, environmental, economic and political impacts of an extractivist economy that traps all of us in the cage of social media to capitalise on our data, exploited as a last resort.

In April, the programme continues with the DISNOVATION.ORG collective and Post Growth, their speculative art and research project that challenges the dominant narratives about growth and progress in an effort to dismantle the capitalist myth of permanent growth and to propose practical strategies for living on Earth in a post-growth and post-extractive scenario.

The last block of activities will take place between May and June and is built around Software for Less, an exhibition that brings together a series of works by US-based artist Ben Grosser that critically question the growth-obsessed business culture of Silicon Valley which has shaped the ideology of “more” that runs the software that enables the information society.

PUBLICATION

New Extractivism

Interviewer: Mojca Kumerdej
Interviewees: Joana Moll, Vladan Joler, Disnovation.org, Ben Grosser

READ MORE & ORDER

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PostScript^UM #39

Daniel Rourke
Why I Want to Fuck Elon Musk

In their space race the gurus of the NewSpace movement are expanding an imaginary that hybridizes individualism, libertarianism, neoliberal economics, counterculture and utopianism. “Why I Want to Fuck Elon Musk” plays with these cultural references, taking inspiration from the most emblematic statements spoken or tweeted by Elon Musk in recent years. Daniel Rourke, a London-based writer, artist and academic, has resorted to working with the OpenAI Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) language model to imagine and narrate chronicles from a near future in which blockchains have materialized and the deepfakes of Bezos and Musk have colonized Mars. The fictional universe thus created by human and non-human imagination builds a literary counterpart to IOCOSE’s latest works – the video animations Pointing at a New Planet (2020) and Free from History (2021) – presented on the occasion of the “All of Your Base” exhibition at Aksioma | Project Space in Ljubljana.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 18 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2021
ISBN 978-961-95437-5-7 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-95437-2-6 (Digital)

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.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

PUBLICATION

Daniel Rourke
Why I Want to Fuck Elon Musk
PostScriptUM #39

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Iris Pokovec
Angels & Discounts

Exhibition
3–26 November 2021
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Angels & Discounts is an ode to consumerism and an elegy to unfulfilled dreams and lost ideals. It talks about the love-hate attitude to consumerist and popular culture and glorifies its charm and its power of hypnotising the masses, while at the same time offering a reflection on the transience of society’s collective stream of thought. It is a narrative about the search for free choice in the numb somnolence of supermarket aisles and shelves with tinned peas and preserved compotes. 

In the style of illuminated billboards, the canvases tell us how to live properly, how to become a better new me and how to finally catch one’s dreams. How to live the American dream. But the messages on them are directed back to the all-powerful entity of dreams and talk about the consequences and wounds that they can cause – about the present time in which we have become exhausted from chasing dreams; in which we are trying to be sceptical and cynical, but illusions and desires prove to be more powerful than reality. Deep in our own and the collective consciousness, we are still faithful followers of the golden dreams about a better tomorrow, caught in our striving towards the green light of potentiality.

As a contemporary horn of plenty, a shopping cart with its piled-up articles promises us a better, clearer and optimistic future. But the latter is emptied together with the shopping cart when we place the articles on the checkout conveyor belt and its magic disappears until the next buyer of dreams uses it. The magic artefact offers instantaneous happiness, for it functions as a black hole: we place in it other people’s slogans and promises of happiness, which, no matter how devotedly we fill it, always disappear – all until the next purchase.

During our browsing through the store of dreams, we are accompanied by the vaporvawe music, which is occasionally interrupted by fictive store announcements. Through them, the artist transforms her visual language into a phonaesthetic experience of reflections based on her attitude to contemporary consumerist culture.   

Angels & Discounts is a retort to the current pop nihilism, the time and space in which the idea of what is entertaining is built on celebrating the banality of existence, meaningfulness without meaning, and in which values have been almost completely displaced by worth. Plastic, two-dimensional and direct works are cleansed of all unnecessary form to the point of taking the exhibition visitor to the backstage of the game of consumerism. 

On the one hand, the works talk about the poetics of the American dream and romanticise an individual’s attitude to infinite capabilities, unlimited choice and immediate satisfaction, while, on the other, they offer an insight into the phantasms of mass-produced ideologies and marketing slogans. The exhibition is the artist’s personal story about reaching too highly for the stars, confronting what is given and searching for angels and discounts in the stores of dreams.

THE AUTHOR

Iris Pokovec (1992) is a visual artist based in Ljubljana. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, where she received her master’s degree in 2017 with her thesis Likeability and Buyability. Her practice is primarily based on classic painting and print-based media, with which she explores the communication tools of contemporary consumerism. In content, she deals especially with the relations between present-day consumer plastics, 21st-century marketing slogans and contemporary pop nihilism.
She has presented her work at solo exhibitions 37 Days of Christmas (MGLC, Ljubljana, 2020), Likeable and Buyable (Gallery, Ljubljana, 2018) and Sigmund Freud Collection Premiere (Zigutamve Project Space, Vienna (AT), 2018). She has also carried out several solo projects: New Year’s Resolutions2019, for which she was awarded a work grant by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, as part of which she conducted the survey How to Make Art Likeable and Buyable, The Research (2019) in Slovenia, which she then repeated in England under the same title as part of the Art Residency programme of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia in London. She has also participated and exhibited in several group projects and exhibitions at home and abroad: Gallery.Delivery: Live Love Laugh (Ljubljana, 2021), Waardeloos (PERIOD gallery space, Haarlem (NL), 2019), A Percentage for Art (Buy Art Campaign, 2018), Made in China: Authentic Slovenian Art in Belgium (WARP, Sint-Niklaas (BE), 2018), Made in China: Goods and Services (Spike Berlin, Berlin (DE), 2018).

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak
And Now for Something Completely Different 12

Exhibition
6–29 October 2021

Opening
WED, 6 October 2021 at 7 PM

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

The work by the duo Nika Oblak & Primož Novak entitled Infinity (digital) focuses on the influence of contemporary means of communication on one’s life. Their artistic practice over the past twenty years has continuously addressed the position of humans in the clenches of consumerist doctrines, media cacophony and popular culture. Along the same lines, in their latest work they have created a spatial video installation consisting of screens, cables and other heralds of everyday modern life.

Employing a good measure of humour and self-irony, the artists focus once again on the human being that is – no less than in the past – caught up in the absurdities of daily routines and subjected to the conventions of tradition and the patterns of dominant culture. Infinity (digital) shows the motif of running, symbolised by an ordinary man involved in the multilayered mechanisms of today’s neoliberal reality. The image of the protagonist running in an infinite and senseless loop from screen to screen can thus be seen as a manifestation of the myth of Sisyphus who, by means of divine punishment, was condemned to repeatedly roll a boulder up the same hillside. With this gesture, the artists point out people’s self-evident attitude to technological progress, show the imperative of adapting to all kinds of changes and call attention to the loosening of basic humanistic values. Even though, in the last few decades, society and technology have advanced to the degree that there is seemingly less and less monotonous work and jobs, the abundance of everything that is available in the material and virtual world can still make one feel caught in the metaphorical aimless run. Contemporary society worships constant fulfilment, whether through work or leisure activities. Subjected to all kinds of stimuli, people today are consequently overloaded with activity. Regardless of whether it relates to one’s job or one’s vacations and travels, activity is ever-present, such as on social media networks where there is a constant absorption of information.

That is why the video’s protagonist, dressed in casual clothes, who persistently and endlessly runs through the screens, can symbolise precisely this inevitable entrapment of individuals in the shackles of prescribed lifestyles and activities, which they cannot resist – at least not without the risk of extreme social deviation or ostracisation, The monumental, white, spaceless environment of the video, into which the runner moves in an even straight line, metaphorically suggests the self-evident fact that an individual is always subordinate to the collective – that is, to society – and always has to adapt to it, for his or her own comfort. The infinity examined by the artists is highly abstract and formless. But, at the same time, it is very familiar since people are consciously or unconsciously prone to repeat patterns, which actually fulfil them and provide them with a feeling of security. The infinite run and its monotonous sound could thus be a lucid depiction of the artists’ relation to the world and their own position in it.

THE AUTHORS

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak have been working collectively since 2003. In their art practice they examine the influence of media and capital on contemporary society, dissecting its visual and linguistic structure. Oblak & Novak have exhibited worldwide, in venues like the Sharjah Biennial (AE), Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo (JP), Istanbul Biennial (TR), Biennale Cuvee, Linz (AT), Transmediale Berlin (DE), FILE Sao Paulo (BR), among others. They have received numerous grants and awards, including the CYNETART Award by the Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau in Dresden (DE), an honorary mention of art critics at Biennale WRO, Wroclaw (PL), the White Aphroid Award for artistic achievement by MMC KIBLA, Maribor (SI) and a Rihard Jakopic honorable mention, awarded by the Slovenian Association of Fine Arts Societies, the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Moderna galerija and the Slovene Association of Art Critics (SI).

RELATED EVENTS

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak
Infinity (digital)
Exhibition
17 September–18 October 2020
DLUL Gallery, Breg 22, Ljubljana

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Nika Oblak & Primož Novak
And Now for Something Completely Different 10
Exhibition
12 June–12 July 2019
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

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PostScript^UM #38

Primož Krašovec
Smetnjak vs. Ljubljana: Singularity of Humour and Politics Beyond Elections

The essay is a commentary of the last ten years of Smetnjak’s intellectually, politically and ethically outstanding production. Intellectually as a collection of theoretic – yet not academic – references, which makes them contemporary, to the point and intriguing and not a part of the canon established for the purpose of raising epigons of one ‘school’ or another. Politically as an exercise in thought, which does not assume fixed sides or viewpoints – not because it would be vague or opportunistic, but because it is too intense to be caught in the fixed positions of identity. Ethically as an attitude towards the world and oneself, refusing to accept the existing, but not being critical to it in a way that affirms the opposite (as this would presuppose criticism from a standpoint of a fixed identity), nor being outraged or judgemental (nonconformity not based on morality). The most important methods of Smetnjak’s operation are singular humour and not taking sides.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 14 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2021
ISBN 978-961-95437-0-2 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-95064-9-3 (Digital)