Series of talks Curated by Valentina Tanni 20 May–23 June 2021 Online
This series of online conversations that accompanies the launch of the Slovenian edition of Valentina Tanni’s book MemesteticA explores the world of memes and participatory culture by focusing on its relationship with modern and contemporary visual art. The goal is to discuss meme aesthetics and to investigate the role that this unregulated cultural system – characterized by an unprecedented level of participation – will have in reshaping our concept of art and its role in society.
We are told that memes are the language of advertising – so what? Smetnjak has no problem with its jollity. You don’t have to be sad to do politics, declares Foucault, even if the thing you’re fighting is abominable. Except that the repugnant is not what we’re up against (it’s the mediocre!), and we’re not fighting it either (it’s tricks, not conflicts). Smetnjak’s memes don’t judge; they scramble the tired binary oppositions. To scramble is to complexify, to stuff with meanings, to weave a network of connections. Scrambling is the movement of schizophrenia but also of the capitalist market, which ceaselessly breaks up the continuity of any tradition. When it comes to culture, the market is the argument of our conscientious right-wingers, but isn’t it really just a smokescreen for more paranoid folklorisms? The leftist virtuousness, which refuses to compromise with the commercial, doesn’t vibe with us either. It’s a drag. We prefer to entertain, to disrupt, to sell. In this spirit, Smetnjak’s exhibition delivers its memes in every possible commercial format and puts them all on sale. Everything must go, we shout, if only for a moment!
AUTHOR
Smetnjak is an anonymous collective from Slovenia that has been mixing memes with theory and art for over a decade now. Its memes seek to redirect the reality of everyday politics, where shit and mediocracy abound, toward something kinder and funnier. With a knack for going viral, Smetnjak’s work has been featured in countless feeds and sites like critical-theory.com, versobooks.com, adsoftheworld.com and artribune.com. Everything Must Go is its first solo exhibition.
► Originally published in Italian language by NERO Editions. ► The Slovenian edition is available HERE.
In the 21st century, art has become a weird thing, weirder, even, than it was before. The Internet, new technologies and social media have stormed our visual universe with gifs, photoshopping and all kinds of appropriation practices. Trolls, YouTubers and Instagrammers are leaving an aesthetic legacy that recalls the precepts of the historical avant-gardes, cheerfully distorted in a bizarre and wild way. How do the arts that we find in museums react to such retaliation? What if the art history books of the future would list not only works of art made by those formally recognised artist-geniuses, but also all memesmade by anonymous users hidden behind all those absurd pseudonyms? This book is the first to draft a comprehensive cartography of the relationship between visual arts and digital culture from the early 2000s–on, where Valentina Tanni traces back the path “from Duchamp to TikTok”, defining the contours of one of the most interesting landscapes of our present.
SI | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 272 pp | B/W | soft cover | 2021 ISBN 978-961-95064-8-6
Colophon
Valentina Tanni: MemesteticA – The Eternal September of Art Published by: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Published in the framework of Tactics & Practice #11: MemesteticA
Highways, antennas, containers, storehouses, pipes, submarine cables, sensors: the word infrastructure usually refers to “matter that enables the movement of other matter”, the underlying organized structures and mediators that support human exchanges and the value people associate with them. However, simple observation suggests that something increasingly valuable is happening not simply “above”, but both within and outside, as well as in-between our so-called infra-structures while humans design and inhabit them in ever more convoluted ways, investing their emotions in them and using them to measure, automate and build world visions and expectations about the future. This essay is an introduction to artistic methodologies that map, tour, stage, dissect, tell, visualize, tear open, restitch and embody the composite networked structure that we sometimes call our Society, sometimes the Internet, and sometimes Planet Earth. Finding alternative ways to inhabit it, perform or run it allows us to discover more about these infrastructures and ourselves within them.
EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 180 pp | colour | soft cover | 2021 ISBN: 978-961-95064-3-1
Colophon
Bani Brusadin: The Fog of Systems. Art as Reorientation and Resistance in a Planetary-Scale System Disposed Towards Invisibility SPECIAL EDITION PostScriptUM #37 Series edited by Janez Fakin Janša
Publisher: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Represented by: Marcela Okretič
Poofreading: Sunčan Stone Mechanical Editing: Miha Šuštar Design and layout: Luka Umek
(c) Aksioma | All text and image rights reserved by the author | Ljubljana 2021
Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana and the Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) through the Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture (PICE).
This essay is the result of a research funded by a grant of the Oficina de Suport a la Iniciativa Cultural of the Generalitat of Catalonia in the year 2020.
Aimed at: academics, scholars of political science, sociology and anthropology, web lovers, technology lovers, individual researchers in the political and social field, CCRU fans and occultists and l/accel curious
We all have experienced from our point of view the ugly consequences of what meme and social media propaganda can bear. Recall the incessant online propaganda made by the neo-Nazi and white supremacist media apparatus (the so called alt-right) for which Donald Trump himself has repeatedly shown support: from his infamous tweet of 2015 at the beginning of the electoral campaign, which depicted him in the guise of Pepe the Frog, up to explicit declarations in support of white supremacism, to the devastating consequences that the cult of Qanon has had in dividing friends and families by bringing the most unexpected internet users (from your yoga teacher, to your concerned mum, to a psychedelic shaman) to the verge of conspiracy theories.
What can we learn from this mess? Can a meme change the reality we live in? Which were the most influential or maybe even magical memes in the history of the web? Can we subvert those mediatic strategies from a grassroots standpoint?
During Memes as Hyperstitional Technology, Clusterduck will introduce the tools and practices which the members of the collective rely on to explore the world of memeology and subcultural internet studies. Clusterduck will then assist the participants during a session of field research into the depths of the social media web. The goal of this session would be to unravel the relationship between Internet memes and hyperstitional technologies.
We will split the participants into groups to delve further into the research and examine the same object from multiple points of view. We will use Telegram chats and other messaging platforms to share inputs, findings and contributions while drawing connections and producing analyses of the phenomena we encounter. The final part of the workshop will involve mutual work on a digital collage, inspired by the work of Aby Warburg, to resume your research and thus include it in the “Detective Walls” panels of Meme Manifesto.
The workshop is part of Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project about Internet Memes that explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology, where Clusterduck is investigating different aspects of meme culture through various media: an art book, an interactive website, a physical installation and a participative workshop. The results from Memes as Hyperstitional Technology will be included in the compilation work of Meme Manifesto.
THE AUTHORS
Clusterduckis an interdisciplinary collective working in the fields of new media studies, design and transmedia, investigating processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-based content. It curated the online exhibition #MEMEPROPAGANDA, hosted by Greencube Gallery, which was presented at The Influencers Festival (Barcelona), Tentacular Festival (Madrid), IFFR (Rotterdam), Urgent Publishing (Amsterdam, Arnheim), Radical Networks (Berlin) and others. Clusterduck is currently developing Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project that collectively explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology. The first stage of the project has been developed at IMPAKT (NL) during this year’s EMAP/EMARE residency programme and presented at ARS ELECTRONICA 2020. Clusterduck also created the participative exhibition #MEMERSFORFUTURE, investigating the role of memetics in the global climate justice movement. The exhibition has been shown at re:publica 2020 and IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2020.
In the framework of: konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art The project konS:: Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
According to the original definition first proposed by biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, memes are ideas that travel and spread faster than others by means of reproduction and evolution. In a mass media environment, memes can be anything from popular images to short scenes from movies and television series, sketches or music from advertisements. Since the late nineties, memes have found an ideal ground to flourish in the “spreadable media” (Henry Jenkins) environment provided by the internet. Viral videos, weird pictures and insider jokes spread quickly within a medium that allows instant manipulation and sharing. Since its founding, interdisciplinary collective Clusterduck has been increasingly concentrating its research efforts on memes, resulting in the creation of several transnational chats on various online platforms and leading to a thorough investigation of the processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-related content. While their online exhibition #MEMEPROPAGANDA explored the potential of memes for political activism, the transmedia projectMEME MANIFESTO(2018–ongoing) explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology. Based on the aesthetics of online conspiracy theories, ancient grimoires and cutting edge contemporary digital design, MEME MANIFESTO strives to be a manual for memetic production, a highly refined documentation of the contemporary memetic landscape and a collective investigation about the hidden sides of the Internet. MEME MANIFESTO explores different aspects of meme culture through various media: a website installation and a participative archive called “Safari”, the physical installation “Detective Wall” and a series of workshops entitled “The Meme Manifesto Protocols” where participants are called on to contribute content, images and discussions to the implementation of MEME MANIFESTO. The project was implemented during the Emap/Emare residency 2020 at Impakt and is now starting to travel the world. During its visit to Aksioma, Clusterduck is bringing a preview of “Detective Wall”. Taking inspiration from Aby Warburg’s famous “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” and with a nod to the so-called “Crazy Wall” shown in the “Pepe Silvia” meme, the ten panels composing “Detective Wall” are an investigation around ten different themes and moments of memecultural history, spanning the period from 2006 to the present day. The visitor is invited to explore the crazy wall – and the research behind it – with the help of “The Detective Wall Guide” co-published by Aksioma and Impakt. And to give a closer look into the digital version of the panels, through a series of attributions and links Clusterduck is inviting visitors to go down an almost infinite series of rabbit holes. In doing so, Clusterduck recommends caution and to proceed at your own risk. As Marc Tuters points out in the introductory text of the Guide: “Seen through the parallax perspective of totality (Jameson) and of [the] micropolitical (Deleuze and Guattarri), Clusterduck’s impossible project to map meme culture has something of the qualities of subcultural vaccine, inoculating ourselves through controlled exposure. Like the Coronavirus we know that chan culture will never go away — no matter how much some might wish it would. As per the Accelerationists, there is thus no way out but through. The cleverness of Clusterduck lies in the seriousness with which they approach an object that refuses to be taken seriously. It is this attitude that has permitted them to stare into the abyss on our behalf, and not to become monsters themselves.”
THE AUTHORS
Clusterduck is an interdisciplinary collective working in the fields of new media studies, design and transmedia, investigating processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-based content. It curated the online exhibition #MEMEPROPAGANDA, hosted by Greencube Gallery, which was presented at The Influencers Festival (Barcelona), Tentacular Festival (Madrid), IFFR (Rotterdam), Urgent Publishing (Amsterdam, Arnheim), Radical Networks (Berlin) and others. Clusterduck is currently developing Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project that collectively explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology. The first stage of the project has been developed at IMPAKT (NL) during this year’s EMAP/EMARE residency programme and presented at ARS ELECTRONICA 2020. Clusterduck also created the participative exhibition #MEMERSFORFUTURE, investigating the role of memetics in the global climate justice movement. The exhibition has been shown at re:publica 2020 and IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2020.
Clusterduck An Investigation of Memes as Art and Art as Memes
Workshop WED, 19 May 2021 3:30 pm–6:30 pm Online
The workshop is full! The registration is not available anymore.
Language: English Max. number of participants: 15
Aimed at: academics, activists, art historians, designers, web lovers, visual cultures scholars and whomever may be oriented to an unorthodox approach to internet memes studies.
The workshop is part of Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project about Internet Memes that explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology, where Clusterduck is investigating different aspects of meme culture through various media: an art book, an interactive website, a physical installation and a participative workshop.
Clusterduck will introduce the ubiquitous tools and practices used by the members of the collective to explore the world of memeology and subcultural internet studies. Clusterduck will then assist the participants during a session of field research into the depths of the social media web. The goal of this session would be to unravel the relationship between Internet memes and contemporary Art. Can a meme be considered art? What do memetic forms and art forms have in common? Are some types of memes influenced by artistic movements such as Dadaism, Cubism, Minimalism and Abstractionism?
During our three-hour meeting, we will split the participants into groups to delve further into the research and examine the same object from multiple points of view. We will use Telegram chats and other messaging platforms to share inputs, findings and contributions while drawing connections and producing analyses of the phenomena we encounter. The final part of the workshop will involve mutual work on a digital collage, inspired by the work of Aby Warburg, to resume your research and thus include it in the “Detective Walls” panels of Meme Manifesto.
THE AUTHORS
Clusterduckis an interdisciplinary collective working in the fields of new media studies, design and transmedia, investigating processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-based content. It curated the online exhibition #MEMEPROPAGANDA, hosted by Greencube Gallery, which was presented at The Influencers Festival (Barcelona), Tentacular Festival (Madrid), IFFR (Rotterdam), Urgent Publishing (Amsterdam, Arnheim), Radical Networks (Berlin) and others. Clusterduck is currently developing Meme Manifesto, a transmedia project that collectively explores the occult meanings and communicative potentials of memetic symbology. The first stage of the project has been developed at IMPAKT (NL) during this year’s EMAP/EMARE residency programme and presented at ARS ELECTRONICA 2020. Clusterduck also created the participative exhibition #MEMERSFORFUTURE, investigating the role of memetics in the global climate justice movement. The exhibition has been shown at re:publica 2020 and IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2020.
In the past ten years, online participatory culture has gained more and more relevance, deeply influencing the way we create, consume and exchange content. Ever-growing Internet access – having reached 60% worldwide penetration – has in fact led to radical changes on many levels, forcing us to reconsider our ideas on communication, economy, politics and also art. A new, widespread digital fluency, both in terms of content production and distribution, together with the formation of a surprisingly varied array of virtual communities, is giving birth to fresh languages and aesthetics on a daily basis, in an unstoppable and dizzying cycle of cultural manufacturing and remixing.
Internet memes in all their different forms and declinations – image macros, videos, photo-fads, catch-phrases and performative chains – are the hot core of this new ecosystem: They shape our view of the world, influencing cultural and political processes, but they can also be read, following Fredric Jameson’s study on postmodernism, as our dominant “cultural logic”, a logic centred on wild appropriation, endless remix and bold re-signification.
While the sociological and political implications of internet memes have been widely analysed, the aesthetic discourse is more often overlooked. The kaleidoscopic and chaotic world of online participatory culture not only influences countless contemporary artists, especially in the field of visual art, but it constitutes an independent art factory in itself, producing an avalanche of creative content that shapes our gaze and taste. Also, it is impossible not to notice that more and more people are adopting – spontaneously and often unknowingly – practices that seem to draw directly from the avant-garde, like appropriation, détournement, extreme photographic manipulation, performative acts and experimental use of language. To describe such cultural tactics, especially in the context of very popular social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and TikTok, Canadian scholar Darren Wershler has coined the expression “conceptualism in the wild”, emphasizing their spontaneous and untamed character. The MemesteticA program explores the world of memes and participatory culture by focusing on its relationship with modern and contemporary visual art. The goal is to discuss meme aesthetics and to investigate the role that this unregulated cultural system – characterized by an unprecedented level of participation – will have in reshaping our concept of art and its role in society.
Trolls, YouTubers and Instagrammers are leaving an aesthetic legacy that recalls the precepts of the historical avant-gardes, cheerfully distorted in a bizarre and wild way. How do the arts that we find in museums react to such retaliation? What if the art history books of the future would list not only works of art made by those formally recognised artist-geniuses, but also all memes made by anonymous users hidden behind all those absurd pseudonyms?
Valentina Tanniis an art historian, curator and lecturer. Her research focuses on the relationship between art and technology, with a particular focus on internet culture. She is adjunct professor of Digital Art at Politecnico University in Milan and lecturer of the course Culture Digitali (Digital Cultures) at NABA. Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and Milan. She is also currently part of Artribune’s editorial team as a writer, managing editor and social media consultant. She published Random. Navigando contro mano, alla scoperta dell’arte in rete (Link editions, 2011) e Memestetica. Il settembre eterno dell’arte (Nero, 2020). Since November 2020 she is a member of Rome Quadriennale Foundation’s Board of Directors.
Highways, antennas, containers, storehouses, pipes, submarine cables, sensors: the word infrastructure usually refers to “matter that enables the movement of other matter”, the underlying organized structures and mediators that support human exchanges and the value people associate with them. However, simple observation suggests that something increasingly valuable is happening not simply “above”, but both within and outside, as well as in-between our so-called infra-structures while humans design and inhabit them in ever more convoluted ways, investing their emotions in them and using them to measure, automate and build world visions and expectations about the future. This essay is an introduction to artistic methodologies that map, tour, stage, dissect, tell, visualize, tear open, restitch and embody the composite networked structure that we sometimes call our Society, sometimes the Internet, and sometimes Planet Earth. Finding alternative ways to inhabit it, perform or run it allows us to discover more about these infrastructures and ourselves within them.
EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 62 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2021 ISBN 978-961-95064-3-1 (Printed) ISBN 978-961-95064-5-5 (Digital)
Bani Brusadin: The Fog of Systems. Art as Reorientation and Resistance in a Planetary-Scale System Disposed Towards Invisibility PostScriptUM #37
Series edited by Janez Fakin Janša Publisher: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Represented by: Marcela Okretič Poofreading: Sunčan Stone Mechanical Editing: Miha Šuštar Design: Luka Umek Layout: Sonja Grdina (c) Aksioma | All text and image rights reserved by the author | Ljubljana 2021
Print on Demand: Lulu.com | www.lulu.com Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana and the Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) through the Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture (PICE). This essay is the result of a research funded by a grant of the Oficina de Suport a la Iniciativa Cultural of the Generalitat of Catalonia in the year 2020.
The Internet Yami-Ichi
The Internet Yami-Ichi
Fair 22 May 2021 10 am–2:30 pm Central Market, Ljubljana
“Once upon a time, the Internet was supposed to be a place for ‘liberty’. Nowadays it’s so uptight. So let’s turn off, log-out, and drop-in, on the real world. The Internet Yami-Ichi is a flea market for ‘browsing’ face-to-face. Take your own Internet liberties here, with us”, the official presentation of the Internet Yami-Ichi reads. Conceived and presented by IDPW, a “secret society on the internet” organizing events and parties and including many Japanese media artists, the Internet Yami-Ichi came about when artist group EXONEMO got an app rejected from the Apple Store. The idea was simply to set up an offline “black market” to enjoy the freedom of exchange, creation and communication that once belonged to the internet before being given up to the interests of corporations and the control of political powers. A place where one could present and sell data as well as internet-inspired ideas.
First presented in Tokyo in November 2012, the Internet Yami-Ichi was a niche success. Offered online as an open format that could be enacted by anyone by following a simple “recipe”, it easily spread around the world, with more than 30 events realized so far. According to the recipe, an Internet Yami-Ichi is an event where “Internet-ish goods and services materialize in real space. It is up to you to interpret the “-ish” part.” The more open and loose the definition is, the better: artists, designers and makers can present functional and dysfunctional software, print-on-demand publications and objects, hoodies, t-shirts, patches, multiples, board games, card games, performances, glitched fabrics, physical computing experiments, meme-related socks or pins… The fresh and experimental nature of the format requires the borders between practices (art/design) and level (professional/amateur) to be kept blurred. The audience has to be involved as customer, participant, player and performer. The event explores and questions the increasingly blurred borders between online and offline, develops an alternate economy for the art world and provides a platform to share concerns about what the internet has become, as well as creative ideas that could affect its future evolution.
In this essay, initially published in Italian by NERO, the Rotterdam based writer, artist and designer Silvio Lorusso, discusses his idea of the “delegation society”, which he briefly outlined in his book Entreprecariat: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur. Nobody Is Safe (2018). The delegation society is no longer divided into Marxian classes but is instead formed into a new pyramidal order. At the top sits the professional élite who delegate reproductive work to the lower levels in order to gain time and be able to work more; at the bottom lies the highly fragmented servant class. In the middle an unstable professional class struggles to become a part of the élite, alternating in their work between professionals and servants. The micro-élite at the top legitimize themselves and the delegation system through telling a story that transforms servants into entrepreneurs, exactly what the gig economy platforms do.
EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 12 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2021
A deer is wandering through a data center. The beast looks scared of the sound he makes by walking on the technical floor, of the cables scattered around, of the flashing lights of the server. How did it get there, under those artificial lights, in that space that is supposed to be hermetically isolated from the outside? The low res footage, probably recorded by a security camera, gives the touch of reality to this otherwise magical and unreal picture of a living being sifting through flows of data.
Shown on a vertical screen, the video is the centerpiece of Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes (2020), a multimedia installation by Spanish artist Mario Santamaría. Traditionally, rabbit holes are perceived as a backdoor between two different dimensions: it’s through a rabbit hole that Alice gets her first access to the wonderland. Yet, is networked space really different from physical space? Does it lack any materiality? Does it rely on a different notion of space and time? Since 2010, Santamaría has been investigating the physical manifestations of data and information, and questioning the metaphor of the cloud that, before becoming “common faith”, has been widely used by anybody who registered a patent concerning the internet and whatever networked device, as demonstrated in the work Cloudplexity (2019), a collection of Internet representations extracted from the U.S. Patent database. In 2016, Santamaría “tracerouted” the data of his website to follow their movement from his server (located in Bergamo, Italy) to his own computer screen; then he followed this path, traveling from Barcelona to Bergamo through Switzerland, Stockholm, Milan and Perugia. It took 14 days for him to do the same journey that data performs in 50 milliseconds: an absurd, illogical journey if we look at it in human terms, as it’s far from being linear, but that visualizes the infrastructure along which data is moving. With a similar intention, since 2018 Santamaría has been organizing “Internet Tours” in various places, bringing groups of people around a city in search of the nodes of the local network.
In Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes (2020), the floor of the exhibition space is partially covered by a technical floor, normally used to hide cables in data centers. Wired black tubes scattered around the floor form an artist designed router, generating an open network identified with the icon 🕳. The “rabbit hole” network has been programmed to send the signal to different geographical locations before arriving at the exhibition spot, seeking the maximum possible route allowed by network protocols, thus accumulating a certain amount of delay that becomes visible through another video work: two screens (one connected to the gallery wifi, the other to the “rabbit hole” network) displaying the live feed of a Foucault pendulum. Through an explicit reference to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Perfect Lovers (1991), the work manifests the materiality of digital time, usually unnoticed as data seems to travel in no time.
Allowing us to look through the “consensual hallucination” (William Gibson) of the cloud (formerly known as cyberspace), these three main installation elements (the partially installed technical floor, the deer in the data center and the imperfect lovers) help us to become aware of the physical, corporeal relationship we have with certain infrastructures, supposedly fixed and invisible, but that can be easily re-engineered.
THE AUTHOR
Roberto Ruiz
Mario Santamaría (Spain, 1985) works across a wide range of media, frequently using photography, video, performance, websites and online interventions. His research focuses on the phenomenon of the contemporary observer, paying attention to both the representations of the world and the devices of vision and mediation. His work includes topics such as digitization, networks, infrastructures, body and algorithms. His work has been shown at MACBA and Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, ZKM Karlsruhe, WKV Stuttgart, Edith-Russ-Haus Oldenburg, CENART Mexico, Arebyte London, Münchner Stadtmuseum, Das Weisse Haus Vienna, and in the Biennials of Thessaloniki, Havana and Lyon among others. He was also finalist in the Post-Photography Prototyping Prize of the Fotomuseum Winterthur and included in Watched! Surveillance, Art and Photography by the Hasselblad Foundation.
BROCHURE
Bani Brusadin The Fog of Systems Art as Reorientation and Resistance in a Planetary-Scale System Disposed Towards Invisibility PostScriptUM #37
Production of the exhibition: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2021
Supported by: Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) through the Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture (PICE) in the framework of the Mobility grants; the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists
Domen Pal / Aksioma
In recent years, taking care of ourselves has become a norm for presenting ourselves as responsible, exemplary individuals in contemporary society. As a result, meditation has become a recipe, not only for overcoming all types of mental distress but also for achieving harmony in our relationships. New age meditation represents a key to a perfectly balanced life, as it suggests that we are responsible for our own happiness and that it depends only on how we perceive ourselves and the surrounding world. It shows us how to calm down and disregard all the unpleasant thoughts running through our mind. With every breath, we take in positive energy, and with every exhale, we get rid of negative emotions such as feelings of anger, stress, tension, dissatisfaction, sadness and despair. But in this way, we also suppress what enables us to question the state of things. In her book Izbira (Choice), Renata Salecl writes: “In today’s crisis and uncertain times, the ideology of positive thinking plays a key role in concealing the need to rethink the nature of social inequality and search for alternatives to the way developed by capitalism. When individuals start to believe that they are masters of their own fate and when positive thinking is available as a panacea for all the misery they suffer due to social inequality, social criticism is increasingly more replaced by self-criticism.” [1]
Hacked Meditation works the opposite way by disrupting our notion of the self and undermining our anthropocentric belief about the exclusivity of the human being. Hacked Meditation is a guided meditation that encourages the meditator to think about what is (not) the meaning of being human if we are to acknowledge all the organisms that coexist with us. Scientifically speaking, a human being consists of 44% human cells and 56% non-human cells. Therefore, when we are thinking about ourselves, we are actually thinking about various other species which comprise an inseparable part of us.
Hacked Meditation helps us understand how dependent we are on natural systems and other biotic organisms. It makes us realize we are involved in the web of life – not the other way in which neoliberalism convinces us as being situated at the very top of the pyramid of life and entitled to exploit natural resources and pollute the environment to any end. Just like traditional meditation, Hacked Meditation encourages self-awareness on two levels: the body and spirit – but with a key difference: it opens a pluralistic view on both and in this way sparks a different attitude towards the world and our place in it. As Robert N. Watson says: “To understand life as – like Shakespeare’s last plays – a series of tragicomedies of separation and reunion, rather than a doomed struggle of the human self towards its own immortality, is a giant step toward an ecological sensibility.” [2]
The project is set as an immersive audio installation which intentionally avoids visual representation of its content, since it talks about microbial life invisible to the human eye and the hidden relations of power. The experience intends to spur contemplation and imagination as well as question prevailing beliefs and ideas, all of which are components that exist in our minds and are most easily accessible when we close our eyes and think.
[1] Salecl, R, Izbira, Cankarjeva založba, Ljubljana, 2010.
[2] Watson, R. N, Renaissance selfhood and Shakespeare’s comedy of the common, The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, Routledge, 2017.
THE AUTHOR
Julia Karczewska
Tamara Lašič Jurković (1994) obtained her master’s degree in industrial design in 2020 from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University in Ljubljana. In her work, she focuses on environmental and social problems of the 21st century and the role of design in their consideration. She seeks solutions in product, service, systemic and speculative design with an emphasis on co-creation, participation, open source and accessibility for the empowerment of individuals and communities. In the 2018/19 academic year, she took part in a student exchange program at the Academy of Design and Crafts in Gothenburg, where she began researching the theory of posthumanism in the context of design. As a co-curator, she participated in the conception of the exhibition Thinking the Conditions of Our Time, which was presented in 2019 at the 22nd Milan Triennial.
CREDITS
Author: Tamara Lašič Jurković Mentors: Thomas Laurien (HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg), Janez Janša Sound editor: Julij Zornik
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2021
Technical support: Zavod Projekt Atol
Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
Sponsors: e-Bralec and partners Alpineon, Amebis, Institut Jožef Stefan
Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists
Hey, hey, hey, listen! In order for this to work, I’m going to need your full attention. You see, you’ve fallen down right inthe middle of a petri dish. You’re a human microbe. No one can see or hear you anymore, not up there anyways. I’m gonna try and help you get out without getting hurt, but I need you to cooperate. Who am I? I’m a resident here. The resident pink flamingo, serpulid worm, animal, vegetable, mineral. This happens quite a lot, actually. You know, visitors falling into the jelly forest. Most of them die, but you look pretty agile, I think you might just have a chance. Did you come to this lab on a school trip or something? Anyways, you’re lucky you fell into a rather new experiment. The bacteria are just starting to grow on this sample, so they’re slow and clumsy. They aren’t even a real colony yet! I’m not sure what kind of bacteria they are, but if I were you, I wouldn’t stick around too long to find out. No matter what they turn out to be, they’re usually hungry.
Take a minute to get your bearings. Did you notice how soft everything is? That’s because we are in a constant state of transformation. Hardened formations only limit us. It is the pliable, squishy goop that encourages life and activity. Some might call it sentience, even. Did you notice its breath? It, here, us, me. We’re breathing – not the way you do, of course. The jelly absorbs everything. If you don’t keep moving, it will absorb you too. Keep walking, don’t touch anything for too long or you’ll get pulled in and become a part of it. Unless that’s what you want.
If Jerry Seinfeld were a bacteria he, might say, ‘What’s the deal with rugged individualism?’ It doesn’t really exist, you know. Humans are so weird.
I’ll get you out, even though I think you should give in. You just have to follow the sound of my voice.
Domen Pal
The exhibition Softshell Creeper presents itself as an ever-expanding, over saturated territory of plush capriciousness. The canopy of a hype-stormed alien creep fills the exhibition space with a brightly colored series of a morphing, non-clickable infrastructure that harbors a parallel agency, composed of strike zones and attacks. Inside this reality, which is “more landscape than artifact”, artificial and organic forms blur, as the viewer navigates the uneven, volatile terrain. Making reference to the specific narrative structure of video games and their oft-times gradual unfolding of information, the exhibition explores how this knowledge is propagated and established within these realms. In physically processing any unknown context, there is a heightened sense of fear and instability that comes with the necessity of making instant judgments and decisions. Whether or not the ambiguous, approaching Softshell Creeper is friend or foe, remains uncertain.
THE AUTHOR
Domen Pal
Andrej Škufca studied fine arts both in The Hague (KABK) and Ljubljana (ALUO) and graduated in 2014. His solo shows include: Black Market, The International Center of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, 2020; Zero Hedge, Karlin Studios, FUTURA, Prague, 2019; Xenomorphic Objects, DUM Project Space Ljubljana, 2017; Indifferences, Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana, 2016. Alongside his artistic practice he is also a founder and member of the editorial board at Šum journal for contemporary art criticism and theory in Ljubljana.
THE CURATOR
Christina Gigliotti is an American independent curator and writer living in Berlin. She is the assistant to the director and artist liaison at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. She also co-curates the programs for Polansky Gallery in Prague and Brno. Since 2015, she has curated over 55 exhibition projects throughout Europe and abroad, and has been published in a number of publications including magazines, artist books, and catalogues.
CREDITS
Author: Andrej Škufca Curator: Christina Gigliotti
Nika Mahnič Offshoring and Other Magic Tricks of Global Finance: An Interview with RYBN
At the 8th edition of the MoneyLab conference, hosted by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Nika Mahnič interviewed RYBN about their work as a part of the Tax havens: Normalized Grand Theft panel. RYBN is an artist collective formed in 1999 that has, over the past years, researched the economy and the global financial system in their contemporary manifestations, thus offering a privileged vantage point from which one can view the transformations brought about by cybernetics. In this interview, they delve into their background, their achievements in databasing, the golden passport phenomenon and why offshoring was and remains a powerful tool of colonial and illiberal dispositions. They often use their art projects to shine some light on the dark side of global finance and show how the neo-illiberal class is successfully working at normalizing and legitimizing it.
EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 12 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2021
Nika Mahnič Offshoring and Other Magic Tricks of Global Finance: An Interview with RYBN
PostScriptUM #35 Series edited by Janez Fakin Janša
Publisher: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Represented by: Marcela Okretič
Proofreading: Sunčan Stone Design: Luka Umek Layout: Sonja Grdina
Cover: A data visualisation of all of the nations implicated in the offshoring accounts disclosed by the Panama Papers, and their relations to one another.
(c) Aksioma | All text and image rights reserved by the author | Ljubljana 2021
Printed and distributed by: Lulu.com
Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
*Originally published in: Nika Mahnič, Max Gorynski, “Offshoring and Other Magic Tricks of Global Finance: An Interview with RYBN”, Medium, June 2020, https://medium.com/wonk-bridge/offshoring-and-other-magic-tricks-of-global-finance-an-interview-with-rybn-56def933d625.
