Tactics & Practice #11:
MemesteticA

Exhibitions | Talks | Publications | Workshops | The Internet Yami-Ichi
19 May–2 July 2021
Various locations

Part of the Tactics & Practice series

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.

THE BOOK

Valentina Tanni
MemesteticA – The Eternal September of Art
Slovenian edition

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?

THE CURATOR

Valentina Tanni is 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.

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PostScript^UM #37

Bani Brusadin
The Fog of Systems

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)

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.

RELATED EVENT

Valentina Tanni et al.
Tactics & Practice #11: MemesteticA
Conference
19 May–2 July 2021
Various locations

This article is only available on Lulu.com

PostScript^UM #36

Silvio Lorusso
The Servile Mass Society

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

Mario Santamaría
Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes

Exhibition
15 April – 7 May 2021

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

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

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

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

Tamara Lašič Jurković
Hacked Meditation

Exhibition
10 March – 2 April 2021

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

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.

THE AUTHOR

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 21^st 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 22^nd Milan Triennial.

Andrej Škufca
Softshell Creeper

Exhibition
10 February – 5 March 2021

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Curated by
Christina Gigliotti 

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 in the 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.

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

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.

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PostScript^UM #35

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

The Proposal
A film by Jill Magid

Video on Demand (Slovenia only)
8–15 January 2021
cinesquare.net

Ticket: 3 €

*Language: English with Slovenian subtitles

In the framework of Akcija!, a cycle of screening events

Known as “the artist among architects,” Luis Barragán is among the world’s most celebrated architects of the 20th century. After his death in 1988, his professional archive was bought by a Swiss furniture company in its entirety, and hid from the public eye. In an attempt to resurrect Barragán’s life and art, boundary redefining conceptual artist Jill Magid creates a daring proposition that becomes a fascinating artwork in itself — a high-wire act of negotiation that explores how far an artist will go to democratize access to art.

Director: Jill Magid
Producers: Jarred Alterman, Charlotte Cook, Laura Coxson
Executive Producer: Laura Poitras
Editor: Hannah Buck
DOP: Jarred Alterman
Original Music: T. Griffin
Associate Producer: Pamela Echeverria

Length: 83 min
Language: English with Slovenian subtitles

RELATED EVENT

What is capitalism’s relationship to art and legacy? Who or what is the law protecting when it allows for the privatisation of culture? How can art be a methodology through which challenging issues are dissected?

The writer, curator, critic, and founder of we-make-money-not-art.com Régine Debatty meets the conceptual artist, writer, and filmmaker Jill Magid to discuss with her the many issues her film The Proposal raises.

FILMMAKER

American artist and writer Jill Magid’s work is deeply ingrained in her lived experience, exploring and blurring the boundaries between art and life. Through her performance-based practice, Magid has initiated intimate relations with a number of organizations and structures of authority. She explores the emotional, philosophical and legal tensions between the individual and ‘protective’ institutions, such as intelligence agencies or the police. To work alongside or within large organizations, Magid makes use of institutional quirks, systemic loopholes that allow her to make contact with people ‘on the inside’. Her work tends to be characterized by the dynamics of seduction, the resulting narratives often taking the form of a love story. It is typical of Magid’s practice that she follows the rules of engagement with an institution to the letter – sometimes to the point of absurdity.

With solo exhibitions at institutions around the world including MUAC, Mexico City: Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Berkeley Museum of Art, California; Tate Liverpool; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York; Gagosian Gallery, New York; and the Security and Intelligence Agency of the Netherlands, Magid has received awards from the Fonds Voor Beeldende Kunsten, the Netherland-American Foundation Fellowship Fulbright Grant, and most recently the 2017 Calder Prize. Magid has participated in Manifesta, the Liverpool, Bucharest, Singapore, Incheon, Gothenburg, Oslo and Performa Biennials. She is an Associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and was a 2013-15 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. An adjunct teacher at Cooper Union, Magid is the author of four novellas. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Fundacion Jumex, and the Walker Art Center, among others.

Price: 4€

PostScript^UM #34

Aude Launay
The Return of the Dead Author

In her most recent research project – which culminated in the exhibition Uncertainty-in-the-Loop (2020) – the Slovenian artist Sanela Jahić presented a further stage of her multiyear project. She converted her labour as an artist – her work, research and interests of the past 14 years – into data. The dataset was elaborated by a predictive algorithm that predicted her next artwork.
The independent art theoretician and curator Aude Launay placed Jahić’s work amongst works that question the concept of authorship, as she questions whether the predictive algorithms used by her can be considered to be the author of the new artworks. Since they proceed from the past, predictive algorithms can be related to the figure of the aoidos, the classical Greek oral epic poet who both repeated the song as well as invented it while singing. On the deeper side, the issue focuses on the definition of what is authored: what makes something the product of a specific authorship process?

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 12 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2019

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Flagged for Political Speech

Exhibition
6 January – 4 February 2021
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of the programme
Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation

What do algorithms see when they look at your social media profile? Are you a good provider of content? And what exactly is good? What does the algorithmic view on your social media profiles say about you?

Analyses of social media profiles are employed in an increasing number of real-world transactions. From border control to job applications, social media profiles are used to assess the threat-levels of a candidate and verify their suitability to enter a country or organisaton.

Many of these social media checks are done automatically by algorithmic entities. How and what do these algorithms assess exactly? And what do their assessments look like?

To find out, !Mediengruppe Bitnik used Ferretly, an automated online service used by Human Resources Professionals to evaluate candidates’ social media profiles. Ferretly uses algorithms trained on keywords and image recognition to sift through 7 years of social media history. The service evaluates candidates publically available social media posts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, analyzing original posts, reposts, replies, and likes. Additionally, Ferretly will assess any news items they can find.

With their service, Ferretly promises to reduce the risk of letting a person displaying toxic behaviour into your organisation or country. Toxic behaviour is defined in 11 risk categories, from hate speech, political extremism, drug-related content to explicit images and toxic language. The publicly available posts are also used to look at the sub-text of each post: the candidate’s attitude towards the event or situation they are posting about is rated as positive, negative or neutral. Each candidate is judged according to these per-defined flags and sentiment points and given a social media score which rates them as fit or unfit for entry.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik ran the social media profiles of the leaders of each of the 27 EU member states through the service. Bitnik then interpreted the results of the analysis and used this as the basis to devise a customized sweatshirt for each of the 27 profiles. 

Each shirt shows Bitnik’s interpretation and visualization of the Ferretly ratings. Besides their social media scores for different parameters, each of the shirts publicly displays a number of flagged posts which were rated by Ferretly as toxic and the reason for this rating. Depending on the report, the shirts contain more or less data. Usually more posts and data meant a worse social media rating by Ferretly.

Like the clothes we wear, our social media profiles have become the carrier of our identities. These online identities are used more and more by the gatekeepers of institutions, countries and organisations to verify that we are worthy of access.

AUTHORS

!Mediengruppe Bitnik (Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo) live and work in Berlin. Contemporary artists working on and with the internet, their practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at leading international institutions, most recently at Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Haus of Electronic Arts, Basel; and Helmhouse, Zurich. Group exhibitions have included Kunsthaus, Zurich; Łódź Art Center; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; and the Shanghai Minsheng 21st Century Museum. They have received numerous awards, among them, the Swiss Art Award, Migros New Media Jubilee Award and an Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica.

RELATED EVENTS

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Tracking, Networks and Data
Workshop
10 – 11 December 2020
Online / Ljubljana

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Decisions Decisions Decisions
Exhibition
3 – 24 December 2020
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

3 December 2020 – 15 January 2020
Delta Lab, Rijeka (HR)

!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Felix Stalder
#algoregimes
Streaming
7 December 2020
aksioma.org/streaming

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Decisions Decisions Decisions

Exhibition
3 – 24 December 2020
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

3 December 2020 – 15 January 2021
Delta Lab, Rijeka

Part of the programme
Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation

The work DECISIONS DECISIONS DECISIONS seeks out the imperfections in the logistic systems in which nowadays computers calculate nearly all necessary decisions. To do so, 27 packages were shipped out from Berlin via the logistics services provider DHL. Each package was, however, given two delivery addresses: one for Aksioma in Ljubljana and one for Drugo More in Rijeka. One address on each side of the parcel.

The resulting installation at the two exhibition spaces is formed from the letters that randomly arrive at each location, leaving the authorship of work as much to the artists as the postal machines.

Before reaching their final destinations, many of the parcels travel back and forth between different postal facilities. Depending on which side is scanned, they change directions multiple times. A TV screen in the gallery shows the recordings of the movements for each parcel, documenting the surrealist journey of the piece.

The now-empty boxes are presented in the gallery as the remaining envelope of the work and skeletons of the process.

The work experiments with forcing a decision-making process on the postal system which does not usually decide – only routes. The work reinterprets The Postman’s Choice by Ben Vautier from the year 1965 in which a postal worker decides where a postcard that has two delivery addresses is finally to be sent. As it was back then, the standard rule in digital shipping operations is that for every shipping unit there must be one sender and one clear recipient. In today’s fully automated logistics systems, it is no longer the postman’s choice, but rather a question of which side of a parcel is “up” for the automated scanning process to read. The logistics system works mechanically by means of barcodes, scanners and programmed directives. Until the human supervisor spots and corrects the anomaly of the undecided recipient.

AUTHORS

!Mediengruppe Bitnik (Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo) live and work in Berlin. Contemporary artists working on and with the internet, their practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at leading international institutions, most recently at Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Haus of Electronic Arts, Basel; and Helmhouse, Zurich. Group exhibitions have included Kunsthaus, Zurich; Łódź Art Center; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; and the Shanghai Minsheng 21st Century Museum. They have received numerous awards, among them, the Swiss Art Award, Migros New Media Jubilee Award and an Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica.

RELATED EVENTS

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Tracking, Networks and Data
Workshop
10 – 11 December 2020
Online / Ljubljana

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Flagged for Political Speech
Exhibition
6 – 22 January 2021
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Tracking, Networks and Data

Electronic Civil Disobedience Workshop
10 and 11 December 2020

Online / Ljubljana

Registration deadline
TUE, 8 December 2020

Language: English
Max. number of participants: 15

In the framework of konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art

With their exploration of logistics infrastructures, !Mediengruppe Bitnik provides insights into systems that usually work invisibly. From the investigation of algorithms that evaluate our social media profiles in their work Flagged for Political Speech to interference with the greatly automated mail system in Decisions Decisions Decisions the artistic duo observes the anatomy of these fully optimized automated systems that assist our daily lives and reveals their gaps and flaws.

Now it’s time for you to join the workshop with !Mediengruppe Bitnik and explore the hidden, unmapped networks of the world around you. Using five mini GPS trackers as tactical tools we will explore the service networks, waste management, transport networks of the city while the position data generated by the trackers will allow us to make visible movements as maps. 

The two-day workshop in the form of a presentation and planning on the first day, and practical work on the second, will take place via Zoom. All participants will be able to follow the movement of devices on the map online for a continuous period of 5 to 10 days. Participants will work in teams of 3 and can either enroll as a group or individually. No special skills are required, however all partakers should have access to an end device and a good internet connection.

SCHEDULE

THU, 10 December 2020 
4:30 pm–6:30 pm
Workshop introduction and planning of the hands-on session and work groups for the next day (online via Zoom)

FRI, 11 December 2020
10 am–12 pm
Pick-up GPS-devices at Aksioma | Project Space (Komenskega 18, LJ). Groups prepare their device for placing and drop them at designated locations within the city. 

4:30 pm–6:30 pm
Online meeting to exchange experiences and share locations of devices (online via Zoom)

THE AUTHORS

!Mediengruppe Bitnik (Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo) live and work in Berlin. Contemporary artists working on and with the internet, their practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at leading international institutions, most recently at Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Haus of Electronic Arts, Basel; and Helmhouse, Zurich. Group exhibitions have included Kunsthaus, Zurich; Łódź Art Center; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; and the Shanghai Minsheng 21st Century Museum. They have received numerous awards, among them, the Swiss Art Award, Migros New Media Jubilee Award and an Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica.

RELATED EVENTS

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Decisions Decisions Decisions
Exhibition
3 – 24 December 2020
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

3 December – 15 January 2020
Delta Lab, Rijeka (HR)

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Flagged for Political Speech
Exhibition
6 – 22 January 2021
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana