!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

24/7. Algorithmic sovereignty. Anxiety. Artificial intelligence. Automation. Crowdfunding. Data extraction. Entreprecariat. Exploitation. Free labour. Free time. Gig working. Human-in-the-loop. Logistics. Machine vision. Man-machine complexity. Micro-labour. No future. Outsourcing. Peripheral work. Platform economy. Post-capitalism. Post-work. Procrastination. Quantification. Self-improvement. Social media fatigue. Time management. Unemployment. These are arguably just a few of the many keywords required to navigate our fragile, troubled, scattered present, in which the borders between life and work, home and office, sleep and wake, private and public, human and machine have faded, and in which the personal is not just political but economic. Edited by Domenico Quaranta and Janez Janša, featuring words by !Mediengruppe Bitnik (Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo) and Felix Stalder, Silvio Lorusso, Luciana Parisi, and Domenico Quaranta and works by !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Danilo Correale, Elisa Giardina Papa, Sanela Jahić, Silvio Lorusso, Jonas Lund, Michael Mandiberg, Eva and Franco Mattes, Anna Ridler, Sebastian Schmieg, Sašo Sedlaček, and Guido Segni, Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation is an attempt to scrutinise and explore some of these issues. A catchphrase borrowed from media theorist Ian Bogost, describing “the Exhausting Work of the Technology User,” hyperemployment allows us to grasp a situation which the current pandemic has turned endemic, to analyse the present and discuss possible futures.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 160 pp | B/W and 1/32 colour | soft cover | 2020
ISBN 978-88-8056-112-5

Related event: Hyperemployment

Sanela Jahić
Uncertainty-in-the-Loop

Exhibition
23 September – 23 October 2020

Opening
WED, 23 September 2020 at 7 pm

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

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

As algorithms ripple through and integrate further with our work and daily lives, the future of work projections note creativity, flexibilty and innovative thinking as forecast skill demands that will be required of employees. These skills, which have traditionally also been attributed to the profession of the artist, are supposed to be among the ones most resistant to or the least exposed to automation. Many people think that what they do requires creativity, and that cannot be expressed in the form of executable code or emulated by a machine. Contemporary perception usually sees creativity as something new, divergent and original that takes people by surprise. And yet, many tasks which might entail human faculties such as intuition, empathy, and creativity, are already being outsourced to increasingly capable automated and automatising systems that just perform them in differently.

There are many ways to distill something into data points. In her recent work, Sanela Jahić converted her labour as an artist – her works, research and interests of the past 14 years – into data. As data, the features of her artworks become tables of numbers; each creative decision emerges in a row of digits. The artist then turned the decision making over to a predictive algorithm. The machine uses the dataset to sift through and identify patterns in her artistic labour in order to predict the content and aesthetics of her next artwork. The first stage of this multiyear project was presented at Aksioma in 2018 with the exhibition The Labour of Making Labour Disappear.

Yet such predictive power is limited in its forecast of future outcome, because it gives a selection from among ready-made choices. And even though this may be an original selection, as calculating predictor of the future it is still weighted down in the past. At every step of the way, the capability to create new choices is heavily constrained by choices that came before. In other words, conceiving artworks from the same conceptual depository is not really imagining something new, but a narrow alteration of existing inputs. To break away from the machine algorithm rolling out combinations of prior existing data, and to avoid sparking a feedback loop, the artist – in the final stage of this project – provides the machine a look at her contemporary investigations as an early window into the present disorganization of her thoughts. The algorithm then determines tomorrow’s artwork based on observations today with the past flickering in the rear–view mirror. On the basis of the predictive model, Pataka was created, a work that listens to what our voices tell machines about us.

THE AUTHOR

Sanela Jahić (1980, Kranj) graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana in 2008, and received her master’s degree in 2010 in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Jahić is an intermedia artist, who constructs visual and technologically supported kinetic objects and installations. Her artistic practice often involves collaboration with specialists for mechanical engineering, automation, software and electronics. She lives and works in Škofja Loka. Jahić has exhibited her work in numerous shows in Slovenia and abroad.

RELATED EVENTS

Sanela Jahić
The Labour of Making Labour Disappear
Exhibition
12 December 2018 – 11 January 2019
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Hyperemployment
Exhibition
 7 November 2019–19 January 2020
MGLC – International Centre for Graphic Arts, Ljubljana

Curated by: Domenico Quaranta
Artists: Danilo Correale, Elisa Giardina Papa, Sanela Jahić, Silvio Lorusso, Jonas Lund, Michael Mandiberg, Sebastian Schmieg, Guido Segni

Automate all the Things!
Symposium
14–15 January 2020
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana
Moderna galerija

Speakers: Elisa Giardina Papa, Sanela Jahić, Silvio Lorusso, Michael Mandiberg, Domenico Quaranta, Sašo Sedlaček, Sebastian Schmieg

► The original English version of the comic book was published by Dr. Julia Schneider and is available HERE. Aksioma published the Slovenian translation.

In 30 years, will robots do all the unpleasant work for us? Or will they subjugate us to become submissive slaves? The debates on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will change our lives move between these extremes. There is no doubt that the change will be dramatic. Maybe now is just the right time to start interfering.
This pioneering comic essay on AI invites you on an illustrated journey through the dimensions and implications of the groundbreaking technology. Discussing important chances and risks associated with AI, this work is a creative stimulus for insiders of the subject as well as an invitation for newbies to get informed and join the debate.
With a doctorate in economics, Julia Schneider appreciates data and code as tools for solving complex puzzles – and loves comics as a medium for telling complex stories. Coming from the opposite direction, artist Lena Kadriye Ziyal loves encrypting complexity with associations and thereby expands the meaning of a theme with her perspective.

EN | A4, 21 x 29.7 cm | 56 pp | b/w | soft cover | 2019
ISBN: 978-3-748531-28-9

Related event: We Need to Talk, AI

Boštjan Čadež
Line Rider

VR game
20 November 2020
Mednarodni festival računalniških umetnosti, Maribor

In the framework of konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art

Throughout art history, some artworks have been lucky enough to be understood not simply as art, but as useful tools, public spaces, cultural phenomena, or memes. Line Rider is one such artwork. Originally created in September 2006 by Slovenian artist Boštjan Čadež (also known as “fšk”) when he was still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Line Rider is a classic sandbox game where you draw a track for a boy on a sled to ride on. The concept is simple and the aesthetics are minimal, yet the possibilities are endless. The line you draw can be a simple line or evolve into an elaborate drawing. Depending upon your attitude toward the character, you can try to make him ride indefinitely or make a drawing that will make him crash or fall in a spectacular way. As a drawing board, it offers basic tools to edit, delete, or remake parts of the drawing. The board exceeds the space of the screen, allowing the user to draw large landscapes. This, together with the perfectly simulated physics (the track must be sufficiently smooth to prevent the character from falling off the sled or the sled from falling into pieces) and the possibility to record and share the final animation, made Line Rider oddly addictive and easily turned it into an internet phenomenon. After it was published on DeviantArt in September 2006, the original game was featured on many popular websites (from Yahoo! to Time Magazine), appeared in several McDonald’s commercials, was discussed in game magazines as well as in the New York Times, and was even used as an educational tool to teach physics. It was downloaded more than 34 million times and reached number seven on Google Zeitgeist’s search query chart (source: Wikipedia). It was plagiarized and became the subject of a number of variations and remakes. But, more importantly, it became the subject of a number of online videos, where hundreds of users shared their tricks and their epic performances – or epic fails – with the game.

While the original game can still be played for free on the website linerider.com, or as a smartphone app, Čadež is currently working on a 3D version playable in virtual reality, a preview of which will be publicly presented at the MFRU festival in Maribor. The new game will be released in 2021.

THE AUTHOR

Boštjan Čadež (1979) studied industrial design at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. As an intermedia artist, he’s lately been focusing mostly on the fields of computer, real-time-generated and generative graphics and robotics, presented in the form of performances and installations. He’s received several prestigious awards and prizes for his innovations in design and programming. His previous artistic endeavours include graffiti, street art and VJ-ing. In 2013, he received the Golden Bird Award in the category of intermedia art.

The publication is a part of the installation 0.004 Hz which examines an event that for several months in 2018 almost imperceptibly affected everyday life in an area of Europe comprising 25 nations, by slowing down some electrical clocks for 6 minutes over the 2-month period.

The publication collects mostly found fragments that are indicative of the potential in, and are essential or tangential to this delay. Official announcements, news reports and interpretations of the incident are juxtaposed with literary, artistic, theoretical, philosophical and scientific texts. These include fragments by Karen Barad, Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Brian Massumi, Adriana Cavarero, Marcel Duchamp, Mladen Dolar and Simone de Beauvoir among others.

EN, SRB, SI, AL | A4, 21 x 29.7 cm | xx pp | b/w | soft cover | 2020
ISBN 978-961-95064-0-0

Related event: 0.004 Hz

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak
Infinity (Digital)

Exhibition
17 September – 18 October 2020

DLUL Gallery, Breg 22, Ljubljana

The new 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 fifteen 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 EVENT

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

Sašo Sedlaček
Oblomo: Busy Being Lazy

Exhibition
28 October–26 November 2020
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

When public life closes its doors, art opens a window. 

With the opening of the exhibition Oblomo: Busy Being Lazy, Aksioma presents a brand new format: #comeby and #peek! Aksioma | Project Space will open its windows wide on Wednesday and invite you to laze around. On tablets accessible from the street, you will be able to mint crypto-coins, to peek into the Oblomo market, where our sleeping “seller” will (not) help you spend your earnings. If you’re too lazy to leave your apartment, don’t worry – you can also mint coins into your Oblomo wallet from the comfort of your home couch. 

The exhibition by Sašo Sedlaček will combine four spaces – gallery, public, private and internet. You will be able to non-work in any of them, and the #drivein market will be open for you every day until 20:55. Let your laziness finally pay off!

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

Can doing nothing be the ultimate form of labour in the age of automation? By employing the same technologies that make us actually work all the time, such as biometrics, the Oblomo platform turns inactivity, motionlessness, laziness into an economic value. It democratizes once privileged values and changes our perspective on idleness from something despicable into something worthy, thus turning laziness into a productive activity with purchasing power.

Based on a blockchain with its own cryptocurrency and machine learning software, the Oblomo platform rewards users for being inactive. When the application detects the user’s non-activity, it rewards it by sending Oblomo coins to their electronic wallet. Users can spend coins on the platform’s market which is at its core a non-work for work exchange platform, where users goods and services are being exchanged and sold.

The Oblomo platform is a web application that works in a browser, so anyone can use it on their phone, tablet or computer, practically on any device with an internet connection and a webcam.

The project was initiated in November 2019 when the first coins were created in the Oblomo ecosystem. In the performance Om for Coin, three individuals – the “miners” – performed the meditation mantra “Om” in front of a machine learning software surveillanced by a live audience. This created around 2 000 000 new coins which are now available to the public for mining and trading.

The Oblomo project got its name after the 1859 novel Oblomov, by Russian writer Ivan Goncharov. In it, the main hero Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, undoubtedly the laziest hero in world literature. Although he spends most of his time in bed, Oblomov isn’t really lazy — or at least he is only slothful in the physical sense. Intellectually, he is a fizzing ball of energy. Oblomov is a visionary representation of the individual in the 21st century, in which physical work is soon to be done by artificial intelligence and robots. And due to the devastating impact of continuous human effectiveness on the environment and lack of reflection, the project also carries an environmental and health message. Laziness is organic, ecological and healthy.

AUTHOR

Sašo Sedlaček holds a BA in sculpture and video from the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Ljubljana (UL ALUO). Since 2015, he works as an associate professor in UL ALUO’s Video and New Media programme. His work has been awarded various grants, including the Trend Award for exceptional achievements in visual culture (Ljubljana 2012) and the VIDA 11 (Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, 2008), and is featured in various private and public collections, including the Museum & Galleries of Ljubljana (MGML). Since 2001, his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at various venues, most recently: Aksioma | Project Space; City Art Gallery of Ljubljana; Espace Apollonia, Strasbourg; Contemporary Art Palazzo Torriani, Gradisca d’Isonzo; Autostrada Biennale Prizren; Handel Street Projects; UGM, Maribor; +MSUM, Ljubljana; AND Festival, Grizedale Forest; Wro Art Center; Ars Electronica; transmediale. In 2020, his project Oblomo, featuring an alternative cryptocurrency based on laziness, will be featured at Dopolavoro within the Rijeka 2020 ECoC.

RELATED PROGRAMME

Sašo Sedlaček
Om for Coin
Performance and exhibition
6 – 29 November 2019
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Sašo Sedlaček
Oblomo: Busy Being Lazy
Exhibition
21 August – 30 September 2019
Exportdrvo, Delta, Rijeka, Croatia

Sanela Jahić
Uncertainty-in-the-Loop

Exhibition
23 September – 23 October 2020

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

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

See the first phase of the project here.

As algorithms ripple through and integrate further with our work and daily lives, the future of work projections note creativity, flexibilty and innovative thinking as forecast skill demands that will be required of employees. These skills, which have traditionally also been attributed to the profession of the artist, are supposed to be among the ones most resistant to or the least exposed to automation. Many people think that what they do requires creativity, and that cannot be expressed in the form of executable code or emulated by a machine. Contemporary perception usually sees creativity as something new, divergent and original that takes people by surprise. And yet, many tasks which might entail human faculties such as intuition, empathy, and creativity, are already being outsourced to increasingly capable automated and automatising systems that just perform them in differently.

There are many ways to distill something into data points. In her recent work, Sanela Jahić converted her labour as an artist – her works, research and interests of the past 14 years – into data. As data, the features of her artworks become tables of numbers; each creative decision emerges in a row of digits. The artist then turned the decision making over to a predictive algorithm. The machine uses the dataset to sift through and identify patterns in her artistic labour in order to predict the content and aesthetics of her next artwork. The first stage of this multiyear project was presented at Aksioma in 2018 with the exhibition The Labour of Making Labour Disappear.

Yet such predictive power is limited in its forecast of future outcome, because it gives a selection from among ready-made choices. And even though this may be an original selection, as calculating predictor of the future it is still weighted down in the past. At every step of the way, the capability to create new choices is heavily constrained by choices that came before. In other words, conceiving artworks from the same conceptual depository is not really imagining something new, but a narrow alteration of existing inputs. To break away from the machine algorithm rolling out combinations of prior existing data, and to avoid sparking a feedback loop, the artist – in the final stage of this project – provides the machine a look at her contemporary investigations as an early window into the present disorganization of her thoughts. The algorithm then determines tomorrow’s artwork based on observations today with the past flickering in the rear–view mirror. On the basis of the predictive model, Pataka was created, a work that listens to what our voices tell machines about us.

THE AUTHOR

Sanela Jahić (1980, Kranj) graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana in 2008, and received her master’s degree in 2010 in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Jahić is an intermedia artist, who constructs visual and technologically supported kinetic objects and installations. Her artistic practice often involves collaboration with specialists for mechanical engineering, automation, software and electronics. She lives and works in Škofja Loka. Jahić has exhibited her work in numerous shows in Slovenia and abroad.

BROCHURE

Aude Launay
The Return of the Dead Author
PostScript^UM #34

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

RELATED EVENTS

Sanela Jahić
The Labour of Making Labour Disappear
Exhibition
12 December 2018 – 11 January 2019
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Hyperemployment
Exhibition
 7 November 2019 – 19 January 2020
MGLC – International Centre for Graphic Arts, Ljubljana

Curated by: Domenico Quaranta
Artists: Danilo Correale, Elisa Giardina Papa, Sanela Jahić, Silvio Lorusso, Jonas Lund, Michael Mandiberg, Sebastian Schmieg, Guido Segni

Automate all the Things!
Symposium
14 – 15 January 2020
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana
Moderna galerija

Speakers: Elisa Giardina Papa, Sanela Jahić, Silvio Lorusso, Michael Mandiberg, Domenico Quaranta, Sašo Sedlaček, Sebastian Schmieg

Sanela Jahić
Uncertainty-in-the-Loop
Exhibition
5 – 27 November 2020
DeltaLab, Rijeka, Croatia

Julia Schneider, Lena Kadriye Ziyal
We Need to Talk, AI

Exhibition
7–24 July 2020

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

In the framework of program Akcija!

In 30 years, will robots do all the unpleasant work for us? Or will they subjugate us to become submissive slaves? The debates on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will change our lives move between these extremes. There is no doubt that the change will be dramatic. Maybe now is just the right time to start interfering.

This pioneering comic essay on AI invites you on an illustrated journey through the dimensions and implications of the groundbreaking technology. Discussing important chances and risks associated with AI, this work is a creative stimulus for insiders of the subject as well as an invitation for newbies to get informed and join the debate.

With a doctorate in economics, Julia Schneider appreciates data and code as tools for solving complex puzzles – and loves comics as a medium for telling complex stories. Coming from the opposite direction, artist Lena Kadriye Ziyal loves encrypting complexity with associations and thereby expands the meaning of a theme with her perspective.

RELATED EVENT

Streaming interview
Monday, 26 October 2020 at 5 pm (CET)
aksioma.org/streaming

In the conversation Nika Mahnič and the author Dr. Julia Schneider took us through a number of issues covered in the comic essay and other AI-related topics.

How do we make computer science more attentive to the issue of minorities and the poor? Are some institutions better left undigitized? Is banning certain technologies a necessary solution, or is it just feeding our paranoia? On a free market, is that even possible? Should we renew our conceptions of privacy? Join the streaming and listen to some interesting takes on artificial intelligence and the dilemmas posed by its rapid rise.

In the framework of konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art

COMIC ESSAY

► The original English version of the comic book was published by Dr. Julia Schneider and is available HERE. Aksioma published the Slovenian translation.

AUTHORS

Dr. Julia Schneider is an independent consultant for Artificial Intelligence and a member of the scientifi c committee of VDEI Association of the Exoskeleton Industry e.V. She received her doctorate in economics from the Free University Berlin for her research on the effects of the 2005 German labor market reforms on welfare recipients` behavior and health.
After that, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the fi eld of empirical labor market and innovation research and as senior data strategist.

Lena Kadriye Ziyal is part of the collectively run content and graphic design agency Infotext in Berlin. She creates design concepts, infographics, icons and illustrations. Lena studied visual communication and graphic arts at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee, the University of Arts (UdK) in Berlin and at the Marmara University Istanbul. Before joining Infotext she worked as a freelance graphic designer and visual artist.

Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
0.004 Hz

Exhibition
19 August–18 September 2020

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

0.004 Hz examines an event that originates from a dispute between Serbia and Kosovo, which for several months in 2018, almost imperceptibly affected everyday life in an area of Europe comprising 25 nations. Due to the complex and unresolved political relations in which Kosovo and Serbia (and the Serbian minority in Kosovo) were – and continue to be – embroiled, there was a deficit of electrical power in the region from January to March 2018. This caused the mean electrical frequency in the entire Continental European Power System (from Istanbul to Santiago de Compostela, from Rome to Copenhagen) to decrease from 50 to 49.996 Hz. For the many electric clocks that keep time according to the frequency of the power grid, instead of quartz crystal, the 0.004 Hz drop resulted in a cumulative delay of 6 minutes over the 2-month period.

The interesting thing is – almost nobody noticed.

This project embraces the event as an opportunity to encounter and contemplate the temporal gap – the cranny, loss of time– or delay that disrupted the (measured) flow of time itself. The result is something that Sambolec calls an ecstatic interval: an interval that amplifies fuzzy and unstable relations between the understanding, measurement, representation and experience of temporality. It is a gap that also illuminates the invisible, involuntary and unexpected ‘shadow connectivity’ that the continent-wide electrical power grid enables between distant people, places, cultures, political spheres and everyday life.

How does the shared grid connect political institutions in the Balkans to the kitchens and bedrooms of Denmark?
How does this affect and inform the contemporary human condition and relations between experience, factuality, distance and visibility?
How does it (trans)form the notion of territoriality, autonomy and statehood?
And, what are the potential relations between this event and the poetic, philosophical and artistic articulations of the evasive, ephemeral and imperceptible?

The installation consists of a sound, a graph of the Continental European Power System mean electrical frequency deviations from January to March 2018, and a newspaper-style publication. Sound is at two frequencies – 50 Hz and 49.996 Hz – amplified by subwoofers and transducers attached to Tupana drum membrane. This drum is a version of traditional Turkish Davul and is still widely played in the region. In Serbian it is called Tapan and Tupana in Albanian. The publication collects mostly found fragments that are indicative of the potential in, and are essential or tangential to, the ecstatic interval. Official announcements, news reports and interpretations of the frequency deviation described above are juxtaposed with articulations of the ecstatic interval across literature, art, theory, philosophy and science. These include fragments by Karen Barad, Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Brian Massumi, Adriana Cavarero, Marcel Duchamp, Mladen Dolar and Simone de Beauvoir, among others.

AUTHOR

Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec (SI/NL) is artist and researcher with a particular focus in sound, new media, real-time interaction, and questions of contemporary mediation in relation to the sense of (bodily) presence. His recent work consists of spatial and sound installations, events and interventions, where (un)mediated sonic events act as central element that affectively evokes human bodily presence, while signaling its physical absence. Addressing the visitors through sound, tactility, kinetic movement and vibration, such experiential artistic works ultimately intend to question in what way human bodily presence can be felt and sensed beyond the directness of visuality and vicinity, and further, what kind of new poetics these re-articulations can form.

His works have been presented internationally at various museums, galleries, project spaces and contemporary art biennales and festivals.

He earned his PhD in Artistic Research from Faculty of Fine Art at University in Bergen, Norway, where he was the recipient of Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship (2013 – 2016). He is currently the recipient of Mondriaan Fund Stipendium for Established Artists, The Netherlands (2018 – 2022). In 2017 he took part in Research Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. In 2010 his work was awarded at Ars Electronica Festival in Linz – Austria.

In 2018 he became a member of artistic committee of puntWG Project Space in Amsterdam and a member of artistic committee of DNK – Amsterdam, a series of experimental contemporary music and sound art concerts, events, lectures and exhibitions.

www.realitysoundtrack.org