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James Bridle (one of Wired magazine’s 100 most influential people in Europe) is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. In 2018, he curated the exhibition and conference Transnationalisms, produced by Aksioma in the framework of the international cooperation project State Machines. Bridle has spent the recent years researching citizenship-by-investment and related technologies: special economic zones and free trade areas, freeports and seasteads, blockchain and other supposedly emancipatory but inhuman and asset-based protocols for identity management. At every level, the mass movement of peoples and the rise of planetary-scale computation is changing the way we think and understand national identity. The state as we know it is coming to an end: in this essay, starting from the increasing exchange of national identities available to the very rich, the author draws the trajectory of State to stateless machines.

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

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PostScript^UM #32

Daphne Dragona, Dimitris Charitos
Challenging Infrastructures. Alternative Networking & the Role of Art

During the last 15 years – when technology has become more natural and habitual, thus causing people to lose control over it – an emerging scene of network practitioners from different fields has been actively involved in building alternative networks of communication and file sharing. Among the practitioners of this DIY networking scene, a growing number of artists have been playing a crucial role as facilitator, mediator, and commoner of knowledge and experience. The artists have been offering tools of understanding based on their will to expose and make accessible opaque systems in an effort to empower people. Daphne Dragona (PhD), curator and writer currently working for transmediale festival, and Dimitris Charitos, Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Media Studies, School of Economics and Political Sciences, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, present and discuss certain exemplary initiatives studying how they evolved in time.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 40 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2018

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PostScript^UM #31

Jaya Klara Brekke
I saw the Blockchain at the End of The World, turned around, and walked back

A mysterious and controversial technology is among us: the blockchain. Constructed by unicorns piecing together the necessary building blocks of code, cryptography and incentives, it can lead humankind to Utopia, or to the Final Solution – the End. If it’s true that “It Is Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism,” as a popular bumper sticker warns, the artist Jaya Klara Brekke, currently pursuing a PhD on the political geographies of blockchain infrastructures, invites us to come back from elsewhere in the future to stay here and now, and not to fear indeterminacy.
Written on the occasion of the New World Order group exhibition curated by Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett / Furtherfield, this homage to the here and now reminds us that we are the ones who are building the future, maybe one automated and run by AI, but we will never be able to predict it.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 12 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2018

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PostScript^UM #30

Daniël de Zeeuw
Notes from the Excluded Middle

Is the idea of society as the totality of individuals the only way of envisioning human sociality, or is it only a historically determined construct? What other dimensions emerge when we shift from thinking in terms of individuals to dividuals and their assembling into condividuals? Which are the political implications of this shift in the contemporary capitalism that already operates on a condividual level? Starting from these questions, the Dutch media theorist Daniel de Zeeuw explored the visions exposed during a two-day event, inspired by Marco Deseriis’s book, Proper and Improper Names – Identity in the Information Society (Ljubljana, 17–18 October 2017). During the event an inquiry into the status of the individual was conducted through the notion of the trans and condividual (Deseriis) as well as the dividual (Gerald Raunig), and the political and artistic practices they engage in (Wu Ming 1 and Natalie Bookchin).

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 12 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2018

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PostScript^UM #29

Marc Garrett
Reclaiming the Corporate Owned Self

The American born artist Jennifer Lyn Morone registered herself as a corporation in 2014, founding Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc. As the founder, CEO, owner, shareholder and product of her own company, she sells, leases, rents or invests her personal data for her own profit. She has commercialised her hormones and diamonds made from her hair, advertising them through satirical videos.
In the Netopticon, the panopticon in which we live using platforms such as Facebook and Google, our data are vacuumed up to generate profits in an extreme form of capitalism. Artist and curator Marc Garrett (www.furtherfield.org) says that Jennifer Lyn Morone’s project turns the tables by shining the torch back onto the data hunters to study their behaviours and clarify the conditions of the data hunt, a dystopian act of genuine survival similar to what punks did when they picked up their instruments to forge a new era of social change, where outsiders found a voice for free expression.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 16 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2017

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PostScript^UM #28

Florian Cramer
Hiding in Plain Sight. Amy Suo Wu’s The Kandinsky Collective

The 15th century Voynich Manuscript, Kandinsky’s abstract painting with a secret encoded message, militant jihadists using porn images for hidden communication and most recently computer malware embedding virus code into images on infected computers (and perhaps this text too) are examples of steganography, which can be also found in Amy Suo Wu’s works. By using Cardan Grille, substitution ciphers and camouflaged text within text in combination with invisible inks, Wu’s works are more than just highly enjoyable pieces of visual art and calligraphic design. As a combination of exhibition works, toolkit manuals and workshops, they are also pieces of practical media research and activism. Her gallery exhibition serves as an experimentation lab for invisible inks and other steganographic techniques with extraordinary creative potential – and is therefore just the beginning of a practice that is meant to leave behind the space where it is now being shown.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 12 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2016

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PostScript^UM #27

Lev Kreft
Manifold Triptych

The Slovenian philosopher, sociologist and politician Lev Kreft ascribes All About You, the new work by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, to the tradition of the Readymade and Self-portrait. But very peculiar ones: the ordinary objects turned into an artwork are IDs and personalized bank cards, the self-portrait is the ID card itself, but also all data about the account and money transfers a given bank card holds. How far can a card owner make his own personal credit card? As well as a citizen has to respect some limitations when changing his name, a bank customer has to respect the bank’s guidelines in “personalizing” his card.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 12 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2016

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PostScript^UM #26

Mojca Kumerdej
The Woman with the Wolf

This tale by Slovenian writer and philosopher Mojca Kumerdej tells of Moo, a woman who lives in a prehistoric age when the passing of time is marked by “bigmoons”, when animals are both sacred and hunted, both enemies and allies, and when the only medicine available are herbs provided by a shaman.
Moo, who knows how to listen to the voice of nature, has been chosen to be the new shaman of her clan in a world at the dawn of civilization, where incest is condemned and wisdom is passed by word of mouth from generation to generation. In other words, Moo lives at the start of the geological era known as the “Anthropocene”, characterized by the changes imprinted on the earth by human beings. Kumerdej’s tale may thus be read as a kind of prequel to the artistic research of Maja Smrekar, whose projects foresee apocalyptic scenarios generated by humanity’s impact on nature.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 16 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2016

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PostScript^UM #25

Domenico Quaranta
In it for the lulz

“What the Internet stood for, for a long time, is something that I’m still nostalgically supporting,” said Constant Dullaart in an interview. The Dutch artist, lecturer and curator grew up in an age of the Internet “designed to be used by everyone”. In its first years, the Internet proved to be the place of warm, authentic relationships, the place where one looked for friends, not followers, and where one engaged in peer-to-peer discussions, not in simply adding a number to a stack. Now we work in corporate backyards and, especially in social network environments, we are very easily and almost inadvertently drawn to care more about numbers than people, and to commodify ourselves, our friends and the contents we produce. “Dullaart’s projects,” says the art critic Domenico Quaranta in this essay, “can be only understood as actions within a system, responding to something and waiting for a response, showing that we could invert this trend if we really wanted to.”

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 12 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2016

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The philosopher Tomislav Medak takes the works and the research of Sašo Sedlaček as a vantage point from which to consider how forms of social domination structure technological development in the present and how the present technological configuration is functional for the reproduction of those forms of social domination.
Sedlaček’s works show the advancement of technology as a source of waste. They also deploy methods of re-purposing the technologies that grow in the shadows of capitalist technoscience – obsolete hardware, free software, alternative technology design and indigenous techniques. The marginal status of such alternative technologies speaks to the fact that technologies cannot in themselves lead to the overcoming of exploitation of workers and spoliation of planetary ecosystems. The post-capitalist transition will require a tide of political mobilisation, but social movements have to understand that a reconfiguration of technology should be part of their strategy.

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Jon Lackman, art historian and writer, tells the story of RDS, Random Darknet Shopper, a bot created by the Swiss artists Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo, known as !Mediengruppe Bitnik. RDS is a piece of software that can operate nearly autonomously, blindly selecting an item costing less than $100 from an online black market, then paying for it from its own Bitcoin account, and having the item shipped to the address of the gallery or museum in which RDS resides at the moment. Its story began in September 2014, in an art gallery in St. Gallen, Switzerland, when it first bought a “Fire brigade master-keys set”. Since then it has bought many illegal items, such as counterfeit brand clothes, drugs, passport scans or credit card numbers. The shopping has been exhibited in the gallery and some paradoxical problems were raised when the police sequestered the Ecstasy pills. Is it illegal for a bot to randomly buy illegal items? And what happens when a vendor knows what (or who) RDS is?

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Molleindustria, the “brand” name of Italian game designer Paolo Pedercini, has been a project of reappropriation of video games and a call for the radicalization of popular culture since 2003. On the occasion of the “All Work, No Play” exhibition at Aksioma Project Space in June 2015, a significant selection of its games was made. The exhibited games deal with the theme of the conflict between life and work, as (video)games can be used to address critically socio-political issues such as flexibility, precariousness and alienation. In this essay, Paolo Ruffino, member of the art group IOCOSE and academic, explores the working conditions of independent game developers, who are often forced into patterns of self-exploitation and are exposed to the risk of over-individualisation. With its unresolved co-existence of an individual and a group, Molleindustria provides an enlightening case giving meaning to the word independence.

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Invisible flying machines are in the skies above us, remotely controlled, led by software, suspended between wonder and terror. For the artist and writer James Bridle “the drone stands in part for the network itself: an invisible, inherently connected technology making possible sight and action at a distance”. To be aware of “the cloud” we are living in is a matter of power and to make the network visible is a recurrent concern in Bridle’s work.
Writer and critic Mirthe Berentsen starts from here to write a fictional futuristic short story about drones, death and digital post mortem life. Can we be reassumed by our digital legacy? Does our individuality correspond to the data we have left behind in chats, text messages, social networks? These are questions we should think about.

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Nicolas Maigret is a critical media artist and curator. In the Pirate Cinema, he explores piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing of audio-visual contents: a monitoring machine shows P2P transfers in real time on networks using the BitTorrent protocol. The P2P Sharing protocol is based on small-sample file fragmentation: when all the “chunks” have been downloaded, the file can then be reconstructed sample by sample until completion, from chaotic scraps received from distinct users around the world. In this essay, Geoff Cox (Associate Professor at the Dept. of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, and Adjunct Faculty at Transart Institute) opens up a discussion on the temporal complexity and the radical montage of multiple realities reflected in the project Pirate Cinema. Understanding temporality at different speeds, levels and scales means beginning to unfold a more nuanced understanding of different kinds of time existing simultaneously across different geo-political contexts.

Today, we live in a world where every time we turn on our smartphones, we are inextricably tied by data, laws and flowing bytes to different countries. A world in which personal expressions are framed and mediated by digital platforms, and where new kinds of currencies, financial exchange and even labor bypass corporations and governments. Simultaneously, the same technologies increase governmental powers of surveillance, allow corporations to extract ever more complex working arrangements and do little to slow the construction of actual walls along actual borders. On the one hand, the agency of individuals and groups is starting to approach that of nation states; on the other, our mobility and hard-won rights are under threat. What tools do we need to understand this world, and how can art assist in envisioning and enacting other possible futures?

This publication investigates the new relationships between states, citizens and the stateless made possible by emerging technologies. It is the result of a two-year EU-funded collaboration between Aksioma (SI), Drugo More (HR), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network Cultures (NL), NeMe (CY), and a diverse range of artists, curators, theorists and audiences. State Machines insists on the need for new forms of expression and new artistic practices to address the most urgent questions of our time, and seeks to educate and empower the digital subjects of today to become active, engaged, and effective digital citizens of tomorrow.

ISBN 978-94-92302-33-5

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A conversation between Or Ettlinger and Pablo Garcia about the definition of virtual space on the occasion of Pablo Garcia’s exhibition at Aksioma, “Adventures in Virtuality”. Both Ettlinger and Garcia are academics, the former teaches Virtual Architecture and Media Theory in Ljubljana, the latter Contemporary Practices at the Art Institute of Chicago; they both share an interest in sci-fi, classical arts and both studied Architecture.
Is “digital” a synonym for virtual? Are simulations virtual realities? Is the mental space a virtual space? These are the main questions discussed in this conversation and the answers are not so obvious.
Virtual spaces are as ancient as the human need for and pleasure in creating images of the world. They can be analogic, as the work of Garcia shows. Virtual is related with reproducibility and is not about the physicality or non-physicality of the object – it is about what we see through the object.

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B/W VERSION

COLOR VERSION

In 2007, three Slovenian artists joined the conservative Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and officially changed their names to Janez Janša. While they renamed themselves for personal reasons, the boundaries between their lives and their art began to blur in numerous and unforeseen ways. The catalogue of Janez Janša® – the anthological exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta and presented in 2017 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM) in Ljubljana – presents a comprehensive selection of works and projects produced by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša over the last ten years – most of them arising as collateral effects of the name change or other life events related to it. The publication raises some universal questions about identity in the age of biopolitics and about art in the age of information, and it casts the Janšas’ story into the future by announcing the registration of the Janez Janša name as a trademark for the next ten years.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 224 pp | colour | paperback cover | 2017
ISBN 978-961-93930-7-9

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B/W VERSION

COLOUR VERSION

In the summer of 2007 three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša,” the name of the right-wing Prime Minister at that time. Since then, the artists have presented their works as performances, exhibitions and a film documentary, and have continued with their investigation of “What’s in a name?”
Starting from this famous Shakespearian question, four eminent European philosophers – Austrian Robert Pfaller and Slovenians Mladen Dolar, Jela Krečič and Slavoj Žižek – confront the implications of the Janšas’ name change and its consequences in four essays. Ten years of artistic and real life activity, here illustrated by a photographic insert, presents an opportunity for them to discuss the symbolic power of the name, the ways it affects the subject and subjectivity, and how playing with names can lead to a radical critique of our late capitalist civilization.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 124 pp | colour | paperback cover | 2017
B&W version: ISBN 978-961-93930-3-1
Color version: ISBN 978-961-93930-4-8