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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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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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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

Digital version of the catalogue which was published on the occasion of Evan Roth’s exhibition Kites & Websites at Belenius/Nordenhake, Stockholm, 2016.

Changes have been made to the layout of this book for the digital version to improve screen readability. An unaltered version of the original printed book can be downloaded here.

Kites and Websites collects a selection of works developed in the framework of Evan Roth’s Internet Landscapes project, an ongoing investigation into the network, nature and the self. Like a new romantic wanderer, he has studied the global submarine fiber optic cables in various countries, often finding himself alone in remote locations.

As the art critic Domenico Quaranta explains, the visual language adopted for the project is infrared photography, a conceptual reference to the architecture of the Internet. Roth also collects audio documentation through a device that scans radio frequencies at regular intervals, recording a mix of white noise and audio fragments. While the Internet Landscapes photos have been printed on kites, the audio and video recordings have been used to build websites.

“Through understanding and experiencing the Internet’s physicality, one comes to understand the network not as a mythical cloud, but as a human made and controlled system of wires and computers.” ~ Evan Roth

ISBN 978-91-983230-0-9 (Printed)
ISBN 978-91-983230-1-6 (Digital)

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How did the internet go from the utopian free-for-all, open source heaven, libertarian last frontier to the current state of permanent surveillance, exhibitionism and paranoia? This duplicity is the underlying thread that links the artists, activists, and researchers in The Black Chamber, an exhibition, a symposium, an urban intervention and a publication.
The Black Chamber aims at discussing the delicate and often awkward role of art and imagination in the age of mass surveillance, stressing the multiple connections between post-studio art and independent research, grassroots reverse engineering, and new forms of political activism in the age of networks.
Not just an exhibition catalogue, this book is also an attempt to show the exhibited works as part of larger research processes. With works and original contributions by Jacob Appelbaum & Ai Weiwei, Laura Poitras, Metahaven, Zach Blas, James Bridle, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Simon Denny, Jill Magid, !Mediengruppe Bitnik and Evan Roth.

EN | 15.2 x 22.9 cm | 152 pp | colour | paperback cover | 2016
ISBN 978-1-326-61205-4

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The catalogue of the exhibition Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and Business curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli and presented in spring 2015 at Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka. The exhibition involved actors who directly engage with hacktivism, art, civil liberties and social networking to expose the contradictions of capitalistic logics and power systems and operate at the convergence of business and art, becoming key to unleashing the paradoxes of the social networking phenomenon. In the business world, a disruption is an unexpected innovation that comes from within the market itself. In the art and activist field, disruption means to generate unpredictable practices and interventions which play within the systems under scrutiny. Nowadays even business is adopting hacker and artistic strategies of disruption, what is the response given by artists and hackers?

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 152 pp | colour | paperback cover | 2015
ISBN 978-961-93930-0-0 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-93930-1-7 (Digital)

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This publication offers a broad view on media piracy as well as a variety of comparative perspectives on recent issues and historical facts regarding piracy. It contains a compilation of texts on grass-roots situations whose stories describe strategies developed to share, distribute and experience cultural content outside of the confines of local economies, politics or laws. These stories recount the experiences of individuals from India, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Mali and China. The book is structured in four parts and begins with a collection of stories on piracy dating back to the invention of the printing press and expanding to broader issues (historical & modern anti-piracy technologies, geographically-specific issues, as well as the rules of the Warez scene, its charters, structure and visual culture…).

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 238 pp | colour | paperback cover | 2015
ISBN 978-961-9219-28-7

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Marko Batista is an artist working at the intersection of science and art. By creating hybrid technological, electromagnetic or chemical systems, he confronts the mystification of technology while also opening up new ways of thinking about technology. With his experimental systems, which bring together the abovementioned fields, he expands the sphere of human perception and the phenomenology of unstable audio-visual systems in space and time.
This book brings together four different perspectives on Marko Batista’s work. Jurij Krpan’s text analyses Marko Batista’s work chronologically and positions it in the Slovenian as well as the broader cultural space. Andreja Hribernik tackles the artist’s work from the perspective of theoretical starting-points. This is taken up by Ida Hiršenfelder, who analyses Batista’s work primarily in light of the development of contemporary technologies and DIY principles. Rounding out the book, Luka Zagoričnik’s text describes the artist’s works from the perspective of sound.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 98 pp | colour | paperback cover | 2014
ISBN: 978-1-312-68473-7

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A name always bears a symbolic mandate. As soon as false pretenders appear, questions arise as to the symbolic mandate’s power, its validity and justification. Names refer to genealogies, yet thereby always involve a certain distribution of power. To arrogate a name is to arrogate power. There is a claim to power in every name, in assuming the social role that goes with it, in transmitting symbolic legacy, in social impact, in genealogical inscription. The story of false pretenders entails the moment of bemusement – one’s feeling that, really, one is always a false pretender, as there’s no way one could inhabit a name legitimately, naturally, feeling fully justified bearing the name one bears. No sufficient grounds can ever substantiate it; no name is ever covered by the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason. The feeling of being an impostor, false pretender to a name, isn’t personal sentiment or idiosyncrasy; it’s a structural feeling accompanying names – their shadow and effect.

EN | 10.8 x 17.5 cm | 64 pp | b/w | paperback cover | 2014
ISBN 978-1-291-98060-8

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Eternal September. The Rise of Amateur Culture is a group exhibition that explores the relationship between professional art making and the rising of amateur cultural movements through the web, an historical event that is triggering a big and fascinating shift in every field of culture, especially visual culture. This catalogue features a curatorial text by Valentina Tanni, together with an interview with artist Matthias Fritsch, the man beyond the Technoviking meme, an essay by artist group Smetnjak on practicing critical theory in the form of internet memes, and visual documentation of Tanni’s ongoing curatorial project The Great Wall of Memes. Featured artists: Mauro Ceolin, Paolo Cirio, Electroboutique, Paul Destieu, Matthias Fritsch, Colin Guillemet, David Horvitz, Maskull Lasserre, Aled Lewis, Dennis Logan (Spatula007), Valeria Mancinelli and Roberto Fassone, Mark McEvoy, Casey Pugh, Steve Roggenbuck, Helmut Smits, Paweł Sysiak & Tymek Borowski, TheGamePro, Phil Thompson, Wendy Vainity.

EN | 15.2 x 22.9 cm | 82 pp | colour | paperback cover | 2014
ISBN 978-1-291-98060-8

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What is New Media Art? What does this term really describe? What has occasioned the schism between this term and the art scene it is supposed to describe? And lastly, what can explain the limited presence of this artistic practice – which appears to have all the credentials for representing an era in which digital media are powerfully reshaping the political, economic, social and cultural organisation of the world we live in – in critical debates?
Beyond New Media Art is, on the one hand, an attempt to analyse the current positioning of the so-called New Media Art within the broader field of contemporary arts and to investigate the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and limited visibility in contemporary art history. On the other hand, the book is also an attempt to introduce new critical and curatorial strategies, which would render this marginalisation a thing of the past, and to elucidate the topicality of art that deals with media and the issues of the information age.

The original entitled was published by Link Editions, Brescia, in 2013.

SI | 14.8 x 21 cm | 206 pp | b/w | paperback cover | 2014
ISBN 987-1-312-09435-2

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In the summer 2007 three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša”. This life event introduced a break into their artistic practice, which evolved into one of the most radical explorations of life in the age of biopolitics. Featuring a text by Domenico Quaranta, this book documents and discusses their recent work, a a continuum that is sometimes produced by companies and institutions as a reaction to their life, sometimes by isolating and documenting specific moments in their life. ID cards, passports and bank cards become the means of a research that undermines the very concepts of “art” and “artwork”, and that challenges both the economic and legal systems in their attempt to regulate our existence in the world, and the art system in its attempt to determine and protect the value of an art piece, while actively seeking for the complicity of both in order to exist.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 80 pp | b/w | paperback cover | 2013
ISBN 978-1-291-66546-8

The catalogue of Sašo Sedlaček’s solo exhibition Supertrash hosted by the Art Gallery Slovenj Gradec in 2012 includes essays by Luka Omladič and Petja Grafenauer.
Waste is the key topic of the Slovenian artist oeuvre. Waste is the pure truth of production, which cannot be brushed aside; waste is the proletariat in the world of objects. This is why art that dares to reflect upon this issue simply must be activist and subversive, says Omladič.
Sedlaček deals with the rejected from our society in many ways: from the local overproduction of printed propaganda to the global circulation of waste, from the neglected beggars in our cities to the 38 million space wrecks circling the earth in fixed orbits. The interest of Sedlaček’s art lies in recycling, (re)use of the rejected, the improvement of the world and a warning to Western people. As Grafenauer points out, he tackles this matter with witty, creative and, above all, useful ideas.

ISBN 978-961-92192-2-5

Behind a name there is always a biography, the story of a life. But what if more than one person shares the same name? Which biography will be associated with that name?
Biografija, the Biography of Janez Janša by Marcel Štefančič Jr., originally promoted on the birthday of the former Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, is not about his life, but about the life of the three artists who chose to bear his name.
As Janez Janša is a trinitarian name, the biography is also “one in three”: in the beautiful photographic book the early lives of the artists are told. Growing up in three different places and in three different countries, but in the same decades, the Seventies and the Eighties, they went through the red armies, the fall of communism, the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the disintegration and subsequent reestablishment of ideologies.
Anecdotes from the lives of the three artists and the social picture of those years foretell the topics that they would later examine in their work.

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The catalogue of the exhibition Signature held in 2010 includes essays by art curator and writer Petja Grafenauer and theorist Miško Šuvaković. The project consists of twenty-seven paintings and nine triptychs, which were commissioned by the Janšas and painted by the artist Viktor Bernik. As part of the broader Janez Janša project, Signature raises many deep questions about authorship and individual identity, about the status of a work of art and the art market. The paintings of Signature are in fact signed by artists who did not paint them, and they display a tension between the “signature-images” and the proper signatures, which are socially agreed signs.
More widely, naming and designation are the angles from which Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša explore in their projects the conditio humana, the human condition, Šuvaković states.

RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting sets out to offer some answers, albeit not exhaustive or definitive, to these questions linked to the artistic practice of re-enactment and its possible redefinition. Through the texts of critics, theorists and artists such as Jennifer Allen, Antonio Caronia, Rod Dickinson, Domenico Quaranta and Jan Verwoert, and through works by Lucas Bambozzi, Vaginal Davis, IOCOSE, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG) and SilentCell Network, the book seeks to explore the relationship between the historical, social and linguistic aspects of re-enactment, and the meaning of this practice, against the background of the history of performance and the increasing mediation of life.

ISBN 9788890330865

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Does the name of the artist say more about society or about the individual? And what kind of knowledge does the name of the artist carry?
The book includes nine essays, one interview and documentation about the Janez Janša project, which took place in the summer of 2007, when three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša,” the name of the right-wing Prime Minister at that time. Starting from the question whether it is actually an art project or rather a private gesture, as the three artists had claimed, each author explores one of the implications of this “re-naming action” and the questions it raises in different fields – from the legal aspects in a comparative study, to the media impact.
Re-naming brings to light the importance of the name as a vehicle of individuality, of property and marketability – themes that are particularly relevant in the Western art system.

This textual and pictorial reader is a follow-up of Davide Grassi’s DemoKino – Virtual Biopolitical Agora, an anti-entertainment interactive movie that develops according to the audience members’ vote.
Inspired in part by the “pianisti” scandal in the Italian Parliament when a number of senators voted in place of their absent colleagues, DemoKino is a virtual parliament, that through topical film parables, provides the voters (participants) with the opportunity to decide on issues that are, paradoxically, becoming the essence of the modern politics: the questions of life – abortion, cloning, therapeutic cloning, water privatization, copyleft, euthanasia, genetically modified organisms, same sex marriage.
“When the issue of life enters the political arena and modern politics becomes biopolitics the democratic decision reaches an impasse: in the political arena laws are being debated on issues that can actually tolerate no decisions and any kind of majority rule is problematic in itself, any political reguation a publicy legitimated act of violence.” (Bojana Kunst)
DemoKino – Virtual Biopolitical Agora is an art book combining Dejan Dragosavac Ruta’s redesign of the visual and textual material of the original DemoKino project with texts from Antonio Caronia, Marina Gržinić, Leonardo Kovačević, Bojana Kunst, Tomislav Medak, Petar Milat and Aldo Milohnić providing a theoretical, artistic and social context.

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Originally published in the catalogue of the group exhibition Eternal September – The rise of amateur culture, this essay by the Slovenian art collective Smetnjak is an excursus about Internet memes, especially about the kind known as the image macro. The image macro – a picture combined with superimposed texts in order to produce a humorous effect – represents one of the most popular means of expression on the Internet for years.
The assemblage of an image and a caption seems to respond to the call Walter Benjamin made in his book about Charles Baudelaire The Writer of Modern Life, a call for a new form of literacy more native to the image-saturated society of spectacle.
Smetnjak have responded to this call by trying to practice critical theory within the pop form of meme, often focusing on the Slovenian cultural celebrity Slavoj Žižek. Here they explain why and how.

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Historians divide geological eras into different “ages”, and we can say that ours is the Plastic Age. This human-generated organic material is now part of the natural world, as the Great Pacific Plastic Patch shows. For Daniela Silvestrin, a cultural manager and curator specialized in bioart, this is where the artistic speculation of artist Pinar Yolas starts.
What if life started today in these plastic wreck-filled oceans? What kinds of life forms would emerge out of this contemporary primordial ooze?
Yoldas’ Ecosystem of Excess is the answer to these questions. She makes us face the issue of climate change, imagining the post-human world we are increasingly building with the overwhelming amount of waste we produce.
We have developed a “throw-away mentality” that has transformed us into a geological force. We need to redefine our way of thinking about nature, and that’s what Yoldas does, projecting us into a future without us yet created by us.