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In the summer of 2007, three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša”. They have claimed that it was not for artistic purposes but was an intimate, personal decision. Art curator and critic Domenico Quaranta takes them seriously, quoting Boris Groys: in today’s biopolitical age, life can be an art form. The three Janšas have gone beyond this, as they have canceled the border between art and life. Making life and art coincide has many consequences, for example in the Troika exhibition, by presenting their original and valid ID cards, passports and bank cards as artworks, they undermine the very concepts of “art” and “artwork”. These documents are ambiguous artifacts that challenge both economic and legal systems in their attempts 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, in order to exist, they actively seek the complicity of both.

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Bojana Kunst, philosopher, dramaturg and contemporary art theorist, writes about “the theatre by other means” performed by BADco., on occasion of their Responsibility for Things Seen spatial intervention and video installation in the Aksioma art gallery.
BADco. is a Zagreb-based performance collective formed in 2000 by four choreographers and dancers, two dramaturgs and one philosopher. Their performances – which have been presented throughout Europe and the U.S. – do not follow a linear dramaturgical structure, but create the theatre event as a complex synchronization of actions, shifts, speeches and movements, focusing on a concrete political interest.
The choreographies, images, spaces and atmospheres of their performances are related to the ways in which we, the viewers, are present in the theatre. The performances invite the audience to speculate, to watch wilfully at the edge of the visible – it is precisely this peculiarity that actually renders BADco’s theatre political.

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Régine Debatty, Belgian curator, critic and blogger, writes about the art of Evan Roth, focusing on his TSA Communication project.
Evan Roth is a graffiti artist, a hacker and an open source coder. He believes in the free circulation of anything that is digital. His works with F.A.T. lab steer attention onto the fantastic five – Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft – and related issues with humor and a mix of digital and analogic practices.
In TSA Communication, he has taken his artistic creativity inside one of the most controlled and liberty-killing places in our contemporary world: airports and airplanes. He has managed to alter the airport security experience, inviting the government to learn more about passengers rather than just inspecting the contents of their carry-on bags.
His works prove that hacker culture is democratic and that it should exist outside computers in order to question infrastructures and to go beyond rigid regulations.

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The journalist and dramaturg Andreja Kopač and the media art critic Ida Hiršenfelder here discuss the unique aesthetics and discursive strategies in the work of Neven Korda. In his career that spans three decades, Neven Korda has created a range of specific performative practices that emerge at the intersection of the textual, the visual and the musical. With his projects, Korda has been emphasising the importance of theatre both in its nature of communal space as well as in the appropriation of the performative that it allows. Every instalment or performance unravels and deepens his intentions, namely searching for the beautiful, exploring the effects of technical means on the perception of space and time, political agitation, and analysis of social dynamics.
The authors analyze Korda’s recent works, especially Consolidations (2013), investigating his usage of low resolution visual and vocal effects, the relation between the spoken and the visual, his choreographies.

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Domenico Quaranta, art curator and critic, writes about the 2004 project Evidence Locker by Jill Magid, now part of the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of New York. Jill Magid is a visual artist who has focused her work since the beginning (the end of the 90s) on surveillance infrastructures and the relationship between observers and the observed. In Evidence Locker, she has built an epistolary romantic relationship with the City Watch System of Liverpool – the largest video surveillance system in all of Britain – bringing into being a story in which love and seduction become tools for knowing.
The project is not only about power, control and privacy issues, but is also an investigation on the connection between humans and impersonal systems. As Quaranta explains: “In the age of smartphones and mediated communications, remote surveillance is now a component of most relationships. All lovers are potential Observers.”ž

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From the first human artistic expression in cave paintings until now, black has been constantly reinvented by art. Like other 20th-century artists (Rothko, Malevic, Klein) before him have done, Belgian Frederik De Wilde explores the nature of colors and produces monochromatic works, but focusing on black in a radical and scientific manner.
In Hostage, as art historian Elise Aspord explains, he has created a material made up of a vertical alignment of nanotubes of carbon that can absorb almost all rays of light, thus giving a new universal reference for black.
This work is the result of a close collaboration between scientists and an artist. It adheres to an aesthetic of the void and raises a paradox, making the darkness visible. Frederik De Wilde and his mysterious nanoblack invite the spectator to feel the “black shock” that is experienced when watching the unknown and the invisible.

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To media art curator and critic Ida Hiršenfelder, Antoine Schmitt’s art and his project Time Slip ask us: nowadays, who can divide the virtual from the real?
Time Slip is a LED news ticker operating in real time: a computer software transcribes official online news released by news agencies, changing the past tense to the future tense. In doing this, it constructs an ambiguous relation between the present, the past and the potential. Time Slip is about the relation between cause, effect, randomness and free will: reading news about facts that have already happened disallows the audience’s ability to be active about them; whereas, oppositely, reading news about the future raises anxiety and shows how the mass media proceed to produce submissive citizens, as opposed to informing them.
Antoine Schmitt, a French installation and digital artist, is first of all an engineer and a programmer who began his career in IT during the 80s.

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Vuk Ćosić, the Serbian pioneer of net.art, monologues with Franco and Eva Mattes, the famous Italian pair of art pranksters, also known as 0100101110101101.org. He leaves blanks to be filled by them in another moment, creating an asynchronous text performance.
They build a dissertation about their recent works – like Freedom, No Fun and Plan C – as Eva and Franco Mattes add comments and further explanations to Ćosic’s observations and hints.
The readers will find out that the three artists had met in Slovenia way back in 1998, when they were all the same person, Luther Blissett. Touchingly, Eva and Franco give thanks to Vuk for having made them discover net.art, and thereby their artistic (and life) vocation.
The text has been left exactly as it was written by the three interlocutors, typos included. In the end, they even make an appointment, mixing private and public coherently with many of their artistic projects.

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monochrom is an Austrian art-technology-philosophy group active since 1993. Through the years, monochrom has collected Zeigerpointer images in the form of newspaper clippings, in an operation of media-cultural archaeology.
Zeigerpointer is a term used to describe images used by printed media – especially local free magazines – to illustrate the aftermath of crimes and accidents where only the witness is left, showing emptiness. Instead of the object of the article, Zeigerpointer images portray witnesses who point at the place where something happened.
In the project The Wonderful World of Absence, a selection of these printed pictures has been painted in oil to be shown to the public. An ordinary media event is lifted from its pure consumer usage in daily life. The single image is isolated from the flow of information and constitutes an aesthetic event and an artistically designed artifact. The project is about the poetry of presenting the non-present and its philosophical implications.

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Bruce Sterling, the world famous cyberpunk sci-fi writer and ideologue of hacktivism, writes about the Italian media conceptual artist Paolo Cirio’s works on the occasion of his personal exhibition Realityflowhacked.
According to Sterling, Cirio thinks as a programmer and through aggregation, contextualization and fabrication, he “sculpts” data. He draws flow diagrams – which represent the way he sees and understands reality – to show maps of vulnerabilities possibly subject to be hacked. Cirio’s diagrams function at the same time as works of art with a precise aesthetics and as operating instructions. They are meant to reveal the unethical and obfuscating nature of the software structures of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Visa, among others.
Every effort of Paolo Cirio is devoted to unveil the undemocratic dictatorship over the management of public knowledge ruled by a few corporations.

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Art critic Ida Hiršenfelder interviews Trevor Paglen, a radical geographer with an academic background, muckraking author and outlaw artist who has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies for several years.
Hiršenfelder and Paglen discuss here four projects: Simbology (2006) – a collection of insignia and patches used in secret operations, Missing Persons – a list of fake names used to cover up CIA agents in the war on terror, Code Names – a catalogue of words, phrases and terms employed for active military programs, and Limit Telephotography Project, which unveils the geographies of classified U.S. military bases all over the world.
This unveiling work of the deep State is made possible by the contradictory nature of the State itself, says Paglen, who also speaks about the relationship between narrative and art, art and economy, and about his idea of seeing.

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After a historical recognition of electronic music and sound’s exploration performed in art galleries – i.e. not in the spaces traditionally dedicated to music – the architect and art curator Jurij Krpan describes Batista’s projects collected in the exhibition Temporary Objects and Hybrid Ambients 2008–2010.
Batista – who is a tech-mixed-media artist, sound researcher, video experimentalist and AV performer – creates hardware environments that establish connections between digital and analogic, electronic and mechanic, visual and sound, audience and machines. He manages to change the perception of electronic as the realm of precision and perfection, showing its characteristics of unintelligibility and imprecision. Through his live performances, moreover, he explores the phenomenology of audiovisual information by immersing the visitor in the “acoustically visual” ambient, which produces sensory, mental and aesthetic reactions.

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In 2010, drawing on Richard Grusin’s theory of “premediation”, the Italian artist collective IOCOSE – specializing in pranks and hoaxes – released the video In the Long Run. The video is the realistic reconstruction of the media event “death of a star”. It was realized following the ritual rules of news format displayed in such cases, staging the death of Madonna as narrated by the BBC.
As the art curator and critic Domenico Quaranta explains, there is a long tradition of fake media events, the most famous being The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles. In the Long Run, however, differs from its precedents, as its authors don’t want the audience to believe it true: by screening the video in an art gallery, no ambiguity is left about its status. What the artists are interested in showing is that when a star does die, the news will be mediatized in exactly this way.

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Some media events have real effects on the world simply by taking place, states writer and editor Steve Rushton. They are “pseudo events”, a concept coined by Daniel Boorstin in 1962 to describe events designed only to be reported.
Rushton collaborated in the visual artist Rod Dickinson’s Closed Circuit – Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, a live performance in which a totally realistic presidential speech to the press is staged. The script was created by Rushton, who composed it from fragments of speeches delivered on both sides of the Iron Curtain since the Cold War, with the aim of showing how rhetoric works to justify violence. The performance is also a reflection on television’s stream of news, a continuous flow that creates a permanent state of crisis, fed by media events.
As the artistic background to Close Circuit, Rushton recalls two media events, both performed at the beginning of the video revolution, Media Burn and The Eternal Frame, produced by the group Ant Farm in 1975.

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Since the second half of the 90s, storytelling has become a central strategy in hacktivism and media art, whereas before, actions and performances aimed at creating disturbance, boycotts and resistance. To Inke Arns – theorist of media art and artistic director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund – media artists and performers such as Yes Men, Christoph Schlingensief, RTMark, Laibach and Ubermorgen have chosen the strategy of “over identification”, which uses narrative and storytelling, in many of their works.
In the projects Voteauction (2000), Psych|OS (2002), EKMRZ-Trilogy (2005–2008), through narratives and counter-narratives, the artist duo Ubermorgen.com enable the audience to understand the complex structures that underlie the functioning of society. By releasing made-up stories into the mass media, they succeed from time to time in launching a certain topic and its reaching a global audience. Potentially mobilizing it.

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PostScript^UM #1

Alessandro Ludovico
An interview with Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša

Artist and media critic Alessandro Ludovico interviews the three artists named Janez Janša. It’s no coincidence that they have the same name and not by chance that they share it with the former Slovenian Prime minister: they deliberately and officially changed the names they’d had from birth to Janez Janša. They also joined the right-wing SDS party led by their homonymous counterpart. After that they experienced a “visible disappearance” from having canceled their previous names but simultaneously having gained huge visibility thanks to their radical gesture. Changing your name is similar to dying: it affects more people other than just you. But name-changing also raises ontological questions about identity, referentiality and, finally, about the status of a work of art. With their bureaucratic performance, the three Janez Janšas have invented two new types of readymade: the personal name, and personal identification documents. Neither of them can be sold or reproduced.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 12 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2014