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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

Anna Ridler
The Abstraction of Nature

Exhibition
19 February 2020–18 March 2020

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

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

“Tulip Mania meant that the order of the stock market was introduced into the order of nature. The tulip began to lose the properties and charms of a flower: it grew pale, lost its colours and shapes, became an abstraction, a name, a symbol interchangeable with a certain amount of money.”

– Zbigniew Herbert

“Tulip mania was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble […] The term ‘tulip mania’ is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values.” [1]
Before the discovery of the “mosaic virus” in 1920, no one knew just what produced the stripes in the petals of some tulips and not others. Those with stripes became more valuable because there was no way of predicting which flowers would be striped or not. Since the flowers were traded when still in bulb state, and their beauty was extremely ephemeral and unpredictable, it’s no surprise that tulip mania has often been compared not only to futures markets but also to various speculative markets from contemporary art to crypto currencies.
Drawing upon these analogies, Mosaic Virus is a three-channel video installation in which animated tulips are generated by artificial intelligence, trained by the artist using a dataset of 10,000 images, with the stripes on the petals controlled in real time by fluctuations in the Bitcoin market. The installation has been conceived by London-based artist Anna Ridler as an updated, upgraded version of a Dutch still life featuring tulips. According to the artist, such flower paintings, despite their realism, are “botanical impossibilities” and imagined, since all the flowers in them could never bloom at the same time. This contrast between “nature” and “artifice” is emulated and improved using AI, dreaming impossible flowers yet drawing upon reality; while the moral meaning of the still life – a memento mori reminding of the ephemerality and transience of life, beauty and goods – is refreshed through the reference to the fluctuations of the financial market. 
Receiving an Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica 2019 in the category “AI & Life Art”, Mosaic Virus is peculiar also for the fact that Ridler photographed and manually annotated every single picture of tulips used to train the artificial intelligence that produced it. This dataset of images became another installation, Myriad (Tulips) (2018), revealing the human aspect that sits behind machine learning. To perform reliably, machine learning requires a large quantity of data (usually several thousand instances) on one specific category. These datasets need to be created and annotated mostly manually, which makes datasets highly sought after assets in today’s economy.In this way, both Mosaic Virus and Myriad (Tulips) thematise the potentials and limits of categorisation, machine learning and the adaptation of the nuances of reality to the binary thinking of machines. As Elaine Ayers noted in a review of the two series, “neatly differentiating between various hues – white and pale pink, dark pink and red proved impossible for both the artist and for her algorithm. ‘Mosaic Virus’ and ‘Myriad (Tulips)’ make the case that the artist and algorithm can never be separated, that flowers are inextricable from systems of social and economic currency.” [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania. Accessed 16 August 2019.
[2] Elaine Ayers, “Using AI to Produce ‘Impossible’ Tulips”, Hyperallergic, 1 March 2019, https://hyperallergic.com/487261/anna-ridler-tulipmania/. Accessed 16 August 2019.

ARTIST TALK

THE AUTHOR

Anna Ridler (b. 1985, UK) is an artist and researcher. She has exhibited at institutions such as the V&A Museum, Ars Electronica, HeK Basel, IMPAKT and the Barbican Centre and has degrees from the Royal College of Art, Oxford University and the University of the Arts London. She was a 2018 EMAP/EMARE fellow and was listed by Artnet as one of nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential. She is interested in working with collections of information, particularly self-generated datasets, to create new and unusual narratives in a variety of mediums, and what happens when things cannot fit into discrete categories. She is currently interested in the intersection of machine learning and nature and what we can learn from history. She is the recipient of a UAL Creative Computing Institute Fellowship 2019 and the DARE Art Prize 2018–2019, which challenges artists and scientists to work together on new approaches to the creative process.

Elisa Giardina Papa
The Cleaning of Emotional Data

Exhibition
15 January 2020–7 February 2020

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

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

In this exhibition for Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, Elisa Giardina Papa presents the third instalment of a series exploring how labour and care are reframed by digital economies and automation. Following Technologies of Care (2016) and Labor of Sleep (2017), this new video installation entitled The Cleaning of Emotional Data focuses on the human labour involved in categorising massive quantities of visual data used to train emotion recognition algorithms. The show also includes a series of large-scale textile pieces developed in collaboration with Michael Graham of Savant Studios (Brooklyn, NY) that prods and subverts normative and historical understandings of emotions.

In the video installation, Giardina Papa addresses new forms of precarious labour emerging within artificial intelligence (AI) economies. She examines the global infrastructure of microworkers who “clean” data to train machine vision algorithms. These workers label, categorise, annotate and validate large amounts of data, thereby enabling AI to function. In the winter of 2019, while living in Palermo and researching affective computing systems, the artist ended up working remotely for several North American “human-in-the-loop” companies who provide “clean” datasets to train AI algorithms to detect emotions. Among the tasks she performed were the taxonomisation of emotions, the annotation of facial expressions and the recording of her own image to animate three-dimensional figures. While performing this work, some of the videos in which she recorded her emotional expressions were rejected, as her facial expressions did not fully match the “standardised” affective categories. It was impossible to know whether this rejection originated from an algorithm or, for example, from another remote worker who might have interpreted her facial expressions differently due to cultural context. The Cleaning of Emotional Data documents these microtasks while simultaneously tracing a history of emotions that questions the methods and psychological theories underpinning facial expression mapping.

A number of AI systems, which supposedly recognise and simulate human affects, base their algorithms on flawed understandings of emotions as universal, authentic and transparent. Increasingly, tech companies and government agencies are leveraging this prescribed transparency to develop software that identifies, on the one hand, consumers’ moods and, on the other hand, potentially dangerous citizens who pose a threat to the state. The historical and contemporary implications of this demand for emotional legibility is explored in a series of large-scale textile pieces, Amiss Motifs, developed in collaboration with Michael Graham of Savant Studios. The textiles juxtapose the abstract lines of facial micro-expressions detected by the algorithms with untranslatable emotional vernacular from both Sicilian dialect and American English. This joint “fabrication” of computational and human language demonstrates how emotional sensibilities exceed reductive categorisation. The fabrics used in this work are sampled from remnants of commercially sold bolts which are typically discarded because the patterns have become distorted, uneven or broken. By working within the gaps of these “amiss motifs”, the overlaid embroideries create a new canvas for unruly and “incomputable” emotions.

ARTIST TALK

Most of the academic and political discourse on post-work has focused on the relationship between automation and free time. That is, it has posited that automation has the emancipatory potential to free us all from work: to reduce necessary working hours or at least to devote ourselves to more intellectually rewarding jobs (immaterial labour). What is not fully convincing about this approach is that it is grounded in a hierarchical separation between machines and humans. What is missing is the acknowledgment of the human infrastructure that sustains automation and artificial intelligence. The invisible, precarious, alienated, low-paid and offshored workforce that automation requires in order to function properly. These workers and their tasks are the focus of this talk.

THE AUTHOR

Elisa Giardina Papa is an Italian artist whose work investigates gender, sexuality and labour in relation to neoliberal capitalism and the borders of the Global South. Her work has been exhibited and screened at MoMA (New York), the Whitney Museum [Sunrise/Sunset Commission], Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018, the Unofficial Internet Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennial, XVI Quadriennale di Roma, rhizome.org [Download Commission], and The Flaherty NYC, among others. Giardina Papa received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Politecnico of Milan, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in film and media studies at the University of California Berkeley. She lives and works in New York and Sant’Ignazio (Sicily).

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RELATED PROGRAMME

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

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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