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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

Michael Mandiberg
Postmodern Times

Screening*
7–10 January 2020

Opening screening
TUE, 7 Januar 2020 at 7 pm

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

* From 8-10 January the screenings will run arbitrarily during 12 PM-6 PM, or by appointment.

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

In Modern Times (1936), Charlie Chaplin’s iconic Little Tramp character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialised world. A factory worker employed on an assembly line, the Tramp is force-fed by a malfunctioning “feeding machine” and performs repetitive, alienating tasks, until he suffers a nervous breakdown, getting stuck within a machine and throwing the factory into chaos. The story follows as a picaresque adventure, with the Tramp going to hospital, then to jail, becoming a hero, doing other alienating jobs, going to jail again and, of course, falling in love. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and financial conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin’s view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialisation.
Eighty years after Modern Times, US-based artist Michael Mandiberg started Postmodern Times (2016–18, 87’), a remake of Charlie Chaplin’s movie entirely outsourced to freelancers of the popular gig workers platform Fiverr.com. If Modern Times is a portrait of the Fordist organisation of work (the assembly line), Postmodern Times portrays the digital factory and the post-Fordist organisation of work, in which workers have no wage, and work (usually from home) on small, underpaid tasks for often unknown patrons. Mandiberg used the crowdsourcing labour platform Fiverr.com to commission short clips from 182 digital freelancers living in over 25 countries, weaving them together with portions of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times to reimagine the “story of industry” for our digital age: Postmodern Times. Produced with the support of LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab, Postmodern Times also features a score that weaves together various interpretations of the original soundtrack, including a generic presentation of the MIDI data, passionate interpretations of the original score performed by musicians on Fiverr.com, and traces of the original score and foley sounds to connect the sound back to the original score. The transformative remix produces a chaotic soundtrack that splinters into digital glitches, only to reassemble around key leitmotifs present in the original score, which itself is representative of the conditions of the work’s creation.

Although grounded on a strong, modernist linear narrative, the production process turns the movie into a typical postmodern object: chaotic, multilingual, polysemic. Each clip was produced by different workers, in different locations and different languages, with no control from the artist. The result is a fragmented and chaotic work that reflects the conditions of digital labour itself, portraying the digital workers’ lives through the traces left in their clips.

THE AUTHOR

Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist whose work crosses multiple forms and disciplines in order to trace the lines of political and symbolic power as it takes shape online. Mandiberg received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BA from Brown University. Mandiberg’s projects have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the New Museum, New York City; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Denny Dimin Gallery, Art-in-Buildings Financial District Project Space, New York City; Arizona State University Museum & Library, Tempe; and Transmediale, Berlin, amongst others. Mandiberg’s work has been written about widely, including in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.

RELATED EVENTS

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

Tactics & Practice #8:
AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS!

Symposium
14–15 January 2020

The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana
Moderna galerija

Curated by
Domenico Quaranta, Janez Fakin Janša

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

Part of the Tactics & Practice series and of the programme Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation

In the framework of Hyperemployment, the symposium AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS! wants to explore a contradiction implicit in the increasing automation of work: is this process, which should apparently open up a new age of free time, no labour and universal basic income, instead turning humans into software agents, invisible slaves of the machines? Welcomed as a curse by the Luddites at the very beginning of the industrial age, throughout the 20th century, automation did not destroy human labour, but profoundly changed its organisation on a global scale. In the late-20th century, technological innovations brought automation to a brand new level, accelerating the shift toward a post-industrial economic model. Today, with many jobs previously run by humans becoming fully automated, the dream – or nightmare – of a post-work society seems closer than ever; and yet, at a closer look, automation in its current form isn’t destroying human labour. Rather, it is making it invisible.

PROGRAMME

DAY 1
14 January 2020 at 11 AM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana, Erjavčeva cesta 23, Ljubljana, classroom 7, first floor

Domenico Quaranta
Portraying the Invisible Crowd
TALK

Throughout history, portraying workers has often been a step into recognising their existence, allowing them the dignity to be considered as a subject, as well as the representatives of a “class”. Digging into the research for the show, Hyperemployment’s curator Domenico Quaranta will offer a tour through various artistic efforts to portray online workers, from Chinese Gold Farmers to scan-ops, from gig workers to online content moderators.

DAY 2
15 January 2020 at 5 PM
Moderna galerija Auditorium, Cankarjeva cesta 15, Ljubljana

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KEYNOTES, ROUND TABLE and LECTURE PERFORMANCE

Elisa Giardina Papa
Notes on Post-Work: Free Time and the Human Infrastructures that Sustain Automation and Artificial Intelligence
KEYNOTE

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.

Sebastian Schmieg
I Will Say Whatever You Want In Front Of A Pizza
LECTURE PERFORMANCE

I Will Say Whatever You Want In Front Of A Pizza is a speculative Prezi (a presentation software) that explores digital labour, the amalgamation of humans and software, and the possibility of interventions inside algorithmic systems. Narrated from the perspective of a cloud worker, the Prezi video presents digital workers as software extensions. The ubiquitous network and the computerisation of everything have not only blurred the lines between bots and people – supposedly autonomous programs are sometimes people who have to act as if they were software; this development has also made it very easy for everyone to hire, programme and retire humans as part of any workflow: bodies and minds that can be plugged in, rewired and discarded as one sees fit.

Silvio Lorusso
Entreprecariat
BOOK PRESENTATION

Entreprecariat (Krisis Publishing, 2018; Onomatopee, 2019) explores and maps out the current entrepreneurial ideology from a precarious perspective. The Entreprecariat indicates a reality where change is natural and healthy, whatever it may bring. A reality populated by motivational posters, productivity tools, mobile offices and self-help techniques. A reality in which a mix of entrepreneurial ideology and widespread precarity is what regulates professional social media, online marketplaces for self-employment and crowdfunding platforms for personal needs. The result? A life in permanent beta, with sometimes tragic implications.

Sanela Jahić, Michael Mandiberg, Sašo Sedlaček
Art Making in the Age of Automation
ROUND TABLE
Moderator: Domenico Quaranta

How does the increasing automation of labour affect artistic practice, on all the levels of content, process and form? How is it affecting the present society and our vision of the future? What can art do to deal with the increasing fragmentation of human labour and its disappearance from visibility, and give it back its presence and dignity? Taking off from their own work and from the statements of other participants in the symposium, the artists involved in the round table will attempt to offer an answer to these and other questions.

Danilo Milovanović
TOP

Exhibition
4–20 December 2020

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists.

The TOP project by Danilo Milovanović is an artistic intervention commenting on the increasing gentrification of urban space in Ljubljana, focusing on the emergence of a growing number of parking lots. Selected through U30+, Aksioma’s initiative supporting the work of Slovenian emerging artists, this production will be presented to the public in the form of a solo exhibition at Aksioma | Project Space.

As a resident of Ljubljana, Milovanović has witnessed significant changes in the city, which are the result of following global development standards, with an emphasis on revitalisation and, consequently, gentrification. Today’s cities face the distinct problem of high traffic and the lack of parking spaces, a challenge which opens up opportunities for new businesses in the form of public or private, temporary or permanent parking lots. In both cases, we can witness minimal investments in infrastructure that allow for easy and regular earnings. Yet, despite the very favourable position of the owners, the working conditions of the employees in the parking lots are often extremely poor. The lack of urban standards and appropriate regulations for such phenomena results in a severe degradation of the urban landscape, which is even more pronounced in relation to ambitious interventions that lead to gentrification.
Within the TOP project, the artist deals with this topic through a series of guerrilla interventions, meant as practical strategies of artistic-activist critique of such negative trends, offered to a civil society that is exposed to them on a daily basis, but apparently has no influence on them. Milovanović playfully created a symbolic parking lot on a location inaccessible to vehicles – the roof of an underground garage – thereby taking away its primary function and displaying it as pure form: a recognisable grid of white geometric lines, complementing the scene with a colourful booth made from recycled advertising banners of actual parking lots.
Absurd as it is, the intervention works as a visual depiction of an urban problem. In the follow up of the project, Milovanović promoted the newly created parking lot by transforming the existing city posters into his own images, thus relating the issue of parking to an even more invasive problem of visual pollution, ironically using a strategy of aggressive advertising in the form of marked hyperbole and competitive injustice.

The title of the project plays with the meaning of the word top, which obviously refers to the location of the parking lot, but in colloquial Slovenian also represents the culmination of the good or the best without competition.

AUTHOR

Born in 1992 in Banja Luka, Danilo Milovanović graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where he is currently completing his postgraduate studies. In his practice, he mainly expresses himself in the public space, with the medium and approach determined by the artistic concept. In particular, he explores the characteristics of the urban landscape in relation to nature or culture, as well as the possibilities of artistic activity and intervention in the public space. For the most part, his works are fleeting, non-spectacular and emerge beyond the comfort zone of artistic creation. The results of these interventions are both poetic and more radical, activist gestures that can be easily overlooked or remain unnoticed within the dynamics of public spaces. In his projects, he often uses simple elements to create particular meanings, situations or newly established relationships between objects or entities.