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.

Kyriaki Goni
Counting Craters on the Moon

Exhibition
2 – 25 October 2019

Curated by
Daphne Dragona

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

To a great extent, the understanding of the world today is mediated by machines. Deep learning algorithms define what we see or hear, and influence what we accept as real or possible. Based on the use of artificial neural networks, which are modelled after the human brain, machines now learn and act autonomously, exceeding the human capacity to memorise and process information. Trained to classify information, predict outcomes and cluster data, they are meant to free us from labour intensive activities, and to assist us in decision making. What challenges, though, does deep learning bring to human-based knowledge? What changes when machines self-learn? What do they see and do differently than humans? How can artificial intelligence enhance new forms of experience and understanding?
Wishing to address these questions, Kyriaki Goni purposely turns her gaze to a distant and uncanny territory: the Moon and its surface. The Moon, according to the artist, constitutes a fascinating example and offers an interesting analogy. Lacking an atmosphere, it operates as a data center which stores in its body the memory of our solar system and allows predictions for the future. The indicators for this chronology and evolution have been its craters, which for this reason have been closely examined by astronomers from the 17th century until today, based on the technological affordances of each period.
At its core, the project Counting Craters on the Moon presents an imaginary encounter between an astronomer and an AI system. Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt (1825–1884), who dedicated his life to studying the moon with his telescope and drew the most accurate lunar map of his era, meets DeepMoon, a convolutional neural network (CNN) developed in 2018 to specifically identify lunar craters. Their dialogue is presented as a two-channel video, which captures the human-machine relationship and playfully tackles the hopes and fears, possibilities and limitations, achievements and errors, different ways of learning and knowing related to each side. Parts of this conversation take shape in the exhibition space, in the form of drawings, objects and archival material, which shed light on the real facts behind this fictional encounter. We see the portrait of the astronomer drawn by the artist and old newspaper articles which reveal a lonely life dedicated to science. A list of craters with the given names hints at the tasks which can only be performed by humans and not by machines. Samples of the dataset with images of the craters indicate how human and machine vision differ. A CNC marble sculpture of a crater manifests with its materiality the effects of a possible error as well as the potential it holds for further learning and improvement. The big, hand-drawn lunar map of Schmidt reveals the meticulous and passionate human observation, while the detection icons of pattern recognition imply the accuracy, efficiency and velocity of artificial intelligence systems. Finally, a hand-made drawing of a lunar crater by Goni after Schmidt’s map indicates her own positioning and methodology.
For the realisation of the project, Goni has herself become an observer and a “machine learner”. [1] She has placed herself in the shoes of the meticulous astronomer, on the one hand, and has attempted to inhabit, to impersonate an artificial intelligence system, on the other. Studying historical and contemporary scientific resources and having reached out to the scientific team behind DeepMoon, she has traversed and bridged the distance between human- and machine-based knowledge. Like in her previous works, in which she has studied the entanglements and relationships between users and interfaces, technological and living networks, human and more-than-human worlds, in Counting Craters on the Moon Goni passionately strives to reveal the synergies between human and artificial intelligence and to underline their interdependence. She is interested in the new languages, metaphors and aesthetics which emerge within these synergies, but also in the surprising continuities that can be found from past to present. Speculating upon what has been described as “augmented” [2] or “generative” [3] intelligence, she invites us to imagine how we can learn from and with machines in order to build different, multiple and, possibly, collective understandings of the surrounding world and its cosmos.

– Daphne Dragona

[1] Mackenzie uses the term “machine learner” for both humans and machines as well as their relationships, reminding us of the continuous effort of the human to understand how a machine learns. Adrian Mackenzie, Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), p. 6.
[2] Pasquinelli underlines that machines do not show signs of “autonomous intelligence”. Any “super-human scale” of intelligence would only be acquired with the human observer, he notes and suggests the term “Augmented Intelligence”. Matteo Pasquinelli, “Machines that Morph Logic: Neural Networks and the Distorted Automation of Intelligence as Statistical Inference,” in Glass Bead, Site 1, November 2017, p. 15. https://www.glass-bead.org/article/machines-that-morph-logic/?lang=enview.
[3] According to Bratton, artificial intelligence may augment any intelligence already existing in the world, on the planet. Benjamin Bratton, “Strelka Talks. Benjamin Bratton ‘Alternative Models of AI (at Urban Scale),’” YouTube, video uploaded by Strelka Institute, 26 June 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3C31DhoPQ4.

ARTIST TALK

In her talk, Kyriaki Goni discusses her artistic and research practice, which explores the synergies and interactions between the human and the algorithm. Datafication, memory, oblivion and prediction are the core elements of this exploration. In which ways does the algorithm affect the ways we perceive not only the world but also ourselves? How can we create new metaphors in order to grasp these processes and cope with them?

THE AUTHOR

Based in Athens, Greek artist Kyriaki Goni, creates extended multimedia installations focusing on the relations between technology and society. By utilising fiction and research, she investigates subjects such as human, non-human and machine interaction, data and privacy, perception and construction of the digital self. Her works have been exhibited in galleries and new media festivals worldwide: Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, transmediale19, IMPAKT, Athens Biennial, Melbourne Triennial, Tomorrows, ADAF, ISEA21, SIGGRAPH2016, etc. She was recently selected for an art commission by the New Networked Normal (theNNN.eu). Following her practice, she also designs and conducts workshops for youth and adults, and presents her research on conferences and digital platforms. Her paper Deletion Process_Only you can see my history was published in Leonardo, Journal of Art, Science and Technology, MIT (August 2016). She completed a BA Hons in Visual Arts and an MA in Digital Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts, as well as graduate and postgraduate studies in Social Anthropology at Panteion University (GR) and in Visual Anthropology at Leiden University (NL).

THE CURATOR

Daphne Dragona is a curator and writer based in Berlin. Through her work, she engages with artistic practices, methodologies and pedagogies that challenge contemporary forms of power. She has been collaborating with transmediale festival since 2015. Her writing has been published in various books, journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues by the likes of Springer, Sternberg Press and Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Her talks have been hosted at Mapping Festival (Geneva), MoMa (New York), Hek (Basel), Arts in Society (London), Leuphana University (Lueneburg) and Goethe University (Frankfurt). Among her curated – or co-curated – projects are the exhibitions: Tomorrows, Fictions spéculatives pour l’avenir méditerranéen (Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, 2019), “…” an archeology of silence in the digital age (Aksioma, Ljubljana, 2017), New Babylon Revisited (Goethe-Institut Athen, 2014), Afresh, a new generation of Greek artists (ΕΜSΤ, 2013), Mapping the Commons Athens (EMST, 2010), Homo Ludens Ludens (Laboral, 2008).She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Communication & Media Studies of the University of Athens.

Boštjan Čadež
Mr Processor, do you understand life?

Performance
24 September 2019 at 7 pm

Cirkulacija2, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Machine learning is a field of computer science that uses statistical techniques to give computer systems the ability to “learn” with data, without being explicitly programmed. New improvements in machine learning, such as the possibility to create and train neural networks to perform specific tasks, have again turned machine learning and artificial intelligence into hot topics and buzzwords, raising concerns about the end of labour – but also pushing the champions of accelerationist thinking to “demand full automation”. Furthermore, discussions around AI have inevitably revived fears related to the Technological Singularity, the hypothesis that the emergence of an artificial superintelligence (ASI) “will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization”.[1] The superintelligence would be the final output of the development of an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a machine capable of self-consciousness that could successfully perform any intellectual task.
How would such a self-conscious, intelligent machine behave? Are the “intelligence explosion” and the singularity the only possible outcomes? We know that extremely clever humans can occasionally behave in extremely stupid ways – why couldn’t a self-conscious machine decide to do the same? This is the scenario depicted by Mr Processor, do you understand life? by Slovenian artist Boštjan Čadež.
Mr Processor is a two-wheel self-balancing robot endowed with such a highly capable AI that it is self-aware. Contrary to all his author’s expectations, the robot almost immediately added mind-numbing code to its software and began acting in a rude and socially unacceptable way. The reason for its decision remains unknown. Was thinking about life just too much for it? Or was the realisation that each robot is made to serve its human masters the motivation to resign its intelligence and make itself a burden instead of being useful? It’s hard to say what motivated it, but whatever the cause, Mr Processor seems to be the first of its kind, the first “intoxicated AI”.
About one-metre high, the robot navigates the gallery space in a random manner. It uses its sensors and cameras to detect obstacles and people. It shows no regard for property and intentionally sprays graffiti on the walls that it encounters. It’s very noisy and rude to people. It follows them, nags them with sound and light and squirts water on them. It does not communicate in a human language, but in computer language.
As a self-conscious AGI has not yet been developed, Mr Processor still outlines a science fiction scenario, playing with the fears and ignorance about the current status of artificial intelligence, which is only able to learn from data sets. The work offers us a surprising, ironic take on what would actually mean to imbue “humanity” into a machine – and, ultimately, it’s more about us than the so-called “intelligences” to which our Promethean dreams are giving birth.

[1] https://scienceofsingularity.com/about/

THE AUTOR

Boštjan Čadež (1979) studied industrial design at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. As an intermedia artist, he’s lately been focusing mostly on the fields of computer, real-time-generated and generative graphics and robotics, presented in the form of performances and installations. He’s received several prestigious awards and prizes for his innovations in design and programming. His previous artistic endeavours include graffiti, street art and VJ-ing. In 2013, he received the Golden Bird Award in the category of intermedia art.

Lea Culetto
deflowered by Lea

Exhibition
4–27 September 2019

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists.

Young Slovenian artist Lea Culetto stands out among the artists of her generation for her ability to address sensitive topics, from menstruation to stretch marks, and to use problematic material, from menstrual blood to body hair, to make art that – far from being dramatic, disturbing and aggressive, is mostly intimate, delicate, fresh and pervaded by a sense of innocence and happiness. Culetto’s work focuses on the feminine body, and responds to the way it is shaped by the “male gaze” through fashion, advertising and the media – thus positioning herself in a long tradition of feminine – and feminist – art; her main media are embroidery and assemblage, used to produce garments and objects displayed in installations or site-specific interventions; she loves pink, dolphins and all that glitters. 1000 and One Nights is a floor installation made out of hundreds of bras; Your Housewife II is a video installation focused on the character of the housewife: in a set filled up with any sort of kitschy domestic knick knacks, from angels to trolls to madonnas to dolls painted in pink and glitter, a monitor shows the video of a woman wearing trashy fetish accessories, while preparing a  plucked hen in her kitchen; A Room of Her Own is a site specific installation done in an hotel room, where Lea Culetto embroidered her initials (LC) and the images of various domestic objects – underpants, a hairbrush, a razor, a whisk – on every pillow, sheet and blanket, in an act of personalisation and appropriation of an anonymous place; in Herbarium, she collects clumps, chunks from her menstrual blood and she displays them as they were dried flowers in an herbarium, or in shaped photo frames as they were pictures of relatives and ancestors; finally, My Life is a Hairy Tale is a series of wearable, skin colored collants decorated with braids made out of human hair: would female body hair become socially acceptable, were it “arranged” as a hairstyle?
Culetto will present in a gallery setup the most recent output of her visual research: the street fashion brand deflowered by Lea: a series of embroidered, wearable garments, marked by political, religious and feminist themes, combined into a whole with the help of kitsch esthetics and exaggeration. Troublesome topics – such as nipples, menstruation, stretch marks and body hair – are presented in unexpected ways, with irony used to discuss topics that are often perceived as taboo. In contrast with the fashion industry, which forces on us a model of the perfect body, causing in young people low self-esteem and various psychological and physical diseases, deflowered by Lea wants to spread a healthy and positive body image. Using different techniques such as embroidery, ornamental stitching, beading, knitting, braiding etc., Lea combines fragments from damaged clothes, second-hand clothes and fabric, and this manual work gives a story to each garment. The humans wearing her designs – real, unretouched bodies – become a live gallery, bringing the ideas embedded in the clothes out into the streets.

THE AUTHOR

Lea Culetto (b. 1995, Trbovlje) uses embroidery, assemblage and mixed media to create objects and installations that challenge notions of femininity and feminism through the prisms of fashion, the gaze and the body. Group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad include: Into the Space (Bežigrad Gallery I, Ljubljana, 2015), DSU ROG (Gallery Zelenica, 2015), Transformation of Image (Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2016), ROOMS 2017 (Kappatos Gallery, Athens), Young Female Art in Šiška (Kino Šiška, 2017), PREMIERA 2018 – 4th Triennial of Young Artists. Cultural Body, Space, Placements (Gallery of Contemporary Art, Celje), ObjectiFication (2018) and Feminist Art at UL ALUO, Part 1: One, Two … Five (Hairy) Proposals for an Éden Better Tomorrow (2019), both Gallery Alkatraz, as well as the exhibition Strands by ČIPke initiative (Cerkno, 2019). deflowered by Lea is her first solo exhibition, which had its premiere at Galerija Miklova hiša (Ribnica, 2019) in co-production with Aksioma.
A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana (UL ALUO), Lea received the UL ALUO Award 2018 for her “sharp, original approach to the thematisation of taboos in connection with the female body through a diverse range of approaches in the field of contemporary art”.

Teresa Dillon
MTCD – A Visual Anthology of My Machine Life

Performance
25 and 26 August 2019 at 6 pm

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Ticket reservation required: info@bunker.si
Entrance fee: 1 €

In the framework of the 22nd Mladi levi Festival

“How old are you? I’m seven iPhones old,” reads one of the statements in the iconic book The Age of Earthquakes (Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2015), in response to the provocative question “Are generations still measured by years?” Are they, indeed?
Since the end of WWII, our life has been marked – at an exponential rhythm – by a number of technological inventions, which have changed the way we communicate, as well as socialise, represent ourselves, work, create and experience content and more. Other historical events in that period – from the Moon landing in the 1960s to the Arab Spring in 2010 – have not impacted our existence as much as our media experience of them has. Many of these inventions, from the personal computer to the World Wide Web, to iPhones, have been game-changing, impacting our lives in ways that make us forget how it was before them; others have not survived the descending curve of the hype cycle. But even the latter, often commercially presented as the “next big thing”, have succeeded in polarising our attention and desires.

Taking this basic truth as a starting point, MTCD – A Visual Anthology of My Machine Life is a monologue in which artist and researcher Teresa Dillon takes one “machine” from each year of her life, reflecting on the uses, misuses, and abuses of technology. From radios to home recording devices to her first experiences on the internet, Dillon’s sonic and visual journey explores the key “machines” that have come to shape her technological know-how and imagination, in turn revealing the contradictions and realities of a generation born as “digital natives”. This multimedia, personal, auto-ethnographic performance piece (which premiered at Berlin’s Transmediale in 2018), will be presented in Ljubljana for the first time in the framework of the 22nd edition of the international festival Mladi levi.

THE AUTHOR

Artist, curator and researcher Teresa Dillon creates and tells stories about the techno-civic, that is, the relationships that exist between people, communities, technologies and governance. She is particularly interested in issues related to survival; repair cultures; environmental monitoring; interspecies relationships; sonic folklores; histories and heritages of technology and the built environment; surveillance; and open source civic resources.

Trained in theatre studies, set design and psychology, Teresa has since the mid-2000s created performances and works under the name Polar Produce. Along with MTCD – A Visual Anthology of My Machine Life (2018), recent pieces include Canary Songs, a sonic re-enactment and choral performance, drawing on the history of female workers in WWI ammunition factories, and AMHARC (2017), a sculptural work made from recycled materials, drawing attention to how surveillance architectures affect other creatures’ habits and ecologies.Teresa’s work has been published and exhibited internationally (Ars Electronica, Helsinki Design Week, LABoral, 7a*11d, Locws International), presented at various conferences and symposia (ISEA, Make City, EcoCity, Istanbul Biennale) and reviewed in Nature Magazine, Wire, Creators,BBC online and we-make-money-not-art. Currently, she is professor of City Futures at the School of Art and Design, UWE Bristol and principal investigator at the international programme and network Repair Acts.

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak
And Now for Something Completely Different 10

Exhibition
12 June–12 July 2019
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

A man is trapped inside a screen, walking endlessly. His movements, careful and repetitive, generate a rhythmic, hypnotic sound. As he moves, the rectangular screen moves too, rotating like a big hamster wheel. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is a kinetic video installation that playfully reflects on our contemporary condition, depicting humans in a perpetual and pointless engagement with technological devices. Our device screens are portals to other dimensions: they help us to learn and remember, to create, and even to connect with each other, but at the same time they are powerful traps. Locking our eyes and our attention, they can become prisons, preventing us to establish more profound and complex relationships with the world and the people around us. The more we use the machine, the more we tend to resemble it: like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, when he morphs into a human screwdriver, the man inside the LCD adapts to the screen’s movements and limitations, transforming himself into a gear of the mechanism. In a wider sense, the work can also be considered a reflection on progress itself: we are constantly moving but making no real advancement, forced into hectic activity with no clear purpose. The title chosen for the work, which is taken after Paul Gauguin’s iconic painting D’ou Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous (1897), reinforces this idea.

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak use technology as a self-reflection tool; they build complex machines capable of bridging the physical and the virtual, the digital and the mechanical, the natural and the artificial. Since 2003, they have produced a large number of projects, including performances, films, photography and installations, that together constitute an ongoing investigation on contemporary life, focusing on its most controversial aspects: the traps of consumerism, the oppressive structures of work and politics, the ambiguous relationship between reality and fiction, the hidden perils of an uncritical use of technologies. In The Box (2005), for example, we see the artists inside a TV screen, trying to find a way out by pushing and kicking the walls. Their actions infiltrate the physical world by bending the frame of the monitor, but they are never able to break out: the mass media system is a giant rubber wall that won’t let us escape its influence, no matter how hard we try. This idea of helplessly trying to establish a physical connection between what’s inside the screen and what’s outside, opening a breach, reminds us of The Last Nine Minutes (1977), a seminal performance by American artist Douglas Davis. Like many other artists of the period, Davis engaged in a profound reflection about the rising world of telecommunication, considering its profound impact on human consciousness and social relationships. Despite these similarities, however, Oblak & Novak’s work is very different, aesthetically and conceptually: humans today are not just exploring new tools of communication, they are completely fused with them, to the point of not being able to recognise their true impact. To describe this new situation, the artists build alternative machines, ironic devices capable of depicting in a very accurate way our daily life: a circle of recursive actions that are both entertaining and exhausting.
In Endless Column (2017), which contains a direct visual reference to the work of media art pioneer Nam June Paik but also pays homage to avant-garde sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the protagonist tries to balance several monitor on her head, in a circus-like performance. All of her attention is focused on the action of keeping everything in place, without losing a single piece. In a world saturated with media contents, and surrounded by devices that continuously demand our attention, we always feel challenged, chased, and in the process of missing something. Distracted by this impossible task of managing everything, we slowly turn into entertaining machine ourselves, becoming part of the global media spectacle.

– Valentina Tanni

THE AUTHORS

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak have been working collectively since 2003. In their art practice they examine the influence of media and capital on contemporary society, dissecting its visual and linguistic structure. Oblak & Novak have exhibited worldwide, in venues like the Sharjah Biennial (AE), Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo (JP), Istanbul Biennial (TR), Biennale Cuvee, Linz (AT), Transmediale Berlin (DE), FILE Sao Paulo (BR), among others. They have received numerous grants and awards, including the CYNETART Award by the Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau in Dresden (DE), an honorary mention of art critics at Biennale WRO, Wroclaw (PL), the White Aphroid Award for artistic achievement by MMC KIBLA, Maribor (SI) and a Rihard Jakopic honorable mention, awarded by the Slovenian Association of Fine Arts Societies, the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Moderna galerija and the Slovene Association of Art Critics (SI).

Jonas Lund
Modern Solutions Require Modern Problems

Exhibition
15 May – 7 June 2019

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

The exhibition Modern Solutions Require Modern Problems by Swedish artist Jonas Lund consists of a series of works exploring opaque algorithmic ranking systems and the increasing loss of agency online. The main body of the work consists of personalised signs, each presenting and ranking different aspects of Lund’s activity and emotional status, from happiness to productivity. Each ranking is the result of a different algorithm, written and composed by Lund, in order to make visible the aspects of his performance as an artist that typically remain unknown, how much trust his works inspire and how that, in turn, affects his happiness. By juxtaposing his own personal happiness in relation to opaque and large scale systems, Lund aims to explore the consequences and limits of algorithms and the rule book of avoiding responsibility as the current defaults for automatic decision-making and influencing processes.

Society has come to recognise that the current solutions presented by Silicon Valley startups often create more problems than solutions. From Airbnb and Uber to Google, Amazon and Facebook, etc., what is typically presented as a ground-breaking world-altering technological innovation quickly erodes political and social institutions with one main goal in mind: to maximise profits for shareholders. At the centre of this ideology lies the belief that all aspects of human behaviour can and should be measured. Thus, vast datasets of signals, preferences and parameters have become the foundation for data-driven algorithmic decision-making processes – how can we squeeze another 0.5% profit out of this transaction, how can we maximize the return on our investment in any given scenario, regardless of whom it affects, as long as it pleases the shareholders. The algorithm has become the ruler, the solution, the seemingly unbiased decision maker that functions as the justification for any arbitrary profit-driven decision. 

How do you counter a “solution” with a problem and think of alternative narratives to relentless technological innovations? In Modern Solutions Require Modern Problems Lund will present a new work in which he is exploring, subverting, satrising and portraying the current infrastructure of the internet and the different aspects of this problematic binary.For the last decade, Swedish artist Jonas Lund has been developing a consistent body of work, focused on contemporary networked systems and power structures of control. If there is a system to analyse, pick apart and reverse engineer, Lund will tackle it. A unique artist whose works are equally relevant in the gallery space as well as online through the development of net specific projects and websites, Jonas Lund attempts to portray the increasing algorithmisation of our daily life, from our daily web experience to economics, from art making to the art market.

ARTIST TALK

In the talk Modern Solutions Require Modern Problems, Lund will explore his artistic practice and body of work through the vantage point of the “solution vs problem” binary division. Very often the technological solutions offered by the Silicon Valley elite quickly turn into societal problems. Conversely, the works that Lund produces can act as problems to the presented solutions. The artist talk will explore Lund’s body of work in relation to this dichotomy and present an alternative narrative to the current dogma.

Part of the ALUO uho events organized by The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana

THE AUTHOR

Jonas Lund (1984, Sweden) creates paintings, sculpture, photography, websites and performances that critically reflect on contemporary networked systems and power structures of control. His artistic practice involves creating systems and setting up parameters that oftentimes require engagement from the viewer. This results in game-like artworks where tasks are executed according to algorithms or a set of rules. Through his works, Lund investigates the latest issues generated by the increasing digitalisation of contemporary society like authorship, participation and authority. At the same time, he questions the mechanisms of the art world; he challenges the production process, authoritative power and art market practices.Lund earned an MA at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (2013) and a BFA at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (2009). He has had solo exhibitions at the Photographers’ Gallery, London (2019), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2016), Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2016, 2015, 2014), Växjö Konsthall Sweden (2016), Boetzelaer|Nispen, Amsterdam (2014), Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam (2013), New Museum, New York (2012), and has participated in numerous group exhibitions including ones at Carrol/Fletcher, London; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, ZKM, Karlsruhe; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Witte De With, Rotterdam; De Hallen, Haarlem; and the Moving Museum, Istanbul. His work has been written about in Artforum, Frieze, Kunstforum, the New Yorker, the Guardian, Metropolis M, Artslant, Rhizome, Huffington Post, Furtherfield, Wired and more.