Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud
“…” an archeology of silence in the digital age

Exhibition
30 August–29 September 2017
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Curated by
Daphne Dragona

In the framework of State Machines

“I have not tried to write the history of that language (A/N the language of psychiatry) but, rather, the archeology of that silence.”

M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1961

In an era when connectivity is taken as a given, communication is often thought of as free and boundless. As network infrastructures increasingly disappear into the environment, to always be in touch has come to be felt as natural. Posts, chats, comments and multiple instant reactions shape an image of a space where communication is immediate, vivid and often noisy. But how accessible, inclusive and democratic is this space at the same time? Overwhelmed by the busyness and speed of today’s environments, seldom do we get to reflect upon recurring forms of exclusion and absence: What about voices that cannot be heard on “feeds” and streams of information? Who gets to speak? Who listens in and who remains silent?

Artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud have been paying special attention to the different forms of silence that prevail on the Internet. With their work, they aim to undermine power structures while also developing tools and systems of communication for those in need. They uncover network mechanisms, expose cases of censorship and surveillance, and embrace infrastructural literacy as a response to the dominance of today’s network infrastructures. Minorities deprived of the possibility to connect, people fleeing in fear of being tracked, citizens suffering violent Internet black-outs, as well as users wishing to react to the constant capturing of their data are the ones the artists have been turning their attention to. In areas such as the suburbs of Paris, the island of Lesvos, the cities of the Arab Spring, even the very center of Berlin, they have worked alongside communities and activists to develop independent zones of communication that users themselves can control and sustain. Bringing back to the foreground what the 90s community network pioneers once called the “freedom to connect,” Wachter and Jud formulate possibilities for communication, opposing silence and exclusion.For the exhibition “…” an archeology of silence for the digital age, the artists have built a communication network similar to the ones they set up in the open space. Two network terminals and one mobile network unit, functioning independenty of the Internet are hosted in the show. Their distinctive tin-powered antennas held by minimal wooden structures allow the signal to reach great distances of connectivity. The mobile network unit – called “Gezi Park Edition” –  offers citizens and users the possibility to set up a local communication network anywhere and at any time. The visibility, materiality and tangibility of these infrastructures invite us to experience the aesthetic, technological and social elements that they involve. Viewing, accessing and trying out these counter-infrastructures, we get to join different zones of connectivity that remind us of the power asymmetries as well as of our very role and silence in the connected world.

The World Without Us
Narratives on the age of non-human actors

Exhibition
27 June–27 August 2017
Vžigalica Gallery | Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana

Curated by
Inke Arns

Artists
Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke, Timo Arnall, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Ignas Krunglevicius, Mark Leckey, Nicolas Maigret & Maria Roszkowska, Eva & Franco Mattes, Yuri Pattison, Sascha Pohflepp, Suzanne Treister, Addie Wagenknecht, Pinar Yoldas

In the framework of State Machines

The exhibition asks what a world without us would be like. But rather than conjuring up a post-disaster scenario, it describes such a world as the result of a gradual development whose origins can be traced back to our day and age. Taking its cues from science-fiction literature and the philosophical school of Speculative Realism, the exhibition largely relies on the principle of extrapolation.

The tools for the creation of a “world without us” are at hand. The first driverless cars are driving on our streets, news articles are compiled by algorithms, and translations are done by machines. Already in 2009 a third of all shares in the EU and the US were traded by algorithms. We can only speculate on the current proportion.

In a “world without us” humans will be replaced by machines, artificial intelligences will be optimized by other AIs and algorithms will be programmed by other self-learning algorithms. In this way, a radically different, post-anthropocentric world could emerge in which non-human life forms could eventually prove better able to adapt than man himself. Benjamin Bratton said of such a world in 2014: “Worse than being seen as the enemy (by AI) is not being seen at all.”

The increasing influence of non-human actors in our everyday life has not only been explored by several recent blockbusters, including Her (2013), and in TV series such as Black Mirror (2011) and Real Humans (2012), but also in contemporary (media) art. Loosely inspired by Timothy Morton’s book Ecology Without Nature, the artists in this exhibition explore the possibility of an ecology after man – an age of the post-Anthropocene, in which other “life” forms, such as algorithms, artificial intelligence, artificially created nanoparticles, genetically modified micro-organisms and seemingly monstrous plants, have taken control. This new era, which has already begun, albeit imperceptibly, is the age of non-human actors.

The World Without Us was originally produced and presented by HMKV in Dortmund, Germany in 2016. For the 2017 Ljubljana version a selection of the Dortmund show was made and some works of the exhibition alien matter (curated by Inke Arns for the transmediale festival, HKW, 2017) were added to The World Without Us.The exhibition will move to Rijeka (Mali Salom / MMSU) at the end of the summer as a part of the project State Machines – Art, Work, and Identity in an Age of Planetary-Scale Computation.

The exhibition overview: HERE

Adam Harvey
Privacy Gift Shop

Exhibition
21 June–21 July 2017
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

In the framework of State Machines

“The NSA declined to comment on Harvey’s work, as did the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”

Washington Post

The Privacy Gift Shop is a marketplace for counter-surveillance technology, privacy accessories, and new ideas about privacy. It was founded by Berlin-based American artist Adam Harvey in 2013, and since then, it has been presented as a “concept store” in many institutional venues, including The New Museum, New York, and other locations in Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Vienna, and London. It has also been discussed on magazines and newspapers, including Wired, Motherboard, and the Observer. In 2015 the Privacy Gift Shop joined NEW INC, the art+tech incubator led by the New Museum in New York City. The store is currently located in Berlin, and sells its outcomes also through an online store, available at https://privacygiftshop.com.

The project wants to “normalize otherwise controversial ideas about surveillance and encourage a critical speculative discourse about issues related to data, surveillance, and privacy.” Its products include the OFF Pocket Phone Case, which blocks wireless signals and protects your phone from stealth data;  the IXNY Tee, a redesign of the iconic “I Love NY” T-shirt featuring an OCR-resistant font that makes it difficult for the NSA to decipher; the Metal Dollar Bill, a copper wallet insert that shields your credit cards from RFID skimming; and the Stealth Wear collection, a series of garments – conceived in collaboration with fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield – inspired by burkas and hijabs that shield against thermal imaging, a surveillance technology used widely by military drones to target people.

More recently, the Privacy Gift Shop launched Think Privacy (2015), a year-long art campaign conceived to raise awareness about emerging issues in the age of data collection. The campaign collects statements that are part education and part provocation, printed over coloured backgrounds reminiscent of motivational posters, and presented in various formats, including wall placards, coasters, refrigerator magnets, mugs, and other ephemera.

Creative resistance to surveillance was a topic in Adam Harvey’s research long before the Snowden revelations. In 2010 he launched CV Dazzle (also included in the show at Aksioma Project Space), a research project about creating a form of camouflage against computer vision, using haircuts and make-up to make a face unrecognizable to most surveillance algorithms. By creating and marketing relatively cheap products that follow the same approach, the Privacy Gift Shop takes a step forward, and realises the artist’s ambition “to bring privacy and counter-surveillance ideas to a wider audience and engage in discussions about how art, design, and creativity can play a role in protecting privacy.” [1]

In Ljubljana, the project was displayed at Aksioma Project Space in a hybrid gallery / popup shop setup, with tentacles reaching out to MSUM and MGML’s Museums Shops, where, from the summer onward, was be possible to buy various “souvenirs” specially produced by Aksioma for the launch of the Privacy Gift Shop in Slovenia.

[1] Quoted in  Stephanie Murg, “I Spy: New Museum Opens ‘Privacy Gift Shop’”, in Adweek, September 9, 2013, online at www.adweek.com/fishbowlny/new-museum-privacy-gift-shop/302687.

Jennifer Lyn Morone
Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc

Exhibition
17 May–16 June 2017
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

In the framework of State Machines

In 2014, American born artist, Jennifer Lyn Morone, registered herself as a corporation in Delaware, USA, as part of a protest project she developed at the Royal College of Art in London. She is now the founder, CEO, shareholder and product of her own company, Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc. JLM Inc presents itself as a new business, established to determine the value of an individual. The corporation derives value from three sources and legally protects and bestows rights upon the total output of Jennifer Lyn Morone: past experiences and present capabilities, offered as biological, physical and mental services such as genes, labour, creativity, blood, sweat and tears; selling future potential in the form of shares; and accumulation, categorization and evaluation of data that is generated as a result of Jennifer Lyn Morone’s life. Through the subversive adaptation of the corporate form the individual asserts their rights to their data as property and grants access to the markets otherwise inaccessible. In this way, the whole process of resources, production and ownership is rightly reclaimed by the individual.

With this project, which is also a life project with all the unpredictability that this implies, Jennifer Lyn Morone sets herself in the long tradition of subversive affirmation. Not a speculative project but a real event, JLM Inc allows the artist to translate into a powerful, clear narrative the workings of extreme capitalism, the economic system in which everybody is living today, but that only a few understand and use to their own advantage. Recognizing that, in the age of social networks and data mining, we are all “data slaves”, exploited by companies to which we hand our data for free, she subverts this mechanism by turning herself into a company, thus able to protect and profit from her data. If exploitation is unavoidable, why not head into self-exploitation?In order to take control over the data she produces, JLM Inc is working on the development of an app called Database of ME or DOME. The app collects and stores for her the data she generates: her location, heartbeat, browsing activity, mood, etc. This way, the company can sell, lease, rent, exchange or invest the data for her own profit. But personal data are only a part of JLM Inc’s business. When you are a corporation you can turn almost anything into a good or service. By thinking of yourself as a product, you can identify what assets you possess and maximize their value by turning them into new products and services. Along these lines, JLM Inc produced Lure and Repel, two scents made from Morone’s pheromone molecules that, respectively, attract and repel men. The company also entered the pharmaceutical business by producing Rejuvanix, a hormone therapy made from Morone’s DHEA, and the luxury market by producing diamonds out of the artist’s hair. All these products (data, scents, pharmaceuticals, diamonds) are sold either online or through the art market, and promoted by commercials that satyrize the ways of communication of a commercial company.

Iza Pavlina
Rule 34

Exhibition
19 April – 12 May 2017
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Online pornography has profoundly changed the access of younger generations to sexual content. Online, everything is easily accessible; everything is explicit, categorized to meet any preference and / or perversion; and the explosion of amateur pornography has turned the representation of the sexual sphere into something that potentially involves everybody.

In the recent past visual artist Iza Pavlina began to research peculiar sexual fetishes and filmed staged situations using her own body as a medium to enact them. However, the materials she generated differ from typical pornographic materials in that there is an absolute lack of explicit content. The artist decided instead to place the object of the fetish itself in the very centre of the attention. Then she uploaded her materials on a popular porn website and passively monitored responses and comments from online audience members. This initial experiment encouraged her to carry on her scrutiny of these kinds of practices, communication forms and relationships, this time focusing more on the development of her online identity and the way her alter ego engages and interacts with its audience.

The project Rule 34, on display at Aksioma Project Space, is the result of this further investigation. For this exhibition new video and photographic materials illustrating various specific sexual fetishes, such as Exophilia (attraction to non-human life-forms), Plushophilia (attraction to stuffed animals), Agalmatophilia (attraction to statues and dolls), Coulrophilia (attraction to clowns and jesters) and so on, were produced and submitted on a regular basis to all major pornographic media and social networking sites. This became the “habitat” in which the artist’s online persona could exist, live and perform. Her engagement with the audience’s responses, private messages and comments were all but passive. Iza in fact established a direct dialogue with her fans, encouraging them to trade her original digital artwork and drawings for a “Cum Tribute” or any other kind of creative feedback.

Everyday conversations, comments, private messages and exchanged items were regularly documented and then accurately formatted to become part of a multimedia installation. This specific content is made available to the gallery’s audience through a number of Wi-Fi routers, each of which hosts a set of reactions to a specific fetish. These devices, installed next to the artist’s staged paraphilia videos, are disconnected from the internet and broadcast their content only locally, so in order to access a specific collection, visitors have to connect to the proper network through a personal device, being it a smart-phone, tablet or laptop. [1] They can also access the artist’s profiles directly on xHamster, Pornhub and XVideos by scanning QRcodes the artist holds in her hands in the exhibited framed self-portrait drawings. If they decide to do so they will have the opportunity to explore Rule 34 even deeper and actively engage with the project.

[1] This exhibition format, called OFFLINE ART, was initially developed by German artist Aram Bartholl

Dorotea Škrabo
Please Do Not Take Photographs

Exhibition
22 March–14 April 2017
Aksioma |Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Today’s tools of image production have turned everyone into a producer, distributor and consumer of images. In the current condition of information overload, images are among the most transferred content: via instant messaging, social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter, micro blogging tools like Tumblr, and services like Instagram and Snapchat. As art critic David Joselit noted, “The scale at which images proliferate and the speed with which they travel have never been greater.” [1]

The impact of this condition on professional visual production and visual art has yet to be recognized, but it has been discussed by many scholars and artists. As early as 2002, artist Seth Price discussed online “dispersion” as a powerful alternative to official art circulation systems. [2] Later on, artist and teacher Hito Steyerl wrote about the potential of “poor images”, the low quality version of an offline artifact that circulates for free on the internet, where it is shared, compressed, remixed, and often deprived of its links to the original author; [3] and artist Brad Troemel talked about “athletic aesthetics” to describe the fast and quantitative approach to art production that artists adopt to maintain an online presence, where they are confronted with compressed attention spans and with modes of fruition that are totally different from those of a dedicated art space. [4]

We can’t forget this when considering the work of younger generations of artists, who happen to be “users” of digital devices and participants in the social networking economy, even before being “artists”. Trained in art and design, “digital native” artist Dorotea Škrabo has grown up in this kind of environment. Before existing as an artist, she existed as a computer and smartphone user. To her, online image production is a performative gesture in a way that artworks can’t be understood as autonomous artifacts, but as traces of the artist; and “viewers” are not consumers of a finished artifact, but are an active part of an ongoing process.In her new installation Please Do Not Take Photographs designed for Aksioma Project Space, Škrabo draws upon these premises. The show consists of two main pieces. In Let Them Eat Cake, images are printed on cakes. These edible treats represent a “snap” published on “Snapchat ”, a phone app that allows a user to develop an intense dialogue with others through images. All posts are deleted from the user’s Snapchat story after 12 hours. The temporary nature of the pictures therefore encourages frivolity and emphasizes a more natural flow of interaction. The visitors of the exhibition are invited to take a piece of cake, offering a metaphorical, yet playful and engaging comment on the ephemeral nature of online images.

The second piece, Musée du Lowres, is a replica of the part of the Louvre where the Mona Lisa is exhibited. The central piece is a screen in a baroque framing displaying the artist impersonating Leonardo’s masterpiece. Mobile devices, loaded with several images, texts and emoji, are applied on the surface encouraging visitors to slightly mutate the artwork by swiping through their contents. Beside the centerpiece, a series of video snaps are displayed on mobile phones along with oversized golden-framed prints of their captions, ironically subverting the traditional relationship between visual artwork and contextual information.

OUCH – Pain and Performance
SCREENING PROGRAMME

Curated by Live Art Development Agency, London

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

15 – 17 March 2017

“I see pain as an inevitable byproduct of interesting performance.“

Dominic Johnson

According to Wikipedia ‘pain’ is an “unpleasant feeling often caused by intense or damaging stimuli… (it) motivates the individual to withdraw from damaging situations and to avoid similar experiences in the future.” But for many artists and audiences the opposite is just as true, and pain within the context of performance is a challenging, exhilarating and profound experience. 

Ouch is a collection of documentation and artists’ films looking at pain and performance – both the pain artists cause themselves within the course of their work, whether intentional or not, and the experiences of audiences as they are invited to inflict pain on artists or are subjected to pain and discomfort themselves. 

The selected works feature eminent and ground breaking artists from around the world whose practices address provocative issues including the lived experiences of illness, the aging female body, cosmetic surgery, addiction, embodied public protest, animalistic impulses, bloodletting, staged fights, acts of self-harm and flagellation, and what can happen when you invite audiences to be complicit in performance actions.  

Ouch featured artists: Marina Abramović, ORLAN, Oleg Kulik, Ron Athey, Franko B,  Marcel.li Antunez Roca, Heather Cassils, Bob Flanagan, Wafaa Bilal, Rocio Boliver, Petr Pavlensky, Martin O’Brien, Regina Jose Galindo, Ernst Fisher & Nicola Hunter, Kira O’Reilly, jamie lewis hadley.Previous versions of Ouch have been shown at Martin O’Brien’s Discharge (Jan 2013), the Wellcome Collection’s In Pursuit of Pain (Jul 2016) and the Venice International Performance Art Week (Dec 2016).

Adult content will feature at this event, including nudity and strong images.

Saša Spačal & Ida Hiršenfelder
Sonoseismic Earth
RESPONSIVE INSTALLATION

Aksioma | Project Space
Komenskega 18, Ljubljana

22 February – 10 March 2017

The responsive kinetic installation Sonoseismic Earth presents Earth in the age of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch of industrial societies. It is an age that has witnessed disruptions in the earth’s systems on a planetary scale. The crisis of the planet is marked by climate change; loss of biodiversity; pollution of the sea, land and air; exploitation of natural resources; and heavy depletion of soil. The global capitalist structure of the world does not allow human beings to act globally, or to counter the planetary crisis produced by inevitable consumption. The obsolescence and, consequently, accumulation of waste are inscribed in every product. Non-renewable energy sources are the driving force of globalism. They all cause seismic shifts: the depletion of fossil fuels creates cavities in the lithosphere, accumulation lakes generate pressure on it, and accidents in nuclear reactors cause tectonic cracks.

Sonoseismic Earth makes a possible entry into a planetary perspective, into the sensual and haptic relationship between the human and the planet. The depletion of fossil fuels in the earth’s crust causes tectonic cracks; hence, in the installation, the globe is gradually polluted. The rendering of seismographic shifts intensifies with the proximity of human beings detected by sensors. The planet emits the infrasonic sound of earthquakes; it submerges the human in the ubiquitous acoustic space with no identifiable origin. The infrasonic sound is a warning frequency, recognised by the more sensitive beings as a sign of danger. With the acoustic environment of the Sonoseismic Earth, humans are caught actively and experientially in the drama of the endless circulation of capital. The crisis of the planet is the crisis of the system.Sonoseismic Earth tries to condense the effect of the fossil fuel industry into an experience of carbon war waged against all life forms on the planet. Such violence makes itself visible in an abrupt and unpredictable way. At the forefront of this war is the global distribution of water, which has been profoundly influenced by climate changes, global warming, and invasive and toxic fossil fuel extractions such as fracking. Equal disruption of water is further violated by privatisation of water resources and deprivation of a large number of living organisms from having access to their basic needs. The mechanism in theinstallation contains a solution of water and fossil fuels that is squeezed out of the globe and produces a poignant odor in the surroundings, making the pollution tangible for the senses. The water is not cleaned, as it is part of a planetary metabolic rift. The things humans consume do not rejuvenate or replenish through the metabolic processes of the earth. Products are discarded as toxic waste and end up in the bodies of organic creatures, amassing in landfills, polluting the oceans. The metabolic rift may only be overcome in millions of years. One of the candidates for replenishment of the earth’s fossil fuel reserves is a living product, an industrial chicken. Due to mass production, it is predicted that the industrial chicken will be the model fossilised organism of the Anthropocene. By putting the bones of industrial chickens into the polluted water-oil solution, Sonoseismic Earth announces the replenishing of fossil fuels in the distant future. However, it cannot announce human existence.

Valerie Wolf Gang
Wet Dreams

Exhibition
14 December 2016 – 6 January 2017

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

“We fly over the world, we consider it from the outside, we see oceans of data, expanding and swirling, transformed by tsunamis of social trends, as sudden as it is fleeting, occupying all available space before giving way to the next start up. We can analyze the attitudes of the masses and the aggregate opinion is easy to obtain through polls and data mining. We, the targets are enthusiastic and willing victims; we love to be ‘free’ consumers. The general, global recording of everything is the price to be paid if we want to be truly ‘free’ to choose.”

– Ippolita, In the Facebook Aquarium: The Resistible Rise of Anarcho-Capitalism, 2015

Listening to strangers’ conversations and secretly watching other people has always been part of our human behavior. We are constantly observing others, comparing ourselves with them and making up new stories and assumptions. In the 21st century, in the era of technology and virtual communications, we (ab)use technology to hide our identity and spy on others even more. We hack into intimate places and invade the privacy of others, we talk with anonymous people and we invent our own alter egos. The installation Wet Dreams by young Slovenian artist Valerie Wolf Gang creates social interventionism, which allows us to hide behind an anonymous identity and gives us the opportunity to ‘hack’ into the intimate life of others if we dare to look and break social conventions. We become invisible people, stuck in the aquarium of our own imagination.

The main piece of the installation is an aquarium in which we see two working computer monitors sink into the liquid inside. On both monitors runs a browser open on Omegle, an online chat website that pairs random people from around the world together for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website begin an online chat with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by starting another random connection. These random ‘real time’ connections create unpredictable conversations and moments in time. The people on Omegle don’t know that they are being observed by the visitors of the gallery; the two monitors are facing each other and the web-cameras are filming each other’s screen, presenting the digital reflection of random online people, selected by algorithms, stuck in a ‘digital aquarium’.
The signal of both monitors is split and the interface of each monitor is projected on the gallery walls: people entering the gallery step inside the ‘digital conversation’ and become part of the aquarium. They can follow the conversation and circle around the aquarium, they can be silent spies, like the NSA, or they can start to interact with the conversation and disturb ‘the reality’.
The installation becomes a medium for spontaneous performance and the symbiosis between the virtual and physical world, constructed from algorithms and real time human interactions.

“To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it’s better not to be a fish.”

– André Malraux

Marko Batista
Sonic Geometry of Space
SOLO EXHIBITION

Aksioma | Project Space
Komenskega 18, Ljubljana

16 November – 9 December 2016

In his works, Ljubljana-based intermedia artist Marko Batista analytically thematises DIY electro-acoustic processes at the intersection of electronic sound, technology and contemporary art. On display in Aksioma is his exhibition Sonic Geometry of Space, conceived as a prototype of a hyper-acoustic capsule. The ambient set-up designed by Marko stems from long-standing sound experiments, for his work is based on the exploration of dynamic self-generating systems and the phenomenology of sound resonances in space. He draws the phenomenality of sound from temporally determined processes within intermedia performing practices, and he attempts to design new modes of the distribution of acoustic resonances in space. The history of electro-acoustic art reveals the complex phenomenality of sound and the relations concerning the time and architecture in which it is located. Sound undulation can be perceived as a series of physical phenomena or as the non-material gestuality of the surrounding objectivity. The question that continues to arise is thus: is electro-acoustic art, in its essence, able to elude its meta-position of listening? Over the past few years, Marko’s site-specific installations have been presented in various galleries, and they offer their viewers a space of apperception and, at the same time, sensory perception. Spatial sound, which is characteristic of Marko’s work, is created by means of aesthetically designed modular interfaces and prototypical acoustic resonators, which were designed especially for the exhibition. The material for the exhibition derives from the inventions of the previous millennium; the show problematises the processes of the production of electro-acoustic artefacts and processuality. By means of sound objects created in the studio, the viewer is led to the questions of sound reality and phenomenality of the phenomenology of sound within contemporary art practices.

Maja Smrekar
Requiem for The Future

Hybrid performance
14-15 October 2016
Ljubljana Puppet Theatre / Stage under the stars

Maja Smrekar conceived  her project Requiem for The Future as an experiment/performance in which the human body is substituted by animals and machines. For several years she has been exploring the work with dogs on an empirical level using elements of modern technology and is particularly interested in creating spatial choreography, mainly performed by dogs and robots. In her work she deals with synergic transitions between anthropomorphic, technomorphic and zoomorphic – the associations, which are evoked by puppets as well.

“As an interdisciplinary artist, fusing humanities and natural sciences into interdisciplinary projects, I look at the complex field of puppetry through an interdisciplinary perspective, ranging from Medieval Spanish theatre, with the so-called máquina real style, to modern, Stelarc’s techno-performances.”

Maja Smrekar

The initial inspiration for the show comes from the concept of Das Triadische Ballet (1922) by Oskar Schlemmer, who understood the early 20th century zeitgeist through two key contemporary currents: the mechanical (the human as a machine and the body as a mechanism) and the primary impulses (the sudden rise of the creative urge, which is a wild, instinctive drive); he believed that he achieved a synergy of the Dionysian and the Apollonian creative principles in his choreographies. Schlemmer thought that the movement of puppets or marionettes was aesthetically superior to human movement; thus, he wanted to emphasise that every artistic medium is artificial, which he achieved through stylised movement, which he kept simplifying until it became reminiscent of the abstracted movement of puppets or marionettes. Similarly, Maja Smrekar is interested in the associative paradigm of animal movement and machine movement. Geometry, which is reminiscent of mechanical movements, is also always present in constant repetition in the formal part of dog training. At the same time, the human guidance of drones could also be understood as the inverse paraphrase of Kant’s reflection on upbringing and education: the human is an animal that needs a teacher/leader. Hence, at this point, the artist addresses particularly the gaze of the other: not only what the existence of humans means to animals, but also how “monstrous” the human appears to artificial intelligence.

On the basis of the theory of the harmony of spheres, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras formed the hypothesis that the Sun, the Moon and the rest of the planets in our solar system emit their unique orbital resonances, which are based on their orbital revolution, while the quality of life on Earth reflects the meaning of cosmic sounds which are otherwise inaudible to humans. Starting from his thesis, music, which shapes the temporal-dramaturgical arch of the performance, establishes one of the key layers in addition to the voice. Beginning with the granulations of sounds from nature and the creation of organic atmosphere in the first part (“DOG”), the performance continues with a cut into techno-steam-punk accompanied by the robust sounds of the flying drones in the second part (“DRONE”). A contrast to both appears with the shift to choir singing in the third part (the absent “HUMAN”), with the opening beats from a Bulgarian folk song Dragana and the Nightingale which speaks about the anthropocentric relationship in the race between nature and culture; yet, it is soon dispelled through the counterpoint of pulsating intervals based on some coefficients of the relations between the orbital frequencies of the planets closest to Earth (13 Venus orbits for 8 Earth orbits, 3 Venus orbits for 1 Mars orbit, 2 Earth orbits form 1 Mars orbit). The concept of the music of spheres entails the metaphysical principle in which mathematical relations express the tonal qualities of the energy manifested in numbers, shapes and sounds – combined into proportional patterns with which, at the end of the performance, we close the paradoxical circuit of human existence in the infinity of the universe.

Human perception of the animal machine as well as the machine run by artificial intelligence is quick to slip into the identification of demonising the other, for in the vicious circle of dialectics we always stop with the discourse of feelings and subjectivisation of the (human) soul.

In establishing links between technology, nature, the hybrid anthropo-, zoo- and technomorphic nature of robots and animals, we are dealing with an interrogation of the contemporary social paradigm in which humans have destroyed nature almost completely due to the excessive exultation of our own culture; yet, despite this, nature survives and lives more fully in symbiosis with technology only after mankind has destroyed itself.

The music from the performance is available from the online publisher Kamizdat under the conditions of the Creative Commons licence.

Olja Grubić & Živa Petrič
Red Web

Performance
10 – 13 October 2016

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Red Web is a digitalised performative installation of a sexual chatroom in which a female performer takes her female or male spectator through a test/experience intertwining the intimate and public space and through an interface addressing everything in between.

The focus of interest in this artwork is the intimate relation of the spectator as an active communicator to the performer upon entering one of the sex portals. It tackles the individual interaction of the performer with a visitor, challenging the limits of communication, levels of perception, intensification of fantasy – as a consequence of a new era of digital reality as a phantasm that blurs the boundary between the public and private spaces.

Red Webis a user’s experience of an individual’s intimate space which includes both the real and the fictional Other at the same time, as well as different performative strategies that generate and transform this relation. It is a fusion of digital communication into a performative situation that will be created in the interaction between the user’s desire and its (un)fulfilment; personal data are valuable goods… The limits of my interface are the limits of my world… You get what you click… Freedom is all around…