Emil Kozole
How Much Is Your Face Worth?
SOLO EXHIBITION

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

6 – 22 July 2016

In 2014 Facebook released the most powerful targeting tool ever – Detailed targeting [1], with intelligence that makes even Orwell’s 1984seems like a fairytale. It segments people by ethnicity, sexual orientation, political orientation, social status, the car they drive, and even the food they eat. How does Facebook know all of this?

The way Facebook files its users is done through algorithms that calculate, for example, your sexual orientation by assessing the interactions you have with other users on Facebook. Your ethnicity instead is guessed by the combination of your given name and last name: if your name is Hans Mueller, you are certainly a white man. Well, at least for Facebook. The neighborhood you live in provides relevant information on your social status. This and much more adds up to increasingly accurate profiles Facebook then sells to advertisers.

If this is not scary enough, Facebook has also developed the most efficient face-recognition software known today: the DeepFace [2] . At the moment the social media in question has over 1.5 billion users that have uploaded more than 250 billion photos and it’s actually capable of identifying any person depicted in a given image with 97% accuracy. When considering these two facts it is reasonable to speculate that our face will soon become an important variable in “target advertising”. So the question is: how much is your face worth?

In a dystopian scenario that explores the value of humans to advertisers purely based on data taken from their Facebook profiles, How Much Is Your Face Worth?, a new project by Slovenian designer Emil Kozole, investigates connections between personal data, facial characteristics and online targeting and questions the rise of new marketing tools that are one step ahead of personalized advertising and are becoming embedded into our lives. The exhibition will feature over two thousand profiles distributed by what Facebook knows and speculates about them with the potential value that they represent.

Oliver Walker
One Euro

Exhibition
8 June–July 2016
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

The value of work has always been subject to huge disparities. For a period in the mid twentieth century leftist parties and labour unions tried – and partially succeeded, at least in Western countries – to reduce these disparities. But during the last three decades, with globalization, the information revolution and the emergence of the post-fordist model of work, have become greater and greater again. Legal and illegal immigration from poorer countries provided cheap labour for agriculture and industries; while the competition from developing countries brought companies to produce cheaper commodities, and to reduce the wages of the workers, hire occasional workers, outsource production to developing countries. Youth unemployment is rising, and if the eight-hour day still survives in certain fields and for certain generations of workers, it has become a mirage for many young people. As it was stated in the concept of the exhibition Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life (FACT, Liverpool, December 2013 – March 2014), “amid the new realities of a globalised experience economy and a working environment that is increasingly distributed, virtualised and digital, our definitions of production and consumption, work and recreation are becoming increasingly blurred.”

Featured in this pertinent exhibition, One Euro by Oliver Walker is a six channel video installation, with each channel depicting one person working. Each video lasts as long as it takes the person depicted to earn one euro. The films vary in length from well over an hour for low paid agricultural workers; to their slightly higher paid counterparts in industry; via those on middle income wages; down to one minute, and with one film little over a second long.
The films do not offer a narrative, but rather quite detached observations of people at work. It is not intended as a didactic essay on wage inequality. While it offers reflection on these staggering inequalities, and this political position is ultimately not left ambiguous, the relationship between labour and money is transformed into a more subjective medium – time. Periods of time are not as easily compared with one another as pieces of graphical information, for instance. With video, the timescale is embedded into the medium (unlike photography, or even text). Ultimately the people on the screens are simply taking part in their everyday lives, and we see six bodies on six screens, side by side.In One Euro, time itself becomes an expressive medium, in a way that underlines its relationship with money and value, but also in a way that underlines the ambiguity of this value. The way the installation is designed, in fact, makes the richer people appear on screen for just a few minutes, or just a few seconds. While the agricultural worker is earning a euro, the screens of the people whose time is worth more is left blank. Their time may be expensive, but does it really belong to them? Are they still able to see any difference between working time and personal time? Do they still have free time?

Jack and Leigh Ruby
Car Wash Incident
SOLO EXHIBITION

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
4 May – 3 June 2016

Eve Sussman is a Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker who works independently and collaboratively, sometimes under the rubric Rufus Corporation. Her work incorporates film, video, installation, sculpture, and photography. Along with Rape of the Sabine Women, 2006, and 89 Seconds at Alcázar, 2004 that debuted at the Whitney Biennial, the company has collaborated on Yuri’s Office, 2009, and whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, 2011. Rufus Corporation’s works have been exhibited and screened internationally and are included in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Sussman is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, the Rome Prize, and has received funding from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others.

As collaborators Simon Lee and Eve Sussman co-founded the Wallabout Oyster Theatre – a micro theatre space run out of their studios in Brooklyn. Their most recent project, No Food No Money No Jewels, was commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Art Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY, co-produced by the Robert D Bielecki Foundation and premiered as a multi-channel installation at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia in February 2016. MORE

Even if there is little difference between a con-artist and an artist, and the latter quite often try to replicate the strategies, the behaviors and the practices of the first, the case of the con-artist that becomes an artist is still quite rare. Jack and Leigh Ruby are one exception. As artist and producer Simon Lee said: “They lived a life of fraud and they continue to live a life of fraud in the art world.” From the early 70s to the late 90’s siblings Jack + Leigh Ruby were career confidence artists operating in America and Australia. They specialized in facilitating insurance fraud, fabricating sophisticated portfolios of false evidence, often using photography, film and video surveillance footage. Finally arrested for a scam in which they robbed their own house, they were incarcerated for more than a decade. In prison the Rubys atoned for their crimes and denounced their illegal behavior. In spite of this they came to re-evaluate their previous career with new aesthetic appreciation, based on their study of contemporary art. 

One thing they probably noticed was the close relationship between the fake media objects – photos, videos, documents) they crafted for their scams, and the strong interest shown by most artists working with media imagery from the Seventies onward for the relationship between reality and fiction, documentation and falsification, live and mediated experience of an event. As they explained: “At the very least we confused the truth to the point that alternative narratives could be suggested and adopted as believable. Variable parallel realities that call into question “what happened” and what we believe to be real, while simultaneously winking at the presence of the directors just slightly off stage, is the basis for our current body of work as artists. Insinuation, implication, loaded gestures, pregnant pauses, cross conversations and doppelgängers are all present in our recent work.” 

The dialogue, that started in prison, with artists and producers Eve Sussman and Simon Lee brought them to further elaborate upon these topics, and to decide to re-invent the most intriguing of the work from their younger days, using the falsified photos and videos as fodder for new work. Upon release in 2012 they returned to the US and made Car Wash Incident, a film they had been planning for several years that is the first in a series inspired by the scam portfolios from their past life. 

Car Wash Incident is a video installation consisting of 25-minute two-channel video loop with an eight-channel audio system. The film installation is inspired by an actual scam carried out in 1975 by the Rubys, but is not a duplication of the event:  it’s a motion picture re-creation of the one of the pieces of ephemera used by the Rubys to commit their crimes: that is a falsified photo from the car-wash scam. The video, comprised of the same scene, filmed over and over again at different angles, features two identical casts of 4 characters (played by 8 actors) simultaneously performing a choreographed plot; one cast enacting the plot story “clockwise” and the other depicting the plot “counter-clockwise.”The video belongs to the genre of the “reconstruction”, for which Aksioma demonstrated a long time interest since the organization of the exhibition Re:Akt! Reconstruction, Reenactment, Re-reporting (2009), and can be easily compared with works such as The Third Memory (1999) by Pierre Huyghe and The Eternal Frame by Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco, also shown at Aksioma in 2013. Since 2013, it has been shown in many venues, including: Old School, New York City 2013; Monkeytown, New York City 2013; Moscow International Film Festival 2013; The Parlour, Brooklyn, NY 2013; B3-Bienale, Frankfurt, Germany 2013; Michael Jon Gallery, Detroit 2015.

Evan Roth
Internet Landscapes: Sweden
PROJECT LAUNCH

March 10 – April 1, 2016
Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana

April 7 – 30, 2016
Mali Salon/MMSU, Rijeka, Croatia
In the framework of The Black Chamber exhibition

“For me this project is as much a search for the Internet as it is a search for new ways of making art within a fundamentally changed network landscape.”

Evan Roth, artist

“The Masters and Servers partners are delighted to commission this new artwork by Evan Roth, it is the first in a significant new series by the artist, who makes visible the environment of the internet and its misuses.”

Ruth McCullough, Senior Producer for Abandon Normal Devices

Internet Landscapes is a new series of web-based artworks by Evan Roth that allows audiences to experience the Internet’s physical, digital and cultural landscape. Through a series of video works that bring together audio and video recordings charting the artist’s obsession with and journey to find the physical Internet. 

As part of the Masters&Servers open call programme he evolves this further with a new commission, Internet Landscapes: Sweden based on the artist’s recent research and documentation of Sweden’s main Internet submarine fibre optic cable landing locations. These landing locations are transitional moments in which fibre optic cables join the undersea communication network, allowing continents to communicate digitally – send emails, skype, phone.

In early 2016 Roth embarked on a pilgrimage to a number of landing locations in Sweden between Kungsbacka, on the south eastern coast, and Väddö, just north of Stockholm, documenting the surroundings using infra-red video and binaural audio recordings. The use of infra-red is in part a reference to the architecture of the Internet, which uses infra-red laser light transmitted through fibre optic cables. While the audio monitors and records his heart rate, surrounding environment and fm radio waves. The result is a online experience that brings together these recordings, to allow you to meditate on the landscape and the internet as the video file transfers through the network from its’ host in Sweden to your screen. 

For Roth, visiting the Internet physically is an attempt to repair a relationship that has changed dramatically as the Internet becomes more centralized, monetized and a mechanism for global government spying. Clearly seeing the infrastructure disappear underground and underwater also alludes to the slowly eroding optimistic and egalitarian values many of us attributed to earlier incarnations of the internet. Through understanding and experiencing the Internet’s physicality, one comes to understand the network not as a mythical cloud, but as a human made and controlled system of wires and computers.

The project will be revealed online on Wednesday 2nd March 2016, and for those wishing to delve deeper, clues are held in the url and source code signaling to the works origins and different readings.

The launch date coincides with the works premier as part of The Black Chamber exhibition curated by Eva & Franco Mattes and Bani Brusadin, taking place at the Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana from March 10 – April 1, 2016.

Tactics & Practice #4:
The Black Chamber

Surveillance, Paranoia, Invisibility and the Internet

Talks | Exhibition | Action in public space | Publication
9 March–1 April 2016
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
ŠKUC Gallery, Ljubljana

Curated by
Eva & Franco Mattes, Bani Brusadin

Part of the Tactics & Practice and the EU project Masters & Servers

How did the internet go from the utopian free-for-all, open source heaven, libertarian last frontier to the current state of permanent surveillance, exhibitionism and paranoia?

This duplicity is the underlying thread that links the artists, activists, and researchers who will participate in The Black Chamber [1], an exhibition, a symposium, and an urban intervention curated by The Influencers (ES), produced by Aksioma (SI) in partnership with Drugo More (HR) and hosted, respectively, by ŠKUC Gallery and Kino Šiška in Ljubljana.

Developed through ongoing research on these subjects by internationally renown artist duo Eva & Franco Mattes and researcher and curator Bani Brusadin, The Black Chamber aims at discussing the delicate and often awkward role of art and imagination in the age of mass surveillance, stressing the multiple connections between post-studio art and independent research, grassroots reverse engineering, and new forms of political activism in the age of networks.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Random Darknet Shopper
SOLO EXHIBITION

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
24 February – 25 March 2016

Follow the bot on: https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/r/

The online environment of the Internet has emerged as a wild and open space where communication is fluent, content is freely exchanged and identity is difficult to track behind the opacity of IP addresses and monikers. In recent years, however, there has been a titanic effort on the part of national governments, international organizations and companies to exert control over this anarchist utopia. Of course, this hasn’t been without conflict: activists, private citizens and other organizations and companies are actively working to protect the “freedom of the Internet” on an infrastructural level, well aware that when this infrastructure changes – for whatever good reason (protection of copyright and patents, the fight against terrorism, etc.) ­– what we will lose is far more than what we will gain. This conflict is no longer something that can be reductively limited to the field of technology. As an important part of current global politics and economics, it is something everybody should be aware of. 

The rise of the so-called “darknet” is part of this process. Technically speaking, a darknet (or dark net) is an overlay network that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations or authorization, often using non-standard communications protocols and ports. Two typical darknet types are friend-to-friend networks (usually used for file sharing with a peer-to-peer connection) and anonymity networks such as Tor via an anonymized series of connections.” (from Wikipedia) Like peer-to-peer networks or forums allowing anonymity, darknets are not illegal – or used for illegal purposes – by default, but as free, uncontrolled spaces, they are easily demonized as dangerous, uncomfortable places where bad things such as terrorism, espionage, pedopornography and black markets flourish. 

How can we get an impartial portrait of a place whose look changes a lot depending on the experience, the culture, the ideas and the tastes of who is visiting it? One possible way is to set up a robot that visits it for us, according to a set of simple, predetermined rules. The Random Darknet Shopper, by Swiss artists !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo, is such a kind of robot. With a wallet of $100 in Bitcoins per week, and the task to randomly buy whatever fits in its wallet and send it to the place where the work is exhibited, the Random Darknet Shopper goes shopping on AlphaBay, an online marketplace accessible via a Tor browser listing about 96,132 products, not all of them illegal. First installed and activated at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland for the show The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland, curated by !Mediengruppe Bitnik, the software bought and shipped to the museum various items including a pair of fake Diesel jeans, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, a stash can, a pair of Nike trainers, a decoy letter (used to see if your address is being monitored), 200 Chesterfield cigarettes, a set of fire-brigade issued master keys, a fake Louis Vuitton handbag and 10 Ecstasy pills. Like every performative work based on open rules, the Random Darknet Shopper accepts the risk of unpredictable developments that may or may not happen during the time of the exhibition. 

When they arrived, the Ecstasy pills – together with the Random Darknet Shopper and all the purchased items – were seized by the Swiss public prosecutor and submitted for forensic examination, which proved the drugs were real. Three months later, the artwork and all the items were released, and the Ecstasy was destroyed. As the artists explained on their blog: “In the order for the withdrawal of prosecution, the public prosecutor states that the possession of Ecstasy was indeed a reasonable means for the purpose of sparking public debate about questions related to the exhibition. The public prosecution also asserts that the overriding interest in the questions raised by the artwork Random Darknet Shopperjustifies the exhibition of the drugs as artifacts, even if the exhibition does pose a small risk of endangering third parties through the drugs exhibited.” 
!Mediengruppe Bitnik explained to The Guardian: “The arts should be able to mirror something that is happening in contemporary society in a contemporary way. We really want to provide new spaces to think about the goods traded on these markets. Why are they traded? How do we as a society deal with these spaces? At the moment there is just a lot of pressure, but not a lot of thinking about stuff, just immediate reaction.” Random Darknet Shopper was so good in doing this that its activity was reported by magazines and newspapers worldwide, including The Guardian, The Washington Times, Time Magazine, Ars Technica, Daily Mail, Vice, Boing Boing, Wired, Gawker, Der Spiegel, Dazed and Confused, Artnews.The project will be presented at Aksioma Project Space as part of the Masters & Servers programme and will be accompanied by a brochure featuring a new text by journalist and art historian Jon Lackman (http://jonlackman.com).