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…

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.