Price: 6€

Kawayoku, a hybrid research area, explores the intersections of cuteness culture, digital warfare and the aestheticisation of violence in an era of semiotic ambiguity and post-truth. From the fetishisation of Weapons Grade Waifus and anthropomorphic warships in games like Azur Lane to the “Israeli” Defense Forces’ TikTok strategies, the essay reveals how cuteness and entertainment serve as tools of domestication, converging state-nationalism with the impish, and the uniform with the algorithm.

Noura Tafeche is a visual artist and independent researcher with a focus on net.art and radical entertainment. Her research delves into phenomena related to online visual cultures, aestheticisation of violence on digital platforms, linguistic experimentation and visual representation
of speculative imaginaries.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 39 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2024
ISBN 978-961-7173-54-3 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-7173-56-7 (Digital)

Price: 25€

… AI, airports, algorithm, anthropocene, asset-based protocols, authorship, belonging, big data, bio art, blockchain, bot, calligraphy, capitalism, carbon footprint, CCTV, citizenship, classes, climate change, collaboration, computing infrastructure, cookies, criticism, crypto, cryptography, custumisation, DAOs, data mining, death of the author, debris, deep state, deep web, delegation society, digital capitalism, ecology, encryption, entreprecariat, fake/prank, finance, gender, gig economy, growth, hacking, hacktivism, hidden landscapes, human/nature, humor, hyperobjects, identity, images, incorporation, indie game, infrastructures, institutions, intelligence agencies, internet, labour, language, Luther Blissett, media culture, media event, memes, microplastics, military, names, nature, net art, new extractivism, NFTs, obfuscation, observing, offshoring, overidentification, ownership, peer-to-peer, performance, piracy, platform economy, politics, poor image, portrait, post-capitalism, post-growth, post-human, power, precarity, predictive algorithm, privacy, production, pseudoevent, radical geography, readymade, recycling, re-enactment, repurposing technologies, scale, secret operations, security, seduction, seeing, self-exploitation, software, speed, stateless machines, steganography, story/narrative, storytelling, surveillance, tax havens, temporality, theatre, utopia, visibility, waste, world building …

What can an anthology on art, technology, society and the environment tell us about the future? In a period of a prolonged generalised crisis, to what extent can critical texts and culture at large offer tools for thinking and acting? Overwhelmed with the feeling that we have no agency to affect what happens in the world nowadays, the only way to step forward might be to look back without losing our desire and urge to affect the present and shape the future.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 418 pp | B/W | soft cover | 2024
ISBN 978-961-7173-51-2

Blaž Miklavčič
Sprawl

Curated by
Maja Burja

Exhibition
28 August–27 September 2024
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Morphogenesis has begun. The system, temporarily halted at an indistinct point between growth and decay, is occupying its surroundings with a totipotent force of transformation. The latter opens up an unpredictable area, with individual vortices in the structure that subside and then, transformed, seep at another, distant point in this anomalous complex …

Sprawl is a spatial organisation of forms that establishes an asemic taxonomic practice as a radical departure from the linear and hierarchical understanding of evolution. In the setup, classification is recursively embedded into the formation process to activate the performative productivity of the diagram as an organism. The system, which is both a taxonomic model and an organism, operates horizontally and in dynamic interdependence of its parts. These occupy states in between the processes of growth, folding, differentiation and decay, which emerge from different directions simultaneously and materialise at the nodes as strange remnants.

If the system is observed as a process where technology mutates into a body – the physical material of an organism – the artefacts are the sediments of specific temporalities and dimensionalities of the processes of procedural generation, which, much like taxonomic practices have historically done, hallucinate entirely new (and non-existent) evolutionary branches and organisms. As a process where the body mutates into technology, however, it is permeated by an uncanny tension between the structure and its non-transparent operation. The system resists dispersal through self-interpretative feedback loops, producing new forms of organisation of its material, which in turn restructure the parameters of the emergent self-cognitive logic.

The affect of ambient horror, usually neutralised by a taxonomic or diegetic operation that links the unclear to the tangible, is thus never resolved, as the system continues to develop new states, relentlessly resisting entropy and further expanding its productive orbit.

Price: 18€

Handmade Networks presents a body of research-based artworks by Steffen Köhn and Nestor Siré. Their collaborative projects explore how the Cuban people have compensated for their lack of internet connectivity by building massive alternative infrastructures, such as grassroots community computer networks or offline “sneakernets”. They document how Cubans defy material scarcity by recycling or appropriating obsolete technologies, creating digital exchange platforms on messenger applications, or engaging in play-to-earn blockchain games. By examining the resilient and resistive potentials of these vernacular infrastructures, Köhn and Siré’s work also reimagines such networks as viable alternatives to the capitalist, consumerist digital infrastructures controlled by an oligopoly of Big Tech companies that have homogenised the global internet. 

EN | 23 x 15 cm | 176 pp | colour | soft cover | 2024
ISBN 978-961-7173-52-9

Related events:
Memoria
Fragile Connections
Digital Ethnography (for artists)
Localising the Internet: Cuban Alternative Data Distribution Networks and the Social Infrastructures that Sustain Them

Printed: 22€
ePUB: 10€

“The Internet is an alien life form,” declared David Bowie in 1999: today, the prophecy has come true, and our digital tools have become magical portals with mysterious properties, windows that overlook a dimension bordering between dream and reality.

Beyond the screen mirrors we comfortably carry in our pockets, we have discovered a region haunted by strange presences—sometimes threatening, sometimes surreal, occasionally fascinating, and other times nonsensical. These are the same presences that, over the past fifteen years, have shaped what we now recognize as “internet aesthetics,” that ensemble of subcultures, popular narratives, and visual and auditory languages through which the alien entity has finally revealed itself to humanity. The net then reveals itself for what it truly is: a threshold as physical as it is mental, where bizarre things happen, time is warped, and we find ourselves inhabiting an intermediate dimension, a territory that is “neither here nor there.”

Exit Reality marks the first attempt to map a world imbued with disorienting hallucinatory qualities, a realm that appears to us as a parallel planet that has emerged from the depths of code-space. Starting from the advent of vaporwave, which infused the network’s native imagery with spectral qualities in the early 2010s, Valentina Tanni takes us on a descent through the levels that traverse the silent horror of the backrooms, brushes against the obsession with sensory stimulation of ASMR, delves into the algorithmic surrealism of weirdcore, and lands in the exploration of pseudomagical practices such as reality shifting and memetic rituals. All the while, we remain comfortably seated before our screen, inside a battlestation ready to take off for a one-way astral journey, eternally trapped in the liminal space born from the now inseparable bond between human visions and Machine dreams.

Valentina Tanni is an art historian and curator. She is interested in the relationship between art and technology, with a special focus on internet cultures.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 264 pp | B/W and 1/32 colour | soft cover | 2024
ISBN 978-961-7173-46-8 (Aksioma)
ISBN 978-88-8056-254-2 (NERO)

Related events:
Internet Aesthetics: A Journey Beyond the Threshold
Let’s Play: Brexit Reality

Price: 5€

Can thought aka theory be as fast and up-to-date as reality itself? Perhaps not, but this conversation between Valentina Tanni and Silvia Dal Dosso about internet aesthetics (and, inevitably, ethics) comes as close to it as possible. What are “landscapes beyond the threshold”, why a suffix is more #core than a prefix and how dark has hivemind become in the meantime? Hell, let’s just call it Applied Post-Ballardianism – “we all went to the same pool”, after all.

Valentina Tanni is an art historian and curator. She is interested in the relationship between art and technology, with a special focus on internet cultures.

Silvia Dal Dosso is an artist, creative director and researcher in the field of digital technologies and web subcultures. She is one of the co-founders of the Clusterduck collective.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 19 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2024
ISBN 978-961-7173-48-2 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-7173-49-9 (Digital)

Related event: Internet Aesthetics: A Journey Beyond the Threshold

Total Refusal
BPM

Curated by
!Mediengruppe Bitnik

Exhibition
15 May–14 June 2024
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics&Practice #15: (Un)real Data – Real Effects

Digital machines work with striking rigour. Inexhaustible like metronomes, their existence is bound to precise rhythms and loops from which they cannot possibly escape. They never question their role in the process of value generation, they don’t unionise, they don’t strike. At the same time, the bug is an immanent feature of their existence. They regularly malfunction and resist to work as intended. What critical potential lies in the crippled struggle of algorithmic entities? Is the glitch a role model for resistance and labour strikes in the time of gamified digital capitalism?

Examining these questions, BPM critically negotiates the concepts of “work” and, as its counterpart, “leisure” on the example of non-player characters (NPCs) in video games. Video game spaces are examined with a humorous approach for their subversive potential, setting the stage for an updated critique of capitalism that focuses on human and non-human working conditions. The two multi-channel video installations, the ethnographical essay Hardly Working and the disco installation Club Stahlbad, both question the rhythmicality and loop-ness of life under capitalism. While the former focuses on the Sisyphus-like working life and the characters’ possible escape from it, the latter discusses the area of leisure as both a counterpart and an extension of the clocked work regime.

THE AUTHORS

The artist, researcher and filmmaker collective and pseudo-marxist media guerrilla Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Adrian Haim, Jona Kleinlein, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf) appropriates contemporary video games and writes about games and politics. They upcycle the resources of mainstream video games, creating political narrations in the form of videos, interventions, live performances, lectures and workshops. 

Since its foundation in 2018, the group has received over 50 awards and honorary mentions, including the audience award at the Animateka Film Festival in Ljubljana and the European Film Award for best short film in 2023. Total Refusal’s work has been screened at over 250 film and art festivals, such as Berlinale, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight or the Oberhausen Film Festival, and exhibited at various exhibition spaces, like the Architecture Biennial Venice 2021, HEK Basel and Ars Electronica Linz.

CURATOR

!Mediengruppe Bitnik (read: the not Mediengruppe Bitnik) are contemporary artists working on, and with, the internet. Their practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. In the past, they have been known to subvert surveillance cameras, bug an opera house to broadcast its performances to people at home, send a parcel containing a camera to Julian Assange and physically glitch a building. In 2014, they sent a bot called Random Darknet Shopper on a three-month shopping spree in the darknets where it randomly bought items like keys, cigarettes, trainers and Ecstasy, and had them sent directly to the gallery space. !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s works are shown internationally, and the group has received various awards including the Swiss Art Award, the PAX Art Award and the Golden Cube from Dokfest Kassel.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

PUBLICATION

(un)real data ☁️ – (🧊)real effects

Contributors: Régine Debatty, Thomas Spies, Xiaowei Wang, Milia Xin Bi, Günseli Yalçınkaya

Editors: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Janez Fakin Janša

► ORDER

LET’S PLAY

Valentina Tanni, Total Refusal
Let’s play: Brexit Reality
Thu, 16 May 2024, 7-8 PM
Slovenska kinoteka, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

Total Refusal
OPEN ENDED STORIES
Wed, 15 May 2024, 4-6 PM
ALUO, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Presentation of the publications Restricting Flight for Surreptitious Assembly by Domen Ograjenšek and The Art of Encoding by Maks Valenčič

17 April 2024 at 7 PM
Cukrarna (lecture room), Poljanski nasip 40, Ljubljana

Programme moderators
Uroš Prah and Martin Hergouth

Restricting Flight for Surreptitious Assembly by Domen Ograjenšek is a surprising philosophical novella that draws on the life and work of Jožef Peter Alkantara Mislej, a mostly forgotten figure of Slovenian philosophic tradition. The work turns to the scenes of a quiet disintegration of his strangely ambitious system, as well as to the materiality of thought, which might stem out of that very disintegration. It intertwines and untwines the strands of diagrammatism, mysticism and the image destined to be reduced to a mark, taking us into the midst of conspiratorial meetings in 18^th-century Vienna and its contemporary outskirts to direct us towards a vectorial ascent into the unknown.

In his lecture, Maks Valenčič will deal with artistic gesture, that is, analyse the artistic predisposition in the anthropological sense. What is an artistic gesture and what are its implications in the sociological and political sense? How does it determine the horizon of artistic endeavour and what are the consequences of this fact? The starting point of the lecture will be Joscha Bach’s claim that “artists are people who fall in love with the loss function”, which is to say that the specificity of artists lies in them being interested in all possible ways of encoding. As it will turn out during the lecture, artists are characterised precisely by that fact, that is, a specific relation to encoding patterns, which also includes a speculative potential and relates the artistic gesture to various speculative discourses, for the alternative ability of reco(r)ding patterns leads to the ability of a generative world building.

Price: 10€

Time drags. 

Restricting Flight for Surreptitious Assembly assesses the contested strands of diagrammatism, mysticism and the image destined to be reduced to a mark. Following the life and work of Jožef Peter Alkantara Mislej, a forlorn figure of Slovene philosophical tradition, the essay veers into the fictive scenes of conspiratorial gathering, silent decay and vectorial take-off. 

EN/SI | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 120 pp | B/W | soft cover | 2024
ISBN 978-961-7173-45-1

Related event: Publications presentation