WED, 26 March 2019
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana

In this talk, Danja Vasiliev gives an overview of “dark internet topologies” in the context of the commissioned piece Vending Private Network he did together with Julian Oliver. Challenging the popular reading of the internet as a digital incarnation of the commons, “public space”, he – using command line utilities known to network administrators – reveals a deep and original privatisation, one that necessitates new “dark abstractions” to achieve the public space we expect from it. In doing so, he shows how “darknets” are technical implementations of the same rights structures we value and actively defend within corporeal public life.

Screening event with the live narration by the author Liam Young
WED, 25 February 2019
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana

WED, 20 February 2019
Moderna galerija Ljubljana

“New Dark Age is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about the Internet, which is to say that it is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about contemporary life.” – Mark O’Connell, The New Yorker

TUE, 29 May 2018
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

In this talk Olia Lialina discusses the most important elements of the web from the mid ’90s and exposes the relationship between a new medium and its first users. The web of the mid ’90s was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. Today this relationship has dissipated as the Internet became a mass medium to accommodate dotcom ambitions, professional authoring tools and usability guidelines. Olia Lialina’s talk deals with the choices web masters of pre-social networks had to make in their work before web design became a profession, and about her choices today, being a designer, a passionate researcher of the vernacular web, and a keeper of the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive. In her highly illustrated talk the artist introduced to the audience pearls of the early web culture, going much deeper than usual ‘Under Construction’ signs and animated GIFs nostalgia.

WED 25 April 2018
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana

Peng’s art functions as a burning barricade in the media biosphere. What are the challenges to this position when working across national boundaries? Something apparently edgy in Germany might be illegal in Poland or the UK. In Europe, freedom of art is of greatest importance; in the US, freedom of speech. In the midst of questions of left-wing censorship and right-wing subversion, Peng share their tactics for disrupting both sides of the debate.

WED, 25 April 2018
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana

The nation state is a modern fiction: a result of the conceptual intercourse between a sovereign introduced by Thomas Hobbes in “Leviathan” and the imperialist and nationalist ideologies of the nineteenth century. Despite all the criticism of it, it is approached as a fundamental component of the political order, an everlasting tabula rasa for (re)structuring power. We suggest an alternative ideology for political self-organisation: steɪt əv nəʊlænd [State of Noland]: a ‘state of mind’ of not aligning with any geopolitical entity and a ‘state-after-state’ as a constellation of practices that functionally replace nation-state monopoly.

WED 25 April 2018
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana

We have built our concept of the nation on the ideas of institutions, of fixed points on maps, in time, and in law.  We’re also somewhat aware that this is fiction? Here, we’ll explore how we might re-understand what we call a “nation”.

TUE, 24 April 2018
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana

The border between Italy and its adjacent countries traverses snowfields and perennial ice sheets at high altitudes, mostly following the path of the Alpine watershed. Due to the global warming–induced shrinkage of the glaciers, a substantial shift of the watershed line has been detected in several places. Between 2014 and 2016, the project team of Studio Folder installed a network of custom-made, open-source sensors on a small section of the Austrian–Italian border on the Similaun glacier, to transmit in real time the position of the line. Marco Ferrari will talk about the genesis of the project and the fieldwork done in the Alps; he will also present the ongoing research on the history of Italian border surveys, along with a glimpse over other projects of Studio Folder that aim to develop a similar methodology of inquiry within the field of cartographic representation.

TUE, 24 April 2018
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana

The transnational reality of living in contemporary global societies poses several challenges for contemporary societies. The prioritization of western nation-state membership and economic imperatives has produced second-class citizenships, while the inhumanity of managing migration by reintroducing border regimes and prioritizing fake security has robbed millions of individuals of their humanity, and fed populist rage against migrants. World citizenship, based on more than the nation state, might assume an interplay of institutional policy with non-institutional practices of various subjectivities, constituting the public. Reclaiming humanity against “the globalization of indifference” requires a utopian invention of “worldliness of people” that stands for a political project of equality, rather than the moral project of the defence of traditions.

TUE, 24 April 2018
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana

New technologies are allowing new forms of identity and community to flourish and be recognised, from virtual citizenships to digital nations, and gender identities to non-human actors. At the same time, systems of power and governance attempt to corral and suppress identity within geographical borders and database schema. James Bridle explores the uses and abuses of identity in his own practice, and the work of others.

TUE, 17 April 2018
Poligon Creative Centre, Ljubljana

MoneyLab is a network of artists, activists, geeks and researchers established in 2013 by the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures. It asks a simple question: How are artists or content producers, which really includes everyone, going to make a living from their work in the 21st century? According to Silicon Valley, we aren’t – we are going to be forced to give all creative products away for free, in exchange for “attention” on social media (while Facebook and Google make billions through ads and selling your private data). In response to the 2008 global financial crisis, “crypto currencies” (such as Bitcoin) arose to bypass both banks and tech giants. Money is exchanged via mobile phones. We join crowdfunding campaigns and experiment (again) with subscription-based services. What is the politics behind all these new services? How do artists relate to these new network architectures? How should we read the current hype? Are these services really decentralized as they claim? How many of us can read the rightwing libertarian values inside the digital money protocols? Who are the new power players? Let us join the debate. Money has been digital for decades. It is now becoming inseparable from the internet. If neither Wall St. nor Silicon Valley will be the winner of this game, then who will?

WED, 21 March 2018
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

In this talk, Joroen van Loon gave a brief general introduction to his work and then focus on the Cellout.me project which revolves around the idea of selling the artist’s DNA data to the highest bidder through an online auction. Van Loon explained why this idea is relevant to today’s data-driven society, and what kind of fundamental questions it poses to privacy, data authorship, big data and authenticity.

TUE, 6 March 2018
ALUO – Department for Visual Communication, Ljubljana

Whether it’s electronic money, tokenized assets or identities on the blockchain – digital wealth is gradually becoming a prominent part of our reality. As a result, the importance of cryptographic technologies is increasing. However, do we really understand those technologies? How do cryptographic technologies provide, secure and display wealth? The current, rather technical, depiction of contemporary cryptography omits those who aren’t literate in code writing. Therefore, its significance and scope aren’t entirely visible and cryptography remains in its crypt. Tim Brouwer believes that cryptography can be reimagined through the medium of product design. During his presentation, he will demonstrate the manner in which cryptographic technologies (from ‘Cryptographic Collectibles’ to futuristic bio-cryptography) manifest itself in our material reality.

TUE, 6 March 2018
ALUO – Department for Visual Communication, Ljubljana

What’s the clearnet? What is the difference between the deep web and the dark web? And how do we find something that wasn’t supposed to be found? In this interactive talk all these questions will be answered. We meet on the clearnet where you learn how to easily find what you’re looking for and what you weren’t supposed to find. Then we will gradually find our way into more hidden parts of the web where we will discover the size and possibilities of the deep web and get to know around this huge online world. Our last stop? The dark web! Is it really such a bad place as the name implies? Or does it have a good reason for existence? You will be provided with tips and tricks to find out yourself. The tour will provide a practical “itinerary” but will also zoom in on the importance of having places to hide.

TUE, 6 March 2018
ALUO – Department for Visual Communication, Ljubljana

Over the past years, a growing number of artists have formulated a critique over the ubiquity of identity recognition technologies. Specifically, the use of these technologies by state security programs, tech-giants and multinational corporations has met with opposition and controversy. A popular artistic form of resistance to recognition technology is sought in cryptographic masks. Zach Blas, Leo Selvaggio, Sterling Crispin and Adam Harvey are among a group of internationally acclaimed artists who have developed subversive anti-facial recognition crypto-masks that disrupt identification technologies. In this lecture, Patricia de Vries explores the ontological underpinnings of these popular and widely exhibited crypto-mask projects.

WED, 14 February 2018
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Agbogbloshie is a district in the teeming metropolis of Accra in West-African Ghana. The world’s largest electronic-waste dump is located here. 22 hard-drives brought back to Austria from this dump were the starting point for the ‘Behind the Smart World’ Research Lab, a one year research program at servus.at in Linz, Austria. Alongside the material and exploitative dark sides of the dirty business with electronic waste, the ‘Behind the Smart World’ project brings together artistic positions dealing with the value of digital information and our constant production of data. During the artist talk at Aksioma Project Space KairUs will present the journey of the hard-drives, the creation of the ‘Forensic Fantasies’ trilogy and give insights to their current research project carried out at Woosong University in South Korea.

WED, 11 January 2018
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

This lecture reflects on new practices, processes, collaborations and partners developed by Furtherfield with the curation of the exhibition New World Order and the publication of the blook Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain. Classed by funders as a high-risk arts organisation because of the political topics and engagement with newly emerging techno-social conditions, Furtherfield constantly adopts new contexts and styles of dialogue across different practices and cultures: new media arts, fine art, permaculture, migration topics, critical engineering, start-up culture & hactivism, etc. Driven by issues of survival and artistic compulsion Furtherfield explores world contexts in relationship to local and international communities cannon breaking & category shifting.

WED, 29 November 2017
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

In this talk, Vladan Joler dives into the landscapes shaped by the algorithmic factories of the surveillance economy, and the associated exploitation of material and immaterial labour and natural resources. He explores maps of the Facebook Empire and investigates the deep anatomy of machine learning systems and the hidden human labour behind them.

TUE, 18 October 2017
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana

Natalie Bookchin’s presentation will explore the notion of condividuality through an aesthetic analysis of the current status of the networked image. In recent years, Bookchin’s work has focused on the creation of online and offline video installations that combine hundreds of YouTube video clips in which ordinary people present themselves before an audience. From teenage girls who dance alone in their rooms to minority groups who reflect upon racial segregation and poverty, these individuals are simultaneously isolated from each other and connected to each other. Yet it is only when Bookchin aligns these personal video diaries in a matrix that emphasizes the recurrence of bodily and linguistic expressions that their connectedness comes to the fore. In this respect, Bookchin’s presentation will allow participants to discuss condividuality as a form of connection and concatenation that proceeds from individual to individual without necessarily passing through a shared narrative or communitarian mythology.