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.
Directed by Timothy Marrinan and Richard Dewey
Single screening / Slovenian premiere
23 January 2018 at 8 pm
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
Ticket price: 5eur / 3eur (presale)
Language: English with Slovenian subtitles
With the screening of BURDEN, an experimental documentary about Chris Burden by Timothy Marrinan and Richard Dewey, Aksioma continues and upgrades a support activity we have been investing on along the last five years: the screening of art films with a strong educational and documentary character, presented in Slovenia for the first time, and focused on the foundational processes, art groups, artists and projects that have marked and/or shifted the currents in world art. BURDEN fits perfectly within this tradition.
Chris Burden (1946–2015) is one of the greatest icons of post-war performance art – named for instance by Marina Abramović as a key reference for her own art practice. Burden guaranteed his place in art history in early 1970s with a series of controversial and often dangerous performances. After having himself shot, locked up in a locker for five days, electrocuted, and crucified on the back of a VW bug, he reinvented himself as the creator of truly mesmerizing installations and sculptures. Burden understood his performances as sculptures, whose key “sculpting” material was his own body, which he subjected to various tests and experiments. The body and corporeality in contemporary performance art have never been the same ever since. Burden became an inspiration for many artists of subsequent generations, spanning from Laurie Anderson to David Bowie.
In BURDEN, Marrinan and Dewey look at the artist’s works and private life with an innovative mix of still-potent videos of his 70s performances, personal videos and audio recordings, interviews with friends, fellows students and colleagues, critics’ comments and latter day footage at his studio, all peppered with his thoughts and musings through the years.The film also reveals the backstage of the Los Angeles art scene, which in the early 1970s was somehow distanced and neglected compared to New York or some of Europe’s capitals. Precisely because of this marginality, the West Coast of the United States became the centre of experimental art, which later on shifted the boundaries of self-articulation and self-organisation of art throughout the world.
BURDEN is the first feature documentary exploring the life and work of pioneering artist Chris Burden. In the early 1970s, Burden’s provocative, often dangerous, performance pieces shook the conventional art world. He had himself shot, crawled through a field of broken glass, and attempted to breathe water. He was dubbed “The Evel Knievel of the art world” by the press – a label he would struggle to overcome for most of his career. Burden quit performance in the late 70s and artistically reinvented himself. He went on to create a multitude of installations and sculptures. His work has influenced a generation of artists and been exhibited around the world. Using unprecedented access to Burden’s archive as well as candid footage filmed with the artist in the final years of his life, this film documents Burden’s shifting motivations and his transition away from the spotlight of performance towards a quieter and more civic minded art-making practice.
Directed by: Tim Marrinan, Richard Dewey
Editors: Aaron Wickenden, Michael Aaglund
Producers / Sales Agent: Submarine Entertainment, Dogwoof Films
Featuring: Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Larry Bell, Larry Gagosian, Robert Irwin, Alexis Smith, Frank Gehry, John McEnroe, Vito Acconci, Peter Schjeldahl, Christopher Knight, Jonathan Gold, Paul Schimmel, Billy Al Bengston, Barbara Smith, Brian Sewell, David Neuman, Peter Plagens and Stanley Grinstein.
Full Cast & Crew.
Tim Marrinan is a documentary filmmaker based in the UK. His past work has often focussed on aspects of art and culture and he’s drawn to stories with compelling characters and strong visual appeal. ‘Burden’ is his first feature documentary. He studied film and social theory at Harvard University.
Richard Dewey is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His student film, The Leisure Class, was recently turned into a feature film produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as part of Project Greenlight, which was won by Rich’s classmate Jason Mann. Rich has worked as a freelance writer for RollingStone.com, Ralph Lauren Magazine, Whitewall Modern Painters and also spent six months as the Marjorie Dean correspondent writing for The Economist at their London headquarters. Rich has an MFA in Film from Columbia University.
Production of the event:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, and the Center for Urban Culture Kino Šiška, 2017
Supported by:
the Municipality of Ljubljana
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.
TUE, 18 October 2017
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
The conference is inspired by Marco Deseriis’ book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. Deseriis will introduce the conference by offering a genealogy of the “improper name,” which he defines as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors. Examples of collective pseudonyms include Ned Ludd, the fictional leader of the English Luddites; Alan Smithee, a shared signature used by Hollywood film directors to disown movies that have been re-cut against their will; Luther Blissett, a fictional media prankster, collective author, and anti-copyright activist; and the hacktivist group Anonymous. Deseriis’s central argument is that an improper name is a form of symbolic power that destabilizes the boundaries between the We and the I as the original creators of the alias lose control of its intended function to unforeseen uses. To express this tension between practices that are neither collective nor individual, Deseriis uses the notion of “condividuality”, a form of association that does not presuppose a community or a common intentionality, but only a concatenation of parts.
TUE, 17 October 2017
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
The conference is inspired by Marco Deseriis’ book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. Deseriis will introduce the conference by offering a genealogy of the “improper name,” which he defines as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors. Examples of collective pseudonyms include Ned Ludd, the fictional leader of the English Luddites; Alan Smithee, a shared signature used by Hollywood film directors to disown movies that have been re-cut against their will; Luther Blissett, a fictional media prankster, collective author, and anti-copyright activist; and the hacktivist group Anonymous. Deseriis’s central argument is that an improper name is a form of symbolic power that destabilizes the boundaries between the We and the I as the original creators of the alias lose control of its intended function to unforeseen uses. To express this tension between practices that are neither collective nor individual, Deseriis uses the notion of “condividuality”, a form of association that does not presuppose a community or a common intentionality, but only a concatenation of parts.
WED, 4 October 2017
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
In this talk Nora Al-Badri & Jan Nikolai Nelles discuss the role and relevance of the museums as a space of constant negotiation, their inherent fiction and colonial patina and the aspects of the digital in decolonization. They also talk about their work and its implications of the so called Nefertiti Hack and lay out why the discussion about the politics of representation, originality and truth of data is necessary and why there is such an institutional Angst to open up the collections as cultural commons and on a public domain…
Curator introduction to the exhibition
WED, 30 August 2017
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
WED, 30 August 2017
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
“What does the war in Syria have to do with the privacy debate in Europe? What does NSA mass surveillance have to do with a Chinese Internet café? On the one hand, we have our own specific views. On the other hand, the forms of expression are subject to a collective political, cultural, governmental and linguistic regime. In order to overcome the forms of attribution, exclusion and paternalism in our own views and expressions, we specifically address the social and cultural mechanisms of exclusion in our art projects. Our projects, such as picidae (since 2007), New Nations (since 2009) and qaul.net (since 2012), have gained worldwide interest by revolutionizing communication conditions. As open-source projects these works uncover forms of censorship of the Internet, undermine the concentration of political power and even resolve the dependency on infrastructure. The tools we provide are used by communities and activists in the USA, Europe, Australia and in countries such as Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, India, China and Thailand. Even North Korean activists participate.
This talk is a tour d’horizont to the isolated and hidden depths. Particularly in the digital age we usually forget about the exclusion and the gaps because they don’t appear in our worldview. By looking into our communication conditions, we can realize new strategies and ways to reach out to eachother.”
– Christoph Wachter in Mathias Jud
TUE, 27 June 2017
City Museum Ljubljana, Slovenia
In this talk Inke Arns speaks about two exhibitions she recently curated: The World Without Us (HMKV Dortmund, 2016/17) and alien matter (transmediale festival, HKW Berlin, 2017). Alien matter refers to man-made, and at the same time, radically different, potentially intelligent matter. It is the outcome of a naturalization of technological artifacts. Environments shaped by technology result in new relationships between man and machine. Technological objects, previously defined merely as objects of utility, have become autonomous agents. Their capacity to learn and network throws into question the previously clear and dominant division between active subject and passive object. Within the alien matter exhibition 30 artists presented works about shifts within such power structures, raising questions about the state of our current environment and whether it has already passed a tipping point and is in the process of becoming “alien matter”. Content-wise, the works clustered around four thematic focal points: artificial intelligence, plastics, infrastructure, and the Internet of Things – subcategories that are deemed to merge into the nascent great machine and thereby, in the words of Günther Anders, are “future obsolete”.
TUE, 20 June 2017
City Art Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia
This talk explored new ways of appearing and disappearing in a machine readable world including strategies for blocking face detection and thermal imaging, and tools for advanced visual-metadata analysis.
WED, 17 May 2017
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
WED, 15 March 2017
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
We are all familiar with pain, from that of the minor twinge to devastating injury or illness, to emotional pain. Yet we struggle to articulate the particularity of our hurt. Making an object of one’s pain has been a frequent project for historical and contemporary art, from paintings depicting great duress, to performances that harness self-injury as a formal technique. This lecture introduces key works in art and performance and asks how artists deal with the constitutive manner in which pain evades representation and communication.
TUE, 17 January 2017
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana
Part of the ALUO uho events.
A documentary about the generation who fought for sexual freedom
Written and directed by Carmine Amoroso
Single screening / Slovenian premiere
13 January 2017 at 8 pm
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
Language: English with Slovenian subtitles
In the framework of Akcija!, a cycle of screening events
“Pornography is vital to freedom and a free and civilised society should be judged by its willingness to accept it.”
Salman Rushdie
Porn to Be Free is a film documentary about the generation who fought against puritanism and censorship to defend freedom of speech and sexual freedom. From Italy, Denmark and France through to California, the film follows a group of rebels who started a battle against censorship through pornography. Together they shook the church, the politics and the institutions. Through uncensored exclusive footage and archive material, the film explores the story and the fights of a group of pioneers: from film director and porn pioneer, Lasse Braun, to Riccardo Schicchi, master of transgression such as the election of porn star Cicciolina in the Italian Parliament. The documentary features numerous other protagonists such as feminist porn director Giuliana Gamba, author Lidia Ravera and a short animation by Charlie Hebdo’s veteran Siné. Through their utopia and shocking dreams, they made the world a freer place and paved the way for forward-thinking debates today, such as neo-feminism, or the LGBT rights movement. Porn to Be Free is an opportunity to reflect on a period of great changes and transformations in which pornography, with its deconsecrating power, became a means of struggle and liberation and grew into a true language: from literature to cinema, from comics to visual arts. Writers, intellectuals, philosophers, feminists, pornographers and porn stars reveal to us how pornography was a means of change and a weapon of social and political struggle, putting Italy at the forefront of one of the most important and pervasive phenomena of contemporary culture, so much so to make turn pale even Larry Flynt and Linda Lovelace from overseas.
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
The film is shot in different formats — from Iphone to Canon C300 — and features dozens of interviews and unseen archive materials ranging across different eras aEnd different technologies — 35mm, private and amateur super 8, hundreds of photographs and sound recordings — the fruit of over two and a half years of research.
Looking at the normalized porn industry today, it appears that we have shifted back in time when opinion and rights movements rised up slightly but can’t break through moralism. We are almost inclined to say that we are lacking of a new Riccardo Schicchi or a new Ilona Staller, with the ingenuity and genuineness, the abstraction and the folly to make inroads into an increasingly monolithic society.
The film has been made and financed in an entirely independent way. No institution, public or private body has agreed to finance the project. The word “porn” in the title was enough to stop any support for production or distribution.
Carmine Amoroso: director and screenwriter of Porn to Be Free. In 1996, Amoroso wrote and directed Come Mi Vuoi (Embrasse-moi Pasqualino), the first Italian film to have a focus on a transgender character, featuring Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel. The film has been sold worldwide and has since become an essential milestone in queer cinema. In 2007 he directed his second feature Cover Boy. The film was selected in over 90 festivals worldwide and won 40 awards. It was also shortlisted to represent Italy at the Academy Awards alongside Gomorra and Il Divo.
Riccardo Schicchi: Photographer, producer and manager, he was the number one protagonist of Italian pornography in the 70’s and 80’s. He turned porn into a major consumption good. Because of his numerous court cases and prison sentences, he was nominated the Che Guevara of porn. He launched several key media icons such as Cicciolina, Moana Pozzi and Rocco Siffredi.
Ilona Staller: Known under the name of Cicciolina, she is the most famous and the most controversial porn star of all times. After a childhood in Hungary, she moved to Italy in the early 70’s and was key in redefining the limits of what can and can’t be shown publicly. Her fight for sexual freedom gave her an iconic status in the eyes of a whole generation. Ilona Staller was also the first porn star to be elected into a national parliament in 1987. In 1991 she married American artist Jeff Koons with whom she has a son, Ludwig. After putting an end to her porn career but without any regrets, she has kept fighting for sexual freedom in prison, for decriminalisation of drugs and against any form of censorship.
Lasse Braun: Braun is the king of Sex Revolution in the 60’s and 70’s. He fought his whole life for the diffusion of pornography in Europe and the United States. At the end of the 70’s he created in Stockholm the company AB Film and produced and directed dozens of films that became porn classics. In 1971 he met Reuben Sturman, the American inventor of the peep show, who became his business partner. in 1974 he was the first director to bring a porn film to the Cannes Film Festival. In 1977, after years of legal actions and successes, he retired from political activism to focus purely on directing and writing.
Giuliana Gamba: In the early 70’s Gamba became the first European female porn director under the name of Therese Dunn. That gave her an immediate cult status in the world of feminist pornography. She then chose to work in the field of erotic films before completely changing career as a documentary filmmaker and creating TV series for the Italian public broadcaster.
Helena Velena: writer, philosopher and record producer is one of the most interesting voices of Italian counter-culture. She defines herself as a “semiotic-psychedelic guerrilla”. She has been active since the Bologna Movimento del ‘77 movement, working as an announcer and DJ for Radio Alice. She was one of the main protagonists of the Italian punk movement, forming first the RAF Punk group and then establishing the Attack Punk Records label, which published fundamental bands of the Italian punk and hardcore scene, among others the first albums by CCCP Fedeli alla linea. In the late 1980’s her research radicalized around themes such as cyberpunk, transgender and the relationship between sexuality and new the communication technologies.
Written and Directed by Carmine Amoroso
Cinematography: Paolo Ferrari (aic-imago)
Produced by Patrizia Zoratti, Carmine Amoroso, Paolo Ferrari, Patrizio La Bella
Associate producer: Francesco Costabile
Editing: Luca Manes, Fabio Nunziata
Music: Fabrizio Fornaci
Sound: Alessio Costantino, Angelo Galeano, Paolo Testa
Sound editor: Stefano Di Fiore
With Riccardo Schicchi, Lasse Braun, Ilona Staller, Judith Malina, Giuliana Gamba, Lidia Ravera, Marco Pannella, Helena Velena, Marco Giusti, Achille Bonito Oliva
Visual Effects: Vincenzo di Natale
Colorist: Emanuele Pasquet
Production Management: Martina Spadano
Production: ZutFilm
In collaboration with Dana Stable and Patroclo Film
International distribution: WideHouse
Production of the event:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, and the Center for Urban Culture Kino Šiška, 2017