TUE, 28 June 2016 Tobacco 001 Cultural Centre, Ljubljana
The Slovenian philosopher, sociologist and politician Lev Kreft ascribes All About You, the new work by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, to the tradition of the Readymade and Self-portrait. But very peculiar ones: the ordinary objects turned into an artwork are IDs and personalized bank cards, the self-portrait is the ID card itself, but also all data about the account and money transfers a given bank card holds. How far can a card owner make his own personal credit card? As well as a citizen has to respect some limitations when changing his name, a bank customer has to respect the bank’s guidelines in “personalizing” his card.
Art of the Prank
Joey Skaggs
Art of the Prank
Directed by: Andrea Marini
Single screening/ Slovenian premiere TUE, 10 May 2016 at 8 pm Center for urban culture Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
Art of the Prank is an emotional journey following the evolution of artist Joey Skaggs-a fierce proponent of independent thinking and the man who has turned the media hoax into an art form. With unprecedented access to the man and his archives, the 82-minute documentary interweaves a current unfolding hoax with a look behind-the-scenes at some classic performance pieces (all reported as fact by a wide range of prestigious journalists) plus commentary from co-conspirators and others. The resulting twists and turns provide unprecedented insight into Joey’s work as an artist, activist and social satirist.
Back in the Sixties, people belonging to the American countercultures realized that elaborate media pranks could be an effective form of social activism. What they have done in the last decades has been of great importance for the new generations of artists and activists that learned from these pioneers how to challenge the system by using the disruptive potential of jokes: a practice that, as the design collective Metahaven argues in the book Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?, is especially effective in times of austerity.
Artist, social activist, educator and prankster Joey Skaggs was one of these people. For decades, mass media have been the main stage for his performances. His work incorporates guerrilla tactics and traditional advertising and public relations techniques to promote his staged performances. Throughout his career, Skaggs has used several aliases such as Kim Yung Soo, Joe Bones, Joseph Bonuso, Giuseppe Scaggioli, Dr. Joseph Gregor, and the Rev. Anthony Joseph. He has been a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief. He ran a bordello for dogs, directed a celebrity sperm bank, and was the capo de capo of the Fat Squad, a paramilitary organization dedicated to wiping out obesity. His cockroach extract vitamin was invented to cure the world’s ailments, and he was the only man ever to windsurf from Hawaii to California.These and many other performances have been diligently reported as fact by domestic and international news media for over fifty years. Yet every one of these so-called news stories was the creation of conceptual artist and performer Joey Skaggs. His elaborately staged media hoaxes, which brilliantly satirize socio-political and cultural issues, have two overriding goals: to expose hypocrisy and effect social change.
In Slovenia, he is most notorious for theStop BioPEEP hoax and the one related to Matjaz Rogelj, a young law student who back in 2001 announced that he, representing all of Europe, had won the first prize in a world competition in computer programming in Rio de Janeiro.
THE AUTHOR
Joey Skaggs is a painter, sculptor and social activist. Beginning in the Sixties, with his iconoclastic and controversial performance art protests, Skaggs realized he could use art to challenge the status quo. Appalled at the cultural hypocrisy he saw around him, especially how it was blindly supported and propagated by the media, he began to satirize social issues with public performances that were elaborately contrived media hoaxes. For each one, he portrayed a fabricated character frequently adopting a pseudonym. He incorporated guerrilla tactics, traditional advertising, public relations techniques and social media to promote the staged performances. The mass media, not recognizing the many clues to his identity, became an unwitting collaborator, reporting his satires as news. Few media outlets over the last five decades have not fallen for one or another of his hoaxes. He has been covered in newspapers, magazines, and on radio and television around the world, in some cases many times as different people.He is a graduate of New York’s High School of Art & Design and received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts where he also taught Media Communications for many years. He currently lectures on divergent approaches to addressing social issues through art. His paintings and sculptures have been exhibited internationally. He also designs satirical products and publishes the “Art of the Prank” blog.
Joey Skaggs Making a Difference: Art & Media Activism Lecture MON, 9 May 2016 at 10:30 am Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana
For: Journalists, Artists, Activists, Educators, Students, and all Media Consumers
Abandon any preconceived ideas about news media. Your mouth will drop open and your eyes will pop with disbelief as you see Skaggs in various disguises and personas repeatedly fooling the people whose job it is not to be fooled. Using extensive video documentation, Skaggs reveals the stories behind his most provocative and successful work. In hilarious detail, he chronicles fifty years of manipulating the media to address such issues as cultural intolerance and racism; scientific cure-alls that exploit people’s weaknesses and vanities; inequities in the American judicial system; and the misuse of power and authority by government, big business, people with an agenda and the media itself. As a committed and passionate advocate of media literacy, independent thinking, and creative activism, he always reveals the truth behind his hoaxes and explains his intent. Skaggs teaches how to analyze and extract the underlying messages in the news; question authority in all its forms; not give up critical analysis for wishful thinking; look to more than one source for information; and not trust everything you read, see and hear. The experience will profoundly change your own relationship to mass media.
Joey Skaggs Social Activism Through Media Manipulation Workshop TUE 10 May 2016, 11 am–6 pm Center for urban culture Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
For: Artists, Activists, Educators, Students
The workshop is based on the Culture Jamming and Media Activism course that Joey Skaggs developed and taught for the Media Communications Department of New York’s School of Visual Arts. With the advent of online social networks and Twitter, new opportunities abound for social activism. Skaggs explores the field of new technologies to communicate ideas and grab attention, and also shows how performance art, video, theatre, graphic design, advertising and public relations can be used to manipulate media in order to advance a cause. Participants in the workshop will identify the social issues that concern them, analyze their target audience, and conceive and/or initiate a plan for social action by manipulating the media.
CREDITS
Author: Joey Skaggs
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2016
in collaboration with Kino Šiška and the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Department of Media and Communication Studies
Partners: Drugo more (HR), FH Joanneum (AT)
The event is realized in the framework of Masters & Servers, a joint project by Aksioma (SI), Drugo more (HR), AND (UK), Link Art Center (IT) and d-i-n-a / The Influencers (ES).
Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
Döppelgängers, Collaborations and other Insinuations
Eve Sussman and Simon Lee
THU, 5 May 2016 Academy of Fine Arts and Design – University of Ljubljana Part of the ALUO uho events.
Artists Eve Sussman and Simon Lee gave as an insight into their work, among other as producers for Jack and Leigh Ruby’s Car Wash Incident installation, Simon’s work MOTHER IS PASSING. COME AT ONCE., Eve’s film whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir and their new joint collaboration No food No money No jewels.
Citizen K
Ztohoven
The Media Reality / Citizen K / The Moral Reform
Ztohoven
WED, 30 March 2016 Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
@The Black Chamber
Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion
TUE, 10 March 2016 Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture
@The Black Chamber
Zach Blas
TUE, 10 March 2016 Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
The Black Chamber
Jacob Appelbaum & Ai Weiwei, Zach Blas, James Bridle, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Simon Denny, Jill Magid, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Metahaven, Laura Poitras, Evan Roth
Group exhibition
With: Jacob Appelbaum & Ai Weiwei, Zach Blas, James Bridle, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Simon Denny, Jill Magid, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Metahaven, Laura Poitras, Evan Roth.
Curated by: Eva & Franco Mattes, Bani Brusadin
@The Black Chamber
Evan Roth
TUE, 9 March 2016 Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
Opera Calling, Delivery for Mr. Assange, Random Darknet Shopper
!Mediengruppe Bitnik
WED, 24 February 2016 Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Yes Men Are Revolting
The Yes Men
The Yes Men Yes Men Are Revolting
Single screening/ Slovenian premiere WED, 28 October 2015 at 7.30 pm Center for urban culture Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
THE YES MEN, the greatest comedians among activists and the biggest activists among comedians!
For the last 20 years, notorious activists the Yes Men (Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum) have staged outrageous and hilarious hoaxes to draw international attention to corporate crimes against humanity and the environment. Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits and a lack of shame, these iconoclastic revolutionaries lie their way into business events and government functions to expose the dangers of letting greed run our world. In their third cinematic outing (after The Yes Men and The Yes Men Fix the World), they are now well into their 40s, and their mid-life crises are threatening to drive them out of activism forever – even as they prepare to take on the biggest challenge they’ve ever faced: climate change. More than the first two films, The Yes Men Are Revolting is as much a character study as it is an entertaining depiction of their latest interventions. Revealing the real people behind the ruses, at its heart lies a hopeful message about fighting for change.
THE AUTHORS
The Yes Men are a culture jamming activist duo that impersonate big-time corporate criminals to draw attention to their crimes against humanity and the environment. Their outrageous satirical interventions at business events, on the internet, television, and in the streets form the basis of two award-winning feature documentaries, The Yes Men and The Yes Men Fix the World, festival favorites in Toronto, Berlin, SXSW and others. Their work has been shown in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, ARS Electronica, and many other art exhibitions. They are the recipients of numerous awards, including Creative Time’s Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, Grierson Documentary Award, Berlinale Panorama Audience Award, the United Nations Association Film Festival Grand Jury Award, Best Documentary Award at HBO Comedy Arts Festival, and the Audience Award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. They are the authors of several books, articles, and they lecture internationally on art and social change. They are the founders of a nonprofit, the Yes Lab, and the Action Switchboard, an online platform for generating real-life direct actions in the service of social movements.
Laura Nix (director and producer) is an independent filmmaker committed to exploring provocative characters and subject matter. She directed the documentary The Light In Her Eyes, about a Syrian Quran school for women, which premiered at IDFA in 2011, was broadcast on the series POV on PBS, and was included in Sundance’s Film Forward program. Other feature directing credits include the critically acclaimed fiction feature The Politics of Fur, which played in over 70 festivals internationally and won the Grand Jury Prize at Outfest, and the documentary Whether You Like It or Not: The Story of Hedwig, for New Line Cinema. Nix co-wrote the Emmy-nominated PBS doc California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown. Her nonfiction television work has appeared on HBO, IFC, Planet Green, and the History Channel. Based in Los Angeles, she’s currently developing a documentary feature about ballroom dancers in San Gabriel Valley, a predominantly Chinese suburb of Los Angeles, California.
CREDITS
Authors: The Yes Men
Production of the event: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, in collaboration with Kino Šiška
The eventis realized in the framework of Masters & Servers, a joint project by Aksioma (SI), Drugo more (HR), AND (UK), Link Art Center (IT) and d-i-n-a / The Influencers (ES).
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Supported by: Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
Under the Shadow of the Drone
James Bridle
WED, 14 October 2015 Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Molleindustria
Paolo Pedercini
WED, 13 May 2015 Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Class Wargames – Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism
Richard Barbrook
Book presentation WED, 22 April 2015 The Old Power Station, Ljubljana
@Networked Disruption
Annie Machon
THU, 12 March 2015 Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
In the last session, the concept of “disruption” is taken from business contexts to the realm of surveillance systems and geopolitical forms of control. How can we apply the strategy of disruption today, in the context of increasingly invasive corporations and surveillance by government agencies, and with the threat of your every move being recorded? Inspired by whistleblowing – revealing social injustices or misconducts by corporations and governments to a wider public – disruption becomes a strategy to start “fighting” the systems we want to oppose from within, reflecting on conscious modalities of “oppositions” that come from the inside of the machine. Annie Machon, a former UK MI5 intelligence officer who left the Service to help blow the whistle on the crimes and incompetence of the British spy agencies, discusses how to empower people to act consciously in society, culture and the media environment, and become protagonists of their lives.
@Networked Disruption
Vuk Ćosić
THU, 12 March 2015 Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
In the last session, the concept of “disruption” is taken from business contexts to the realm of surveillance systems and geopolitical forms of control. How can we apply the strategy of disruption today, in the context of increasingly invasive corporations and surveillance by government agencies, and with the threat of your every move being recorded? Inspired by whistleblowing – revealing social injustices or misconducts by corporations and governments to a wider public – disruption becomes a strategy to start “fighting” the systems we want to oppose from within, reflecting on conscious modalities of “oppositions” that come from the inside of the machine. Annie Machon, a former UK MI5 intelligence officer who left the Service to help blow the whistle on the crimes and incompetence of the British spy agencies, discusses how to empower people to act consciously in society, culture and the media environment, and become protagonists of their lives.
@Networked Disruption
Telekommunisten (Baruch Gottlieb, Dmytri Kleiner)
THU, 12 March 2015 Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
The proposal of an alternative to capitalism by working within capitalistic logic is suggested by the notion of Venture Communism developed by the Telekommunisten collective, who present the latest miscommunication technologies, including the new release OCTO P7C-ES, a metaphor of a centralised social network made of intertwined pneumatic tube offline-technology, ready to be disrupted by the visitors.
@Networked Disruption
John Law
THU, 12 March 2015 Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
Urban exploration and pranks group The Suicide Club, founded in January 1977, was the protean cradle of ideas that, while obscure at the time, have gone on to influence world-wide trends, sub-cultures and social movements. Starting in 1986, The San Francisco Cacophony Society, a more open experimental organisation that rose from the ashes of the secretive Suicide Club, was the group that created the Burning Man Festival. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, arguably the most influential American novel of the 1990s as well as a statement defining an entire generation’s cultural displacement, was directly inspired by Cacophony and the earlier Suicide Club. The first decade of the 21st century saw the rise of a mass movement of street games and urban play epitomised by the new social media phenomenon of “flash mobs” and the world-wide “urban exploration” culture. Cacophony was one of the primary sources in the early encouragement and implementation of these types of play. Street art and media pranking were a part of the scene as well, embodied in the advertising pranking of the Cacophony affiliated Billboard Liberation Front (starting in 1977) and the punk rock circus and bike rodeo underground that blossomed in the 1990s, instilling a DIY spirit into the alternative performance scene world-wide.
@Networked Disruption
Bani Brusadin
THU, 12 March 2015 Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
Networked Disruption
Anna Adamolo, Anonymous, Billboard Liberation Front, Burning Man Festival, Cacophony Society, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Julian Oliver, Laura Poitras, Les Liens Invisibles, Luther Blissett, Mail Art, Neoism, Peng! Collective, Suicide Club, Telekommunisten, Trevor Paglen
