TUE, 10 March 2016
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture
@The Black Chamber
TUE, 10 March 2016
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
The Black Chamber
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
TUE, 9 March 2016
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
Opera Calling, Delivery for Mr. Assange, Random Darknet Shopper
WED, 24 February 2016
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Yes Men Are Revolting
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
Language: English with Slovenian subtitles
In the framework of the cycle of screening events Akcija! and programme Masters & Servers
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
WED, 14 October 2015
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Molleindustria
WED, 13 May 2015
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Class Wargames – Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism
Book presentation
WED, 22 April 2015
The Old Power Station, Ljubljana
@Networked Disruption
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
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
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
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
THU, 12 March 2015
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
Networked Disruption
Group exhibition
Curator: Tatiana Bazzichelli
Exhibition opening: THU, 23 April 2015 at 7 pm
In the frame of the festival Mine, Yours, Ours.
Organisation: Drugo More, Rijeka
Production: Drugo more, Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Free entrance
Dolac I/II, Rijeka, Croatia
@Networked Disruption
WED, 11 March 2015
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
The presentations in this session share a philosophy, which works towards the embodiment of a shared identity, generating semantic disruptions, questioning social and cultural categorisation and closed systems. The case of the Anna Adamolo fictional identity (Italy, 2008–2009) demonstrates how to conceive of strategies of un-representability during demonstrations and strikes. Such action emerges from inside the Italian students movement, acting through the cracks and interstices of institutional Italian politics and viral business logics of social media and Web 2.0. Alongside, Janez Janša focuses on the acts of changing one’s personal name and the effects of such a gesture in mainstream press and institutional politics, opening up a series of questions, from what is real and what is mediated to the questions of identity and political in art.
@Networked Disruption
WED, 11 March 2015
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
The current meaning of openness, and the rhetoric of decentralisation, freedom and exchange in social media cannot be fully understood without tracing back the practice of networking in the underground artistic contexts over the past decades. This session proposes to analyse the roots of social networking based on both analogue and digital networked art, and connect them with the post-digital critical reflection. Social networking is seen as a practice of community creation, towards the imagination of common spaces of intervention – and identity identification – where symbols, myths and memes are shared. This panel describes the genesis and the creation of a number of grassroots artistic networks between the Eighties and the Nineties, across both Europe and the US, and question the practice of networking today. A common thread connects the network of mail art, Neoism, Luther Blissett and, more recently, in the post-digital era, the Anonymous entity. Such practices of disruption have been “social networks out of the box”, therefore generating viral practices, strategies of networking and “radical play”, both online and offline.
@Networked Disruption
WED, 11 March 2015
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
The current meaning of openness, and the rhetoric of decentralisation, freedom and exchange in social media cannot be fully understood without tracing back the practice of networking in the underground artistic contexts over the past decades. This session proposes to analyse the roots of social networking based on both analogue and digital networked art, and connect them with the post-digital critical reflection. Social networking is seen as a practice of community creation, towards the imagination of common spaces of intervention – and identity identification – where symbols, myths and memes are shared. This panel describes the genesis and the creation of a number of grassroots artistic networks between the Eighties and the Nineties, across both Europe and the US, and question the practice of networking today. A common thread connects the network of mail art, Neoism, Luther Blissett and, more recently, in the post-digital era, the Anonymous entity. Such practices of disruption have been “social networks out of the box”, therefore generating viral practices, strategies of networking and “radical play”, both online and offline.
@Networked Disruption
WED, 11 March 2015
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
The current meaning of openness, and the rhetoric of decentralisation, freedom and exchange in social media cannot be fully understood without tracing back the practice of networking in the underground artistic contexts over the past decades. This session proposes to analyse the roots of social networking based on both analogue and digital networked art, and connect them with the post-digital critical reflection. Social networking is seen as a practice of community creation, towards the imagination of common spaces of intervention – and identity identification – where symbols, myths and memes are shared. This panel describes the genesis and the creation of a number of grassroots artistic networks between the Eighties and the Nineties, across both Europe and the US, and question the practice of networking today. A common thread connects the network of mail art, Neoism, Luther Blissett and, more recently, in the post-digital era, the Anonymous entity. Such practices of disruption have been “social networks out of the box”, therefore generating viral practices, strategies of networking and “radical play”, both online and offline.
@Networked Disruption (intro)
WED, 11 March 2015
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
In the last decade, the critical framework of art and hacktivism has shifted from developing strategies of opposition to embarking on the art of disruption. By identifying the emerging contradictions within the current economic and political framework of information technology, this seminar presents a constellation of activist and hacker practices, as well as those of artists, who work on the interferences between networking participation, political criticism and disruptive business innovation.