aksioma, Author at Aksioma

Conversation on a Balcony

Constant Dullaart and Vuk Ćosić

TUE 3 March 2015
City Hotel, Ljubljana

Dust & Illusions – 30 Years of History of Burning Man Festival

Olivier Bonin

Oliver Bonin
Dust & Illusions – 30 Years of History of Burning Man Festival

Single screening / Slovenian premiere
THU, 26 February 2015 at 8 pm
The Old Power Station (Stara mestna elektrarna), Ljubljana

Language: English with Slovenian subtitles

In the framework of the cycle of screening events Akcija! and programme Masters & Servers

Documentary film Dust & Illusions by Olivier Bonin explores the thirty years of history of the BURNING MAN EFSTIVAL. Burning Man is a week-long annual event that began in San Francisco’s Baker Beach in the mid-1980s and then migrated to the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy. The event is described as an experiment in community, art, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance and it is the largest cultural and art event in North America. From the renegade spirits of the 1970s in San Francisco, to the multi-million dollar business the event has become, the film looks at this necessary and explosive evolution.

Dust and Illusions is the only worthwhile documentary about Burning Man. Most are navel-gazing, utopian affairs.

The screening at the Old Power Station introduced Slovenian audiences to the topics discussed by John Law, one of the founding members of the Burning Man festival, in his lecture, which took place as part of the Networked Disruption Seminar in March in Kino Šiška.

AUTHOR

Olivier Bonin was born in France and holds an engineering degree in microelectronics. He showed an early interest in photography and film. He studied photography in San Francisco, where he found his way into filmmaking. Starting with short fictions, he quickly found a perfect symbiosis between his interest and knowledge in social movements and documentary filmmaking. When he attended the Burning Man festival, he knew he had found a great subject combining film photography in such a beautiful environment with a complicated human story about community building.

John Law (USA) was one of the founders of the Cacophony Society in 1986. Emerging from the ashes of the mysterious and legendary Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society was an informal, unclassifiable group of anonymous people who spent their time exploring the boundaries of a conformist society, and occasionally crashing them. They sought imagination, adventure and mutual trust beyond the pale of those provided by mainstream society: that involved playful ways of disrupting propaganda, mocking respected symbols (like in their infamous Santarchy, an invasion of rebellious Santas), exploring forbidden urban space (from sewers to bridges), rebuilding freedom through mayhem, confusion, dangerous operation and sometimes just outright madness. Mostly harmless, often illegal, always fun.

CREDITS

Author: Oliver Bonin

Production of the event:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

Partner:
Stara mestna elektrarna Ljubljana

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).

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.

Real-time for Pirate Cinema

Geoff Cox

WED, 21 January 2015
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

As a portrait of the network in real-time, Pirate Cinema somewhat reflects the temporal complexity of the world now in the coming together of different co-existing ways of being in time. In the talk Geoff Cox wants to suggest that Pirate Cinema might allow us to better understand the dynamics of networked technologies and some of the defining conditions of globalization that underpin the cultural logic of our times.

The lecture is based on Geoff Cox essay, which was commissioned for the Aksioma’s new series of brochures PostScriptUM.

The Pirate Cinema

Nicolas Maigret

WED, 21 January 2015
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

We started a meme, which started the whole world crying

Collective Smetnjak

TUE, 9 September 2014
Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana

Was it ever possible to practice critical theory within a form of meme? The problem is not just that its concept was invented by evolutionary biologist and that the cats they are a-LOLin’, entailing all the misgivings of informatics, communication, like/dislike binaries, quantification, valorization… it’s also that critical theory has a crisis of its own on its hands, or as Tiqqun puts it: “We don’t need any more critical theory. We don’t need any more professors. Now critique works for domination. Even the critique of domination.” In short, has subversion been reduced to a joke or does the joke itself have to be taken seriously?

The Story of Technoviking

Matthias Fritsch

Screening and artist’s presentation

Side programme of Eternal September.

Free entrance

Komenskega 18, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Eternal September – The Rise of Amateur Culture

Valentina Tanni

Guided tour
TUE, 2 September 2014
Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana

Eternal September is a group exhibition that aims to explore the relationship between professional art making and the rising tide of amateur cultural movements throughout the Web, a historical event that has triggered a huge, fascinating shift in every field of culture, especially the visual one. The exhibition includes works by 15 authors and artistic groups (professionals and amateurs alike) and a series of special projects and accompanying events that will take place both offline and online.

Presentation in the framework of the exhibition Ego Massage

Constant Dullaart

WED, 14 May 2014
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Adventures in Virtuality

Pablo Garcia

WED, 2 April 2014
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Networking Post-Digital Transitions

Tatiana Bazzichelli

WED, 12 February 2014
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

What is the connection between hacker practices, artistic experimentation and queer performativity in the post-digital era? Since 2011 Tatiana Bazzichelli has been developing the reSource transmedial culture berlin, the year-round initiative of transmediale festival as a project of networking based on the inter-connection of genres and practices in the field of art, technology, politics and identity. The main goal was to facilitate the sharing of resources and knowledge between the transmediale festival and the local and translocal scene engaged with art and digital culture in Berlin. This presentation will reflect on curating as an activity that crosses practices and languages, in connection with a critical reflection on media culture. By highlighting how networking can be a disruptive concept able to work on the convergences of interdisciplinary fluxes, the focus will be post-digital practices presented before and during transmediale 2014 “afterglow”, linking the artistic with the mediatic, political, economic and queer practices.