Game-Changers: The Game is a storytelling-driven board game and a game co-design springboard that engages players and “peerticipants” in generative discussions about post-capitalist strategies and the mutually conflicting discourses that underlie the “new economy” buzzwords of the day, such as sharing, smart, circular, collaborative, regenerative and many others.
In the game, two teams that embody seemingly opposite discursive poles – for example Commonism vs. Capitalism, Green Growth vs. Degrowth, or the Hacker Class vs. Vectoralists – compete in creating compelling storylines about transformation in order to lay claim to playing fields consisting of real-world initiatives and related ideas.
To create these stories, the teams must use the Challenge and Intervention cards available to them at a given time or respond to the cards already linked to particular playing fields. This leads to various chains of events, including co-optation and Trojan horse scenarios. Another, third set of cards, Wildcards, is composed of “external” events which can offer unique windows of opportunity for either team or skew the balance in a number of ways.
Audiences (peerticipants) evaluate the players’ storylines in real time and, in doing so, affect their chance of success. They may also submit new Challenges, Interventions and Wildcards, which get fed into the game while it is being played. Thus, the game is or becomes a modular and generative knowledge commoning tool, both on-site and accross its many playthroughs (using a dedicated platform to be developed).
THE AUTHOR
Rok Kranjc is an eco-social transformations researcher at the Institute for Ecology and a translator and editor at the Journal for the Critique of Science. Internationally, he is affiliated with the P2P Foundation, the Participatory Futures Global Swarm and the Shared Futures platform, and is the founder of Futurescraft, a research and design studio for experiential futures, generative games and other forms of engagement with alternative (regenerative, post-growth, commons-based) economies. He has translated several books in the fields of political ecology and ecological economics to his native Slovenian. His original publications include the chapter Commons Economies in Action: Mutualizing Urban Provisioning Systems, co-authored with Michel Bauwens and Jose Ramos for Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities (2022) and the article Challenges and Approaches to Scaling the Global Commons, published in Frontiers (2021). He is currently co-writing a university textbook about and co-developing a VR experience of commons-based economies with Dr Peter Bloom.
CREDITS
Author: Rok Kranjc Mentor: Maja Burja
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2022
Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
Hi-Res Prints for Burial T-shirts
Ema Maznik Antić & Maks Bricelj
Ema Maznik Antić & Maks Bricelj Hi-Res Prints for Burial T-shirts
The wasps have gathered in a corner of the wooden shack for the second time, restraining flight for a surreptitious assembly. Forming patterns that change every now and then, perhaps in intervals. An octagon disassembles and rearranges into a triangle, turning into a circle, its line wiggling as a twisted sine wave before eventually settling into a hexagon.
It was not staying put for the sake of staying put but, rather, due to an intricate petrification of the mind. Where to go when the outside already beats on your humble enclosure with a ferocity matching that of a grief-stricken mama bear? Those cubs were hard to mistake for your usual game, yet you made the shot nonetheless. All that occurs seemingly does so as punishment for one thing or another – be it a sin or a frivolous mistake. Despite this, you bear little sign of guilt or remorse. Regret seems exuberant. You would welcome it, yet it seems unlikely to come. Too costly for your mental economy. The wood reeks.
Perhaps you’ve spilt some varnish that managed to seep through the hardwood floor. It holds a grip on you. Luring you closer. Twisting your neck as you draw your ear to the gaps between the wooden planks, attempting to distinguish the vague sizzling sounds: the pops and crackles that emanate from the foundation underneath. It could very well be tinnitus. You never were a skilful shot. The uncertainty, however, does not unnerve you.
The exhibition leaves little room for imagination. In the space that it awards it, it holds it hostage instead. Immersion is used as a borrowed concept, stripped of its wonder-like spectacle until it is but a mere entryway into those that immerse. A lone wooden construction covered with fastened leather strips and scattered drawings encodes a vacuous experience that forgoes narration for scenes devoid of protagonists or unfolding events, shredding the boundaries between the hypothesised, the fictive and the real. You are an experimental protocol, a hypothesis, by no means binding for the environment that you enter. The spatial installation does not hold you in any regard. If challenged, it withdraws rather than face the consequences of your will. And yet, you are allowed to enter. Welcomed, even, by its carefully arranged inventory. As finicky as it may be, it seeks ample amusement. Subjects – that bear no hold on its development or form but nevertheless test its intricate layout – provide for it a foundation upon which its own sense of verity could eventually be formed.
THE AUTHORS
Domen Pal/Aksioma
Ema Maznik Antić (1998) obtained a BA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana (2021), where she is currently pursuing an MA in the same field. She has also received the institution’s Prešeren Prize. She has presented her work in the individual exhibition Lost Cargo at DobraVaga (2022), in group exhibitions Plaza Protocol – Deposit at Mala galerija BS (2022), Terminal Drift at the MoTA LAB (2022) and s04e03 (2021) as part of the student pop-up gallery 7:069 at the Alcatraz Gallery, and in the student exhibition Ni belega platna (2020) at Mala galerija BS. She lives and works in Ljubljana.
Maks Bricelj (1991) obtained a BA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2016, and an MA in Sculpture from the same institution in 2021. He has held several individual exhibitions, including Gel Chambers at R Space (2022) and Not Being Able to Function Properly at Kino Šiška (2019), and participated in many group exhibitions, such as Plaza Protocol – Deposit at Mala galerija BS (2022), Terminal Drift at the MoTA LAB (2022), Open call at the Škuc Gallery (2017) and Community Kit at MAO’s Project Space (2017), among others.
THE CURATOR
Domen Pal/Aksioma
Domen Ograjenšek is a writer, critic and curator of contemporary visual art. They are a former member of the ŠUM Journal editorial board and its research collective, and they have given lectures and seminars at art institutions such as the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC Ljubljana), the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (MSUM), Škuc Gallery, PhaseBook Prague, Nova Pošta and the International Festival of Computer Art (IFCA). Their reviews and essays have been published in magazines and online platforms such as PASSE-AVANT, Artalk, Blok Magazine, Fotograf Magazine, all-over Magazine, ETC. Magazine, Maska Magazine, ŠUM Journal, Borec Journal, Tribuna and Radio Študent. They have curated exhibitions at the Museum of Madness Trate, SCCA-Ljubljana, Aksioma Project Space, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (as a member of the Neteorit collective), Center for Contemporary Arts Celje (Likovni salon) and Škuc Gallery. They are based in Vienna.
CREDITS
Authors: Ema Maznik Antić & Maks Bricelj Curator and author of the text: Domen Ograjenšek
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2023
Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists
Financial support: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
Thanks: Fabrikaid d.o.o., Živa Božičnik Rebec, Nicholas Gardner, Robert Petek, Glej Theatre
Neocolonial Visions: Algorithmic Violence and Unmanned Aerial Systems
Anthony Downey
Price: 4€
PostScriptUM #47
Anthony Downey Neocolonial Visions: Algorithmic Violence and Unmanned Aerial Systems by Anthony Downey
In the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) threatened to inflict significant casualties on the ground troops of the United States and Allied Forces. This led to unprecedented levels of investment in unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and the ensuing ascendancy of wide-area persistent surveillance systems (WAPSS) across the region. These prototypes of hyper-surveillance and targeting were inevitably supported and powered by developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Combining the predictive logic of AI and the martial rationalisation of the pre-emptive strike, these technological and logistic alliances sought to not only calculate risk and threat but to eliminate it before it materialises. They seek, in short, to occupy the future in the name of terrestrial and extra-terrestiral dominance. Throughout the following essay, Anthony Downey (Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa at Birmingham City University) examines the historical contexts and current deployments of such systems, enquiring into how neocolonial projections of power are implicated in the martial and political will to occupy the future. What happens, he asks, when we defer life-and-death decisions to a mechanical calculus of probability that is beholden to martial devices of pre-emption, political expediencies and the neocolonial logic of expendability.
EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 22 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2023 ISBN 978-961-7173-32-1 (Printed) ISBN 978-961-7173-35-2 (Digital)
The project Under the Calculative Gaze investigates how socially applied AI is not only directly intertwined with unresolved injustices of the prevailing socio-economic system, but actually enables a transition towards authoritarianism that is present in the technology industry itself, in the politics of various countries and institutions, and in the rise of far-right political movements. AI reinforces existing power dynamics and, by hierarchically categorising individuals, furthers societal divisions based on exclusionary and ideologically underpinned criteria of value and allocation.
Targets of the extensive digital control and algorithmic optimisation are typically “low-rights environments”, where expectations of political responsibility and transparency are easier to disregard. Counteracting this are collective practices of self-organisation, where positions of social and political disadvantage give rise to solidarity across differences and beyond models of algorithmic governance.
INSTALLATION ELEMENTS
No to AI, Yes to a Non-fascist Apparatus (video)
The video No to AI, Yes to a Non-fascist Apparatus looks at the way mathematical separations ‘repeat the trick of ranking and ordering being’ – particularly in the ideas of worth, greater worth, and less worth – from within systems that are already enabling forms of exclusion and harm. The narrator is Dan McQuillan, who authored the text for the video, which features animated 3D scans of actual places of resistance. With the use of photogrammetry, the artist constellates different localities and situated testimonies, aligned by the commonality of their struggle for better social conditions. From 56a Infoshop, a DIY and self-managed social centre in South London, through tensegrity structures used in an Amazon warehouses blockade, to Rozbrat, a centre of independent social and cultural activity in Poznan. These grassroots networks of solidarity are forms of counter power that challenge the processes of extraction and exclusion from a perspective that is fundamentally relational.
1s and 0s, haves and have-nots (prints)
The ability of AI to understand society and classify it into actuarial risk categories is frequently used to restrict access to loans, subsidies, employment, medical care and pain relief for particular groups of individuals, as well as to prevent them from crossing international borders.
1s and 0s, Haves and Have-Nots is a series of digital graphics that creates a highly standardised pseudo-marketing environment and presents numerous concrete examples of discriminatory and harmful practices proceeding from probabilistic algorithms and applications of AI systems.
Workers’ Initiative: Union (video)
Amazon’s business model represents a significant regression in terms of labour rights. Instead of using technological automation to improve workers’ conditions, the company employs it as a means to exert systematic and vigilant control over their bodies, labour and working environment. Scanners and computers record and analyse every second of a worker’s shift and the resulting data is used to pressure them into reaching the productivity quota generated by algorithms.
In 2018, the grassroots union Inicjatywa Pracownicza (Workers’ Initiative) convinced Poland’s National Labor Inspectorate to measure the energy expenditure of workers during a shift in the warehouse. The results of the examination showed that some employees burned two to three times more calories than the legal limit.
Amazon also relentlessly opposes any organisation formed by workers to fight for their rights and better working conditions. Magda Malinowska, who worked in an Amazon warehouse in Poland for six years and is a representative of Inicjatywa Pracownicza, was dismissed in November 2021 when Amazon sought to further suppress workers’ resistance in the workplace. While fighting to get reinstated, she continues to organise with the Amazon Worker International (AWI).
The video Workers’ Initiative: Union records her experience of shop floor organisation and of using unions as a powerful tool in the fight against a corporate system that treats workers as mere numbers, pressures their bodies past the point of exhaustion, and then discards them.
Workers’ Initiative: Resistance(video)
Although the mainstream media portray them as powerless victims of algorithmic capitalism, Amazon workers are busy organising disruptive collective action from inside their warehouses – with a direct impact on the company’s profits.
Those who work on an Amazon shop floor develop a deep understanding of the company’s global production and distribution network, which relies on the labour of more than 1.5 million workers operating in virtually identical logistic centres around the world. As this is a highly standardised working environment, all employees share the same problems and seek to unite to address them. For its part, the company exploits every possible circumstance and legislative disparity in the countries where it operates to inhibit any kind of cohesion among employees.
Workers resist by organising themselves transnationally and sharing information about their struggles and strategies. Amazon Workers International (AWI), a grassroots network of exchange, support and solidarity, uses Amazon’s global chain of warehouses to exert coordinated and distributed pressure on the company.
Agnieszka Mróz, a union organiser and member of AWI and Inicjatywa Pracownicza, has been working at Amazon’s first warehouse in Poland since its inception in 2014. In the video Workers’ Initiative: Resistance she gives an insight into the company’s exploitative practices and the workers’ fightback.
Tensegrity structures
Tensegrity structures proceed from the root to contest the distanced, cold, thoughtless mechanisms of structural inequality and enclosure. Based on a system of isolated components inside a network of continuous tension, the two bamboo DIY towers allow the viewer to feel the potential of resistance as they tie into a specific event: the protest site in front of Amazon warehouses. In the Extinction Rebellion action intended to draw attention to Amazon’s exploitative and environmentally destructive business practices and disregard for workers’ rights, the structures appear as a splinter in the power relations.
Sanela Jahić (1980, Kranj) graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana in 2008, and received her master’s degree in 2010 in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Jahić is an intermedia artist, who constructs visual and technologically supported kinetic objects and installations. Her artistic practice often involves collaboration with specialists for mechanical engineering, automation, software and electronics. She lives and works in Škofja Loka. Jahić has exhibited her work in numerous shows in Slovenia and abroad.
CREDITS
Author: Sanela Jahić Technical director: Andrej Primožič Author of the essay ‘No to AI, Yes to a Non-fascist Apparatus’: Dan McQuillan Visual image and graphic design: Jaka Neon 3D animation: Toni Mlakar Audio post-production: Julij Zornik Image post-production: Art Rebel 9 Thanks: Magda Malinowska, Agnieszka Mróz, Inicjatywa Pracownicza, Matti, Lenart J. Kučić, Extinction Rebellion, Jacqueline Serrato / South Side Weekly, Hedi Tounsi
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2023
The project konS:: Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
Sanela Jahić – Under the Calculative Gaze
Price: 0€
AI completes the enclosure that the autonomists called the social factory, where capitalist relations of power extend to the smallest corner of social reproduction. But the very generalisability of these algorithmic exploitations creates the ground for a recomposition of resistance from forms of relationality that still escape the algorithmic gaze. ― Dan McQuillan
Under the Calculative Gaze is a paperback adaptation of Sanela Jahić’s artistic research that investigates how socially-applied technological tools are not only directly intertwined with unresolved injustices of our current system, but actually accelerate a transition towards authoritarianism that is present in the technology industry itself, in the politics of various countries and institutions, and in the rise of far-right political movements.
EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 216 pp | colour | soft cover | 2023 ISBN 978-961-7173-31-4
Colophon
Sanela Jahić Under the Calculative Gaze Editor: Janez Fakin Janša Editorial assistant: Maja Burja
Translator and language editor: Miha Šuštar Design and layout: Jaka Neon, based on IBM’s open-source Carbon Design System
In the framework of konS ≡ Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art konS is a project chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
As metal turns to rust, so do the barriers of time give up their consistency once they are reduced to the strata that make up the ground we walk on. All known worlds and timelines inevitably become flat.
Downward direction is key, as the exhibition points underground, connecting the works through speculative tunnels, currents of soil-shifting and infrastructures of extraction. The breached layers of earth reveal remnants of abandoned divisions, currencies of unfamiliar lineage and scale, all relics of arrested growth that graze the sight of the present, replicating behind the observers’ retinas and nerve endings like topological hijackers entrusted to carry through what had been abruptly left on permanent hold. The depths obscure only what is seemingly too dangerous or threatening to be perceived on its own – at full scale, in a definition that reveals, even if slowly, progressively, the ratio of its conception and design.
By venturing underground, the exhibition takes advantage of fractured phenomenality, exploring settings where light does not aid sight but hinders it. Overexposed white spots and swallowed edges; in the dark, things get clearer. Darkness could very well be the original abstraction, reducing the clutter of visual sensorium to its absolute minimum. Shapes form at the threshold of imagination, splitting the cognitive apparatus and merging it with its transcending otherness.
In the pitch black, the existing and the perceived align.
The paranoid ambiguity of physical presence uproots the unreliability of vision and reinstates it as material inscription rather than appearance. To an outside observer, the sites might seem riddled with displacement: that of the works, their ascribed meaning (the symbolic frame or mesh from which they originate – any attempt at comprehension is met with pushback, a shift in the works’ noetic grounding), as well as that of soil and air, of ions, oxidising and morphing the traces of iron into bleeding patches of rust and debris. The effects of displacement, however, wane as one descends deeper.
Amidst the thick matter, nearing ever closer to the molten core, the works emerge as autonomous signs – intricate webs of strategies, knowledge and ambitions – in those sticking around long enough, at depths deep enough. In these conditions, the philosophical analogy of the cave or crevice (or in contemporary terms, a mine or a shelter) loses its established meaning as an analogy of confusion and begins to function as a space of noetic respite instead. A space where reason moulds its own conditions rather than sourcing them out of appearances and pre-existing forms.
THE AUTHOR
Domen Pal/Aksioma
Živa Božičnik Rebec graduated in 2014 in Unique Design – Glass and Ceramics from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where she also studied for a master’s degree in sculpture. Her works have been exhibited in Slovenia and abroad in such venues and events as Nova pošta (2022), 34th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts Iskra Delta at The International Centre of Graphic Arts (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (2019), Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Modern Art (2019), Škuc Gallery (2018), Simulaker Gallery (2017), Cmurek Castle (2015) and Fashion/Art Toronto international exhibition in Toronto, Canada (2014). In 2019, she was an artist in residence at the Karlin Studios (Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague).
THE CURATOR
Domen Pal/Aksioma
Domen Ograjenšek is a writer, critic and curator of contemporary visual art. They are a former member of the ŠUM Journal editorial board and its research collective, and they have given lectures and seminars at art institutions such as the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC Ljubljana), the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (MSUM), Škuc Gallery, PhaseBook Prague, Nova Pošta and the International Festival of Computer Art (IFCA). Their reviews and essays have been published in magazines and online platforms such as PASSE-AVANT, Artalk, Blok Magazine, Fotograf Magazine, all-over Magazine, ETC. Magazine, Maska Magazine, ŠUM Journal, Borec Journal, Tribuna and Radio Študent. They have curated exhibitions at the Museum of Madness Trate, SCCA-Ljubljana, Aksioma Project Space, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (as a member of the Neteorit collective), Center for Contemporary Arts Celje (Likovni salon) and Škuc Gallery. They are based in Vienna.
CREDITS
Author: Živa Božičnik Rebec Curator and author of the text: Domen Ograjenšek Cover animation: Blaž Miklavčič Music: YamYam | David Halb
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2023
Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists
Financial support: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
Sponsor: Waltech International d.o.o.
Thanks: Emergency Management Department – City of Ljubljana, MKC Maribor, Dinos, Fabrikaid, plastikaTrček, Nervous FX (Voranc Kumar, Blaž Miklavčič), Tomo Per for Roglab, Nicholas Gardner, Vid Koprivšek, Ema Maznik Antić, Maks Bricelj, Aljoša Krebl, Čuli, Luka Polc
Tactics&Practice [podcast]: Scale
Colloidal Ontologies: The Gendered Body at the Interface of Matter
Laura Tripaldi
Price: 4€
PostScriptUM #46
Laura Tripaldi Colloidal Ontologies: The Gendered Body at the Interface of Matter
Writer and independent researcher Laura Tripaldi shows how politics can play out in the nanoscale dimension, by focusing on the role of colloids in defining what “matter” and “bodies” are. When, in 1856, Michael Faraday experimented on gold colloids and investigated their behaviour, the reality of what was known as “matter” and was usually perceived as a collection of intrinsic properties became much more elusive and complex. Even our entire biological bodies could be understood as remarkably intricate colloidal systems consisting of trillions of tiny biochemical particles dispersed in water. One hundred years after Faraday’s experiments, gold colloids were first used in modern pregnancy tests. This revolutionary invention gave women the possibility to make autonomous choices about their bodies, and serves as an example of how non-human nano-actants participate in our politics and ontologies.
EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 18 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2023 ISBN 978-961-7173-30-7 (Printed) ISBN 978-961-7173-28-4 (Digital)
FaceOrFactory, Tamara Lašič Jurković, Dorijan Šiško, Andrej Škufca
There is Plenty of Room in the Simulation
Jussi Parikka
Price: 4€
PostScriptUM #45
Jussi Parikka There is Plenty of Room in the Simulation In this essay, Jussi Parikka, writer and professor in digital aesthetics and culture at Aarhus University, explores the concept of scale. He argues that nothing actually works on the 1:1 scale, so we needn’t be simplistic about scale. Nothing is really self-identical, because all is mediation. All is radically about scales, relations and friction. Across media and aesthetics, in every field which has had to negotiate how to inscribe abstraction in a communicable, tangible form, scale is mobilised inside and into the techniques of knowing. The simplicity of measurement is only apparent, it hides a series of scalar loops that reveal something essential: scale is the middle of an intertwining bundle of forces.
Scale is a generative notion and it entails an ethic-aesthetic meaning: scales standardise and potentially destabilise, and creating methods for other scales can be seen as an ethical practice.
EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 17 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2023 ISBN 978-961-7173-24-6 (Printed) ISBN 978-961-7173-23-9 (Digital)
Jussi Parikka There is Plenty of Room in the Simulation
PostScriptUM #45 Series edited by Janez Fakin Janša
Publisher: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Represented by Marcela Okretič
Proofreading: Miha Šuštar Design: Luka Umek Layout: Sonja Grdina
Cover image: Rosa Menkman, Decalibration Target: Start of Image Marker, Drone footage, produced by transmediale with the support of the Stimuleringsfonds Creative Industries NL, January 2023. Photo by Rosa Menkman | https://beyondresolution.info/TARGET
(c) Aksioma | All text and image rights reserved by the author | Ljubljana 2023
Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
This research has been supported by the Czech Science Foundation funded project 19-26865X “Operational Images and Visual Culture: Media Archaeological Investigations.”
In her latest project Joule Thieves, artist Meta Grgurevič combines her interest in the fundamental principles of mechanical systems with years of research into energy production. The installation experiments with basic physical phenomena that can be used to create one of the core units of contemporary society and its products – information. Natural phenomena such as light, time, force and electricity are entangled into a mechanism that functions as a poetic production chain of human and non-human agents.
As part of the project, the artist has developed a completely analogue optical device powered by mice running on a wheel. The mechanism used in the installation takes as its starting point the workings of Théâtre Optique, the predecessor of the cinema projector, and combines the technologies of clockwork and zoetropes with a specially developed unit for generating and storing electricity. The construction, with its completely transparent and cumbersome mechanism for generating projections, lays bare the material (and energy-consuming) basis of electronic media. It ironises the typical connection between input and output, work and effect, extraction and consumption, and departs from the idea of autonomous systems operating in an infinite closed loop. Even when mice that power the mechanism toil for hours, they create little energy, yet the construction nevertheless creates a surplus of voltage by using a joule thief circuit, but this ultimately allows for only a brief projection.
The project thus speculatively reflects on how energy could be produced, stored and used (differently) and creates a microenvironment that transforms the production loop into a system where man, nature and technology are directly interconnected.
THE AUTHOR
Domen Pal / Aksioma
Meta Grgurevič (1979) lives and works in Ljubljana. In 2007, she completed her postgraduate studies in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. In her practice, she explores the relationships between science, metaphysics and the effects of magic, developing kinetic objects and multidimensional scenes as fully functioning mechanisms that act as metaphors for utopian systems of exchange. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. Among others, she has presented the solo exhibition Scratching for Gold (Cukrarna, Ljubljana, 2022), the major survey exhibition Impossible Mechanisms (UGM, Maribor, and Künstlerhaus, Graz, 2020) and received the Audience Award at the 31st Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts for her project Timekeepers (Ljubljana, 2015).
CREDITS
Author: Meta Grgurevič Construction assistance: France Petač Technical assistance: Gregor Krpič Scientific collaborator: Dr Neža Grgurevič, DVM Joinery: Andrej Zavodnik
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2023
Production assistant and text: Maja Burja
Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
Acknowledgements: Thanks to JAŠA for artistic review and Stas Vrenko for advice on technical design.
Fuzzing Signals, Fuzzing Membranes
Nicole L'Huillier
Fuzzing Apparatuses
Nicole L’Huillier
Nicole L’Huillier Fuzzing Apparatuses
Workshop WED, 17 May 2023, 2–5 PM Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Necessary tools: – Laptop with the Ableton Live software installed. Get the trial version here: https://www.ableton.com/en/trial/. – Audio recorder with mic input. Participants who don’t have an audio recorder will be able to experiment and create their own audio pieces with a device provided by the organiser. – Headphones.
In order to explore multiple ways of receiving and intersecting sounds and vibrations, participants will be invited to experiment with different types of microphones and interfaces for listening and recording. In this exercise, they will engage with different scales and types of vibrational phenomena: from tactile and intimate listening to exploring the propagation of sound vibrations in different media and to listening to electromagnetic activity as well as other invisible forces that surround us.
Participants will use recording devices to explore the potential of sounds and manipulate them with an open-source Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). By transforming their recorded material into personal creations, they will acquire foundational tools for analysing and editing sound as they reflect on, share and engage in a dialogue about scales of listening and practices of attunement.
All of this will be done in relation to (and around) La Orejona, a vibrational membrane microphone sculpture that is based on a soft accelerometer elastic sensor and interacts with vibrational phenomena around it. Participants will be able to directly engage with La Orejona’s membrane and unpack the many questions and possibilities it brings up in terms of relationality, unintelligibility, incommensurability, collectivity, noising, resonance, frequencies, signals, mappings, transductions etc.
THE AUTHOR
Nicole L’Huillier (1985) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from Santiago, Chile. Her work centres on exploring sounds and vibrations as construction materials to delve into questions of agency, identity, collectivity and vibrational imagination. Through installations, vibrational/sonic sculptures, custom-made (listening and sounding) apparatuses, performances and experimental compositions, she explores performativity and agency from micro to cosmic scales and creates membranal as well as resonant rituals. She holds a PhD in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT (2022). Her work has recently been shown at transmediale, Sonic Acts, Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Ural Industrial Biennial, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Bienal de Artes Mediales, Venice Architecture Biennale and Ars Electronica, among others.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
Technical support: CONA, Institute for Contemporary Art Processing Acknowledgements: Art Centre (Pionirski dom Centre for Youth Culture), Stara mestna elektrarna – Elektro Ljubljana (Bunker)
According to interdisciplinary artist and researcher Nicole L’Huillier, everything that is material has the capacity to resonate, from the micro scale (that of particles) to the macro (cosmic and interplanetary) scale. As a consequence, anything at any level of existence and materiality can be a performative agent of sound, and through the porous membranes that contain and are contained by our bodies and their technological extensions we can enter into resonant dialogues with countless entities, signals and forces. L’Huillier’s understanding of reality as a membrane between different performative agents that can be involved in “resonant rites” directly informs the interactive sound installation La Orejona Records.
A membranal listening apparatus for more-than-human entities, La Orejona (literally “the big-eared one”) is a sculpture that acts as a recording studio. With its elastic vibrational membrane microphone, it can record phenomena such as sound waves, touch-activated oscillations and ground tremors. However, in contrast to typical modern microphony that targets “signals” and filters “noise”, La Orejona operates with the purpose of indiscriminately weaving independent signals into a collective and inseparable muddy mass of sound.
THE AUTHOR
Nicole L’Huillier(1985) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from Santiago, Chile. Her work centres on exploring sounds and vibrations as construction materials to delve into questions of agency, identity, collectivity and vibrational imagination. Through installations, vibrational/sonic sculptures, custom-made (listening and sounding) apparatuses, performances and experimental compositions, she explores performativity and agency from micro to cosmic scales and creates membranal as well as resonant rituals. She holds a PhD in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT (2022). Her work has recently been shown at transmediale, Sonic Acts, Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Ural Industrial Biennial, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Bienal de Artes Mediales, Venice Architecture Biennale and Ars Electronica, among others.
Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
Thanks to Karsten Schuhl for coordinating the production and fabrication and to Jessie Mindell and Devin Murphy for their contribution and assistance to the sensor system and mapping. This work was originally commissioned for the transmediale festival 2023 (Berlin) and was developed as part of the transmediale residency 2022 thanks to the support of Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio de Chile and the Division of Culture, Arts, Heritage and Public Diplomacy – Dirac, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chile.
Tehnical support: Projekt Atol Institute
RELATED ACTIVITIES
ARTIST TALK
Fuzzing Signals, Fuzzing Membranes
Starting from the idea that reality is dynamically arranged by vibrations that are in constant interference, resonance and transduction, the artist guides us through an exploration of the vibratory – particularly the sonic through its aural and tactile manifestations – as an intrinsically collective medium that can activate intimate and intricate ways of relating to other media and to the world we are part of. This talk presents a resonant exploration that proposes a body of work based on the possibilities within the concept of La Membrana, an organisational conceptual apparatus and model structure that stimulates vibrational ways of being and thinking. By learning from La Membrana and implementing a series of membranal strategies, the artist intends to construct a narrative that is oscillatory in essence and that opens a number of questions around performativity and agency from a multiscalar and multiagential perspective. With no fixed point of reference or static definitions, Nicole’s presentation embraces the poetics of unintelligibility and incommensurability. Full of fuzzy instruments and techniques, this talk is charged with ambiguity and confusion as resonant mediators and translators, as apparatuses for tuning in/to our vibrational reality.
WORKSHOP
Nicole L’Huillier Fuzzing Apparatuses 17 May 2023, 2 PM-5 PM Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Fragile Connections
Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn
Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn Fragile Connections
Exhibition 20–28 April 2023 osmo/za, Slovenska 54, Ljubljana
The interactive installation documents the massive grassroots computer network SNET (Street Network) that Cuban technology enthusiasts have set up in response to the constraints of internet access on the island. This network allows users to play multiplayer video games, chat, send messages, debate in forums, share files, or host websites. SNET organically evolved from hundreds of neighbourhood local area networks (LANs) connecting with each other and is believed to be the largest community network in the world that is entirely isolated from the internet, linking tens of thousands of households in Havana. Its material base consists of miles of Ethernet cables running across streets or balconies, Wi-Fi antennas mounted on poles on rooftops, and servers and network switches operated by an army of volunteer node administrators. It relies on a network of thousands of participants who collaboratively create, operate, and maintain its hardware and software infrastructure.
The installation replicates the technological set-up of a SNET node and thus constitutes a fully functioning Local Area Network. It allows audiences to connect with their smartphones to explore part of the network themselves and view or download research documents about SNET’s history. It further consists of a three-channel video documenting a focus group interview with three SNET admins that was conducted over one of the network’s TeamSpeak servers and recorded on their desktop screens. Further elements of the work are an infographic detailing SNET’s power dynamics and hierarchies and a set of stickers with icons and symbols that SNET members use to express their digital identities.
THE AUTHORS
Nestor Siré(1988, Nuevitas) is an artist living and working in Havana, Cuba, who is interested in informal methods of the distribution of information and goods, forms of social creativity in the face of scarcity, and the communities and human infrastructures that shape such practices. His projects are related to alternative networks, informal economies and power structures. Siré pays particular attention to the alternative strategies that have emerged in the digital culture of his native Cuba, which are a response to the country’s disconnection from the global networks that control the Internet today. His works have been exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana), Queens Museum (New York), Rhizome (New York), New Museum (New York), Ars Electronica (Linz), Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei), Musée d’art de Rouyn-Noranda (Canada), Transmediale (Berlin) and The Photographers’ Gallery (London), among others. He has participated in events such as the Havana Biennial (Cuba), the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea), the Curitiba Biennial (Brazil), the Warsaw Biennial (Poland), the International Biennial of Asuncion (Paraguay), the Festival of New Latin American Cinema of Cuba and the International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen (Germany).
Steffen Köhn (1980) is a filmmaker, anthropologist and video artist living and working in Berlin and Aarhus who uses ethnography to understand contemporary sociotechnical landscapes. For his video and installation works, he collaborates with local gig workers, software developers, science fiction writers and fellow artists to explore viable alternatives to current distributions of technological access and arrangements of power. His works have been exhibited at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, Kunsthaus Graz, Vienna Art Week, Hong Gah Museum Taipei, The Photographers’ Gallery and the Biennials of Lulea and Warsaw, while his films have been screened at, among others, the Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival and the BFI Film Festival London.
In 1981, Canadian author and cyberpunk novelist William Gibson published Johnny Mnemonic, a short story in which Johnny, the main character, is a data trafficker who has undergone cybernetic surgery to have a data storage system implanted in his brain. The system allows him to serve as secure storage for digital data too sensitive to transfer across the net; but it becomes a problem when data stolen from the Yakuza are uploaded to his brain.
Shot in 2021 – the year in which the plot of the story takes place – and during a pandemic (another Gibson’s prediction), Memoria implants this narrative on contemporary Cuba’s reality, and contrasts the imaginary of the Internet in 1980s Cyberpunk literature with the contemporary Cuban experience of the Internet as a particular conglomerate of differing horizons of technical and social possibility. The work examines both sci-fi, as well as real-world alternatives to the mainstream capitalist consumerist version of the net that we are left with today, envisioning more decentralized, (net-)neutral, non-commercial iterations of the web.
As a collaboration between a media artist, an anthropologist, and a Sci-Fi writer, Memoria is based on long term ethnographic fieldwork on Cuban alternative data distribution networks. With online access heavily restricted by the government, but also the US trade embargo, Cuban citizens have found a way to distribute all kinds of web content in the form of the Paquete Semanal (The Weekly Package), a one-terabyte collection of digital material compiled by a network of people with various forms of privileged internet access and circulated nationwide on USB sticks and external hard drives via an elaborate human infrastructure of deliverymen, so-called Paqueteros who, like Mnemonic, physically bring the content to the remotest corners of the island. The most recent evolution in a 40 years long tradition of piracy – illegal yet not explicitly contrasted by the state – the Paquete Semanal forms a sort of offline version of the Internet and contains any kind of entertainment and cultural data.
Memoria is an immersive four-channel expanded cinema installation with specifically developed software and hardware components. Its narrative is presented on 4 synchronized screens that merge live-action footage with found footage from videos that have circulated in Cuba through the Paquete. To represent its protagonist’s loss of memory, the work will slowly “die” during the course of the exhibition, thanks to a custom system that corrupts both the audiovisual material as well as the devices on which the project files are stored.
THE AUTHORS
Nestor Siré (1988, Nuevitas) is an artist living and working in Havana, Cuba, who is interested in informal methods of the distribution of information and goods, forms of social creativity in the face of scarcity, and the communities and human infrastructures that shape such practices. His projects are related to alternative networks, informal economies and power structures. Siré pays particular attention to the alternative strategies that have emerged in the digital culture of his native Cuba, which are a response to the country’s disconnection from the global networks that control the Internet today. His works have been exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana), Queens Museum (New York), Rhizome (New York), New Museum (New York), Ars Electronica (Linz), Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei), Musée d’art de Rouyn-Noranda (Canada), Transmediale (Berlin) and The Photographers’ Gallery (London), among others. He has participated in events such as the Havana Biennial (Cuba), the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea), the Curitiba Biennial (Brazil), the Warsaw Biennial (Poland), the International Biennial of Asuncion (Paraguay), the Festival of New Latin American Cinema of Cuba and the International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen (Germany).
Steffen Köhn (1980) is a filmmaker, anthropologist and video artist living and working in Berlin and Aarhus who uses ethnography to understand contemporary sociotechnical landscapes. For his video and installation works, he collaborates with local gig workers, software developers, science fiction writers and fellow artists to explore viable alternatives to current distributions of technological access and arrangements of power. His works have been exhibited at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, Kunsthaus Graz, Vienna Art Week, Hong Gah Museum Taipei, The Photographers’ Gallery and the Biennials of Lulea and Warsaw, while his films have been screened at, among others, the Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival and the BFI Film Festival London.
Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn Fragile Connections 20–28 April 2023 osmo/za, Slovenska 54, Ljubljana
Digital Ethnography (for artists)
Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn
Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn Digital Ethnography (for artists)
Workshop 19 April 2023, 2–5 PM The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana
What to bring? – a laptop and/or a smart phone
Aimed at: Arts, humanities and social science students, art practitioners with an interest in artistic research, academics and professionals in the fields of sociology, cultural anthropology and media studies
This workshop explores how ethnographic fieldwork methods can become a key part of the artistic research process. Ethnography is a holistic method for exploring cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subjects. It emplaces the researcher’s self in a field site as a consequential social actor and conceives their body and perceptions as an integral part of the toolkit.
After an introduction in the central concepts, ethics, and methods of digital ethnography, we invite participants in an autoethnographic experiment that we call “Internet diary” to reflect upon how differently digital culture is experienced across the globe.
In Cuba, such as in many other parts of the world, media files (such as films, photos, music, etc.) are shared primarily offline and interpersonally on pen drives or from phone to phone when internet access is restricted for economic or political reasons. People in Cuba, for example, have found an ingenuous way to distribute all kinds of web content in the form of the Paquete Semanal (The Weekly Package), a one-terabyte collection of digital material compiled by a network of people with various forms of privileged internet access. It is circulated nationwide on USB sticks and external hard drives via an elaborate human infrastructure of deliverymen, so called Paqueteros who deliver right to their clients’ homes.
Such alternative distribution networks not only make up for limited internet access but also have the potential to avoid online surveillance and data extraction and are difficult to monetize or co-opt through advertising. Hence, they represent a striking alternative to algorithmically-powered platform capitalism.
To experiment with the intricacies of offline cultures ourselves, we invite participants to document their internet consumption ON THE DAY BEFORE THE WORKSHOP and make it accessible offline. Participants are asked to prepare a folder containing everything they have watched/read/seen online on that day. Each participant is also asked to detail the strategies they used for downloading and archiving these materials. All these personal archives are then compiled into one folder that represents a day in the group’s internet use. During the workshop, we will then explore and try out different ways to organize and distribute these offline data to make them meaningful to others, just like the curators of El Paquete Semanal do. Upon Nestor’s return to Havana, this curated archive will then be circulated as a collaborative work in Paquete Semanal’s art section, an ongoing artistic intervention by Nestor that repurposes this offline distribution network as a digital exhibition space. Artists among the participants are invited to explore ways to represent their work in such an offline form.
Participants will develop:
a critical lens on how global digital technologies become “localised” or appropriated in different cultural and political contexts;
insights into an ethnographic approach to artistic research and the ethical requirements of such a highly immersive process;
an understanding of experimental forms of collaboration between artist-ethnographers and their interlocutors, and the politics and poetics of such cooperation.
THE AUTHORS
Nestor Siré (1988, Nuevitas) is an artist living and working in Havana, Cuba, who is interested in informal methods of the distribution of information and goods, forms of social creativity in the face of scarcity, and the communities and human infrastructures that shape such practices. His projects are related to alternative networks, informal economies and power structures. Siré pays particular attention to the alternative strategies that have emerged in the digital culture of his native Cuba, which are a response to the country’s disconnection from the global networks that control the Internet today. His works have been exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana), Queens Museum (New York), Rhizome (New York), New Museum (New York), Ars Electronica (Linz), Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei), Musée d’art de Rouyn-Noranda (Canada), Transmediale (Berlin) and The Photographers’ Gallery (London), among others. He has participated in events such as the Havana Biennial (Cuba), the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea), the Curitiba Biennial (Brazil), the Warsaw Biennial (Poland), the International Biennial of Asuncion (Paraguay), the Festival of New Latin American Cinema of Cuba and the International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen (Germany).
Steffen Köhn (1980) is a filmmaker, anthropologist and video artist living and working in Berlin and Aarhus who uses ethnography to understand contemporary sociotechnical landscapes. For his video and installation works, he collaborates with local gig workers, software developers, science fiction writers and fellow artists to explore viable alternatives to current distributions of technological access and arrangements of power. His works have been exhibited at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, Kunsthaus Graz, Vienna Art Week, Hong Gah Museum Taipei, The Photographers’ Gallery and the Biennials of Lulea and Warsaw, while his films have been screened at, among others, the Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival and the BFI Film Festival London.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
