Lara Reichmann
Loading Suns

Curated by
Domen Ograjenšek

Exhibition
13 December 2023–12 January 2024
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Loading Suns spark up in the absence of a human gaze. In its stead, ASTER, MODIS, MISR, CERES and MOPPIT brace the satellite for its journey through the harsh conditions of space. Terra, also known as EOS AM-1, is a multinational scientific research satellite, its monitoring mission set in the Sun-synchronous orbit around the planet, where five core sensors, ASTER, MODIS, MISR, CERES and MOPPIT, monitor Earth’s atmosphere, land and water. Loading Suns invites the viewer to follow the story of Terra from its humble beginnings to its eventual demise and downfall. The satellite will one day cease to serve its purpose, its story told through the polyphony of anthropomorphised voices, the inner apparatuses, through which cognition, reflection and remembrance become instances of a communal foretelling. 

Lara Reichmann approaches animation through the logic of the additive cut: stitching fragments of narratives and forms to achieve results that echo not only its constitutive parts but also the glitches and noise of the synthesising process. Terra’s inner world reflects the stitched fabric of the world it is obliged to monitor and observe – the satellite image of the planet, computationally reconstructed out of a myriad of fragmented images. Refection in terms of cognition and self-awareness comes by way of a continuous flow, of aggregation and computation. The unfolding narrative splits at points where the stitch itself enters the flow of observable data. Amidst the noise, a precarious form of cognition begins to face its eventual decommission, its attentive monitoring and observation turning into mourning of its Icarian descent.

Price: 18€

The word scale is tricky. It invites many definitions, orientations and connections to ourselves, our surroundings and our tools. However, to think of scale as solely technical is reductive and omits the relations, feelings and beliefs that come with such measurements and images. In this book, eight authors come together to challenge our conventions and understanding of scale as grounded in the human. In their texts, Asia Bazdyrieva, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Anthony Downey, FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo), Chris Lee, Jussi Parikka and Laura Tripaldi expand our understanding of scale to the more-than-human, trace its movements and frictions through histories, and question the way scale generates political power. Demonstrating how we can think with scale, they introduce us to scalar thinking, its urgency in our socio-technical present and its potential for making new maps, new representations and new kinds of measurements.

A Short Incomplete History of Technologies That Scale is a joint publication by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, and transmediale in Berlin. The publication reflects back the shared theme of transmediale’s 2023 festival edition a model, a map, a fiction and of Aksioma’s programme Tactics&Practice #14: Scale and came together from a common desire to think collectively about how measurements and maps create both politics and feelings in the world.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 144 pp | B/W | soft cover | 2023
ISBN 978-961-7173-40-6 (Aksioma)

Related event: Tactics & Practice #14: Scale

Vid Koprivšek
Swarm Entry

Curated by
Domen Ograjenšek

Exhibition
8 November–8 December 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Simple agents exhibit complex behaviour. On its way to the hive, a bee readies its sensory experience, preparing it to be extended onto others. The twitch of the wings, the turn of the body, clockwise, then counterclockwise. Culture holds an innate ability to be made into a plan. 

The other bees gather and observe. The dance grants the bee the ability to acquire targets, carry out reconnaissance and share its findings. All with precision in numbers. It is general reactivity before conscious planning. Self-organisation comes by way of sensorimotor exchange and pheromonal tracing, randomness or error amplified until emerging as structure. 

The swarm enters the fray of life as soon as the environment outscales the agent’s ability to comprehend it. Swarm Entry echoes it in this endeavour. 

It joins it in the strategic delight of dance, the movement of self-organising, of the principles that draw structure out of chaos. Foremost a headspace, it merges the movement of bodies with that of pieces of information and its inherent processes of thought, leaving behind the intuitive notion of the mind as an individualised enclosure. Within it, simple agents carry out complex manoeuvres and tasks. Our sensorimotor skills reacting before consciously planning. Reflexive movements become strategies and plans. Experiences automatised. Extending collective reach.

Price: 4€

PostScript^UM #48

Asia Bazdyrieva
Micro, Meso Macro

Since the escalation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Asia Bazdyrieva, who has settled in Germany, where the sociopolitical reality seems more and more volatile, has crossed the border between her home country and peaceful Western countries several times. She has experienced first-hand that this border produces two realms: the realm of being in pain and the realm of trying to prevent it at all costs. Ukraine’s resistance has put the country on the map: prior to the invasion, its territories were imaged and imagined as a site of inexhaustible resources that can feed the entire world; however, after the invasion, the fear of disruption has produced an emotional state that is identical to the one produced by climate change – the fear that the usual lifestyle will soon be over. The problematic yet convenient separation of climate and war discourses and narratives in the Western world has proven to be no longer sustainable.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 22 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2023
ISBN 978-961-7173-39-0 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-7173-36-9 (Digital)

Related event: Tactics & Practice #14: Scale

Rok Kranjc
Game-Changers: The Game

Event
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana
12 November 2022, 10 AM – 12.30 PM

With: Rok Kranjc, Ela Kagel, Pekko Koskinen, Filip Dobranić, Anja Blaj, Gregor Žavcer, Felix Fritsch

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

In the framework of Tactics & Practice #13: From Commons to NFTs

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.

Ema Maznik Antić & Maks Bricelj
Hi-Res Prints for Burial T-shirts

Curated by
Domen Ograjenšek

Exhibition
11 October–3 November 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

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.

Price: 4€

PostScript^UM #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)

Related event: Tactics & Practice #14: Scale

Sanela Jahić
Under the Calculative Gaze

Exhibition
25 January–24 February 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

3 March–2 April 2023
Cukrarna, Ljubljana

In the framework of konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art

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.

PUBLICATION

Sanela Jahić – Under the Calculative Gaze

ORDER

THE AUTHOR

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.

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

Related event: Under the Calculative Gaze

Živa Božičnik Rebec
STRATA 9.073 (kernel processing)

Curated by
Domen Ograjenšek

Exhibition
30 August–29 September 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Underground shelter, Argentina Park, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

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.

Price: 4€

PostScript^UM #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)

Related event: Tactics & Practice #14: Scale

Price: 4€

PostScript^UM #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)

Related event: Tactics & Practice #14: Scale

Meta Grgurevič
Joule Thieves

Exhibition
21 June–14 July 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

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.

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.

Part of Tactics & Practice #14: Scale
In the framework of konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art

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.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

EXHIBITION

Nicole L’Huillier
La Orejona Records
16 May–2 June 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Nicole L’Huillier
La Orejona Records

Exhibition
16 May–2 June 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #14: Scale

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.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

WORKSHOP

Nicole L’Huillier
Fuzzing Apparatuses
17 May 2023, 2 PM-5 PM
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana