Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn
Fragile Connections

Exhibition
20–28 April 2023
osmo/za, Slovenska 54, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #14: Scale

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.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

PUBLICATION

Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré
Handmade Networks

Contributors: Bani Brusadin, Erick J. Mota, Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré

Editor: Janez Fakin Janša

► ORDER

WORKSHOP

Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn
Digital Ethnography (for artists)
19 April 2023, 2 PM–5 PM
ALUO, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

MEMORIA [exhibition]

Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn
Memoria
19 April–12 May 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn
Memoria

Exhibition
19 April–12 May 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #14: Scale

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.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

PUBLICATION

Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré
Handmade Networks

Contributors: Bani Brusadin, Erick J. Mota, Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré

Editor: Janez Fakin Janša

► ORDER

WORKSHOP

Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn
Digital Ethnography (for artists)
19 April 2023, 2 PM–5 PM
ALUO, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

FRAGILE CONNECTIONS [exhibition]

Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn
Fragile Connections
20–28 April 2023
osmo/za, Slovenska 54, Ljubljana

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

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

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.

RELATED ACTIVIITES

PUBLICATION

Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré
Handmade Networks

Contributors: Bani Brusadin, Erick J. Mota, Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré

Editor: Janez Fakin Janša

► ORDER

MEMORIA [exhibition]

Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn
Memoria
19 April–12 May 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

FRAGILE CONNECTIONS [exhibition]

Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn
Fragile Connections
20–28 April 2023
osmo/za, Slovenska 54, Ljubljana

Farzin Lotfi-Jam
My Domestic Routines

Exhibition
29 March–14 April 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

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

Almost every aspect of our lives is now subject to regimes of monitoring. Using transportation infrastructures and accessing shared spaces requires membership and compliance with public and, more often, commercial digital network codes. From the biometric imprints taken at checkpoints to the vehicle tags needed to drive through tollbooths, from the history-tracking smart cards of many mass transit systems to the constant video recording in public spaces and workplaces, our cities watch and track us. Increasingly, movement through the city has less to do with the quality, design or programme of urban spaces and more to do with the command and control systems connected to them.

But control systems are not only organising cities, police actions, borders and online behaviour, they are also present in the most intimate aspects of our lives. The corollary to the self-monitoring of social media are the monitoring devices that have entered homes. Marketed under the rubrics of “smart living”, “health and wellness” and “mindfulness,” these self-focused products offer tantalising opportunities for consumers to disrupt their domestic routine and innovate their lifestyles. Taking the form of biometric data-collecting wearables, chirpy digital assistants and fully integrated command and control systems tasked with monitoring security sensors and optimising energy use, these products make digital-collar workers out of consumers, whose data is sold to the highest bidder. Undoubtedly, these forces are reshaping domestic space – this exhibition explores how.

My Domestic Routines comprises a film and a physical installation. The installation displays a catalogue of readily available smart products sourced from IKEA, Amazon, Google and Wyze. A recursive routine connects these proprietary systems and casts them in a never-ending performance of detection and response. The film presents a composite image of Farzin Lotfi-Jam and his home rendered through the attentive vision of the smart home industry. The film reveals how regimes of monitoring have produced a neurotic domestic subject simultaneously obsessed with seeking ever more representations of his domestic life, while securitising himself against the imagined fears lurking in the American suburban imaginary. Our domestic routines may seem banal, even scripted and contrived. This exhibition captures a feedback loop between domestic desire, data collection and the insidious possibilities of convenience.

THE AUTHOR

Farzin Lotfi-Jam is an architect whose work explores the politics of technology and cities. He is an assistant professor of architecture at Cornell University where he directs the Realtime Urbanism lab. The lab uses and invents new spatial media and technologies to visualise and simulate how algorithms, models and notions of “real time” govern urban life.  He is also the director of Farzin Farzin, an interdisciplinary design studio working across architecture, urbanism, computation and media. From modelling the control matrices of smart cities to spatialising the cultural logics of social media, his individual and collaborative projects are research-based and multimediatic. Lotfi-Jam’s work has been collected by The Centre Pompidou and the Sharjah Art Foundation, and he is the recipient of the 2022 Architectural League of New York League Prize, as well as recent grants and support for his research from the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, M+/Design Trust and The Shed, where he was an inaugural Open Call Artist. He has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture, MAXXI, the Venice Architecture Biennial, the Oslo Architecture Triennial, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Seoul Architecture Biennial, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and elsewhere. His co-authored book Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image was published by Columbia University Press.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

WORKSHOP

Farzin Lotfi-Jam
Realtime Subjects
29 March 2023, 2 PM–5 PM
ALUO, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Farzin Lotfi-Jam
Realtime Subjects

Workshop
29 March 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 with:
– The latest build of Unreal Engine 5
– The latest build of Cesium for Unreal Engine

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

Where do virtual humans reside? The workshop will explore this question by looking at recent urban simulations that virtualise cities and their populations. Specifically, we will use a recent smart city technology, the “digital twin”, as a topic of inquiry and design method. The digital twin, a virtual replica that maps data from objects in the physical city onto digital proxies in a simulated city, is the latest product being marketed to cities by global logistics companies and smart city technology firms. Digital twins are immersive, omniscient fantasy images, populated with real-time feeds of human activity, weather, traffic and other urban events. What is at issue in this technology is the reliance on a computational model to make the city legible to decision makers, who then use this model to create urban futures.

This workshop examines how digital twins represent cities and their subjects. It asks what the consequences of this technology are for collective urban futures and how this technology can be mobilised to produce more equitable, just and exciting urban visions. Specifically, workshop participants will technically and conceptually hack the components (data inputs, immersive visualisations and simulations, and outputs) of the digital twin concept and system architecture. Participants will produce a simple simulation of an urban environment using the Unreal Gaming Engine.

THE AUTHOR

Farzin Lotfi-Jam is an architect whose work explores the politics of technology and cities. He is an assistant professor of architecture at Cornell University where he directs the Realtime Urbanism lab. The lab uses and invents new spatial media and technologies to visualise and simulate how algorithms, models and notions of “real time” govern urban life.  He is also the director of Farzin Farzin, an interdisciplinary design studio working across architecture, urbanism, computation and media. From modelling the control matrices of smart cities to spatialising the cultural logics of social media, his individual and collaborative projects are research-based and multimediatic. Lotfi-Jam’s work has been collected by The Centre Pompidou and the Sharjah Art Foundation, and he is the recipient of the 2022 Architectural League of New York League Prize, as well as recent grants and support for his research from the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, M+/Design Trust and The Shed, where he was an inaugural Open Call Artist. He has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture, MAXXI, the Venice Architecture Biennial, the Oslo Architecture Triennial, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Seoul Architecture Biennial, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and elsewhere. His co-authored book Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image was published by Columbia University Press.

RELATED ACTIIVITIES

EXHIBITION

Farzin Lotfi-Jam
My Domestic Routines
29 March–14 April 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich
Onset

Exhibition
7–24 March 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #14: Scale

A demon roams through an ominous synthetic environment, reconstructed from satellite images of Russian air bases: Khmeimim in Syria, Baranovichi in Belarus, and Belbek in Ukraine. This parasitic force pervades the air bases, passing through their deserted corridors, interrogation rooms and electricity substations. Devastation follows in its wake. In this single-channel video installation, Engelhardt and Cinkevich use an unholy alliance of medieval demonology, open-source intelligence and CGI animation to uncover the hidden life of these military outposts. Over the course of the film, the true horror of Russian colonialism becomes manifest in the process of possession – the imposition of external control that gradually destroys an organism from within.

THE AUTHORS

Anna Engelhardt is the alias of a media artist, researcher and writer. Her practice examines post-Soviet cyberspace through a decolonial lens, with an overarching aim of dismantling Russian imperialism. These investigations take on multiple forms of media, including video, software and hardware interfaces. Engelhardt also pursues lecturing and publishing to situate digital conflicts within a broader colonial matrix. Her works and activities have been featured at the transmediale festival, Venice Architecture Biennial, Ars Electronica and the Kyiv Biennial, as well as in Digital War and The Funambulist.

Mark Cinkevich (1994, Lahoysk) is a Belarus-born interdisciplinary researcher and artist based in Warsaw. Having received his master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Helsinki, he now pursues a PhD at the Department of Anthropology, University of Warsaw. In his practice, he is interested in critical, speculative and experimental aspects of art that operate at the intersection of fact and fiction. His work focuses on the post-Soviet infrastructural and social landscape, through which he explores in particular the concepts of nuclear colonialism, infrastructural colonialism, extractivism and monstrosity.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

LECTURE PERFORMANCE

Infrastructural Horror: Soaring, Sprawling, Vast. As part of the conference Shifting Scales ↔ panel The Optimising Gaze and its Demons

WORKSHOP

Investigation as a Medium: Open-Source Intelligence for Artists
ALUO, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana
8 March 2023, 2 PM–5 PM

Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich
Investigation as a Medium: Open-Source Intelligence for Artists

Workshop
8 March 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 installed with Google Earth Pro

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

Since contemporary methods of control and violence are concealed, embedded in vast infrastructural and logistical networks, they can only be confronted with new practices and tools. Elaborating on the making of their essay film Onset, Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich will break down open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools and ways those techniques could inform an artistic practice. They will also discuss the convergence of fact and fiction, where they will explain how to search for classified information and turn it into something more than just discrete numbers of transmitted megawatts.

In their practice, Cinkevich and Engelhardt fuse OSINT tools with demonology to scrutinise Russian military strategy. They determine the sequence of events in a manner similar to the reconstruction of a transnational crime scene and thereby inform the parafiction narrative in their work. While primary reliance on open-source data allows them to look at such highly measured and controlled segments as energy and military infrastructures, demonology opens paths for engagements across cases and disciplines, key for an artistic practice.

After the conceptual overview, the audience will be invited to apply the new investigative method in practice. Attendants will be provided with the GPS coordinates of Russian military infrastructures and will conduct their own investigation in a guided manner.

THE AUTHORS

Anna Engelhardt is the alias of a media artist, researcher and writer. Her practice examines post-Soviet cyberspace through a decolonial lens, with an overarching aim of dismantling Russian imperialism. These investigations take on multiple forms of media, including video, software and hardware interfaces. Engelhardt also pursues lecturing and publishing to situate digital conflicts within a broader colonial matrix. Her works and activities have been featured at the transmediale festival, Venice Architecture Biennial, Ars Electronica and the Kyiv Biennial, as well as in Digital War and The Funambulist.

Mark Cinkevich (1994, Lahoysk) is a Belarus-born interdisciplinary researcher and artist based in Warsaw. Having received his master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Helsinki, he now pursues a PhD at the Department of Anthropology, University of Warsaw. In his practice, he is interested in critical, speculative and experimental aspects of art that operate at the intersection of fact and fiction. His work focuses on the post-Soviet infrastructural and social landscape, through which he explores in particular the concepts of nuclear colonialism, infrastructural colonialism, extractivism and monstrosity.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

EXHIBITION

Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich
Onset
7–24 March 2023
Aksioma | Project Space

Price: 4€

PostScript^UM #44

Martin Zeilinger
Structures of Belonging

So far, many of the things we build on and with blockchains have presented themselves as new types of property enclosures. From cryptocurrencies to NFTs, decentralised ledger technology seems mostly dominated by the asset logic of financialisation. But the landscape of blockchain-enabled digital culture is fantastically diverse and can encode much more than a desire for wealth and ownrship. In this short essay, media theory and digital art researcher Martin Zeilinger explores what might become possible – for artists, activists or community organisers – when we reimagine blockchains not as property-oriented infrastructure, but as structures of belonging. Doing so may allow us to develop conceptual frameworks that better account for (dis)continuities between hyper-capitalist tech innovations and their radical alternatives. Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) offer the perfect starting point for thinking about how to mix on- and off-chain technologies in structures of belonging that push beyond fintech legacies and emphasise collaboration, co-ownership and sharing.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 18 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2023
ISBN 978-961-7173-19-2 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-7173-21-5 (Digital)

Related event: Tactics & Practice #13: From Commons to NFTs

Price: 8€

At this moment in the 21^st century, we are witnessing a new form of extractivism well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of man’s cognitive and affective being. —Vladan Joler

New Extractivism was the theme of the twelfth edition of Tactics&Practice, a discursive, educational and exhibition programme focusing on the research, investigations and artistic works of Joana Moll, Vladan Joler, Disnovation.org and Ben Grosser that was realised by Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana in early 2022. This booklet collects the interviews conducted on that occasion by writer and publicist Mojca Kumerdej for Sobotna priloga, the weekly supplement of the Slovenian daily Delo.

EN/SI | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 128 pp | B/W and 1/8 colour | soft cover | 2023
ISBN 987-961-7173-18-5

Related event: Tactics & Practice #12: New Extractivism

Dorijan Šiško
Critical Hit

Exhibition
30 November 2022–16 December 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Critical Hit is a speculative video game that draws the gallery visitors into a post-virtual vision of parallel reality, which seems like a walking simulator set in the convoluted infrastructure of the Dantean circles of cyberspace. With this project, the artist and designer Dorijan Šiško continues his eclectic research into the aesthetics and the medium of video games by reflecting on the alternative relations between virtual and physical spaces and digital and material cultures.

Entering the arcade, players try to orient themselves within a spatiotemporal haze, following various material hints – light signals, a reflective map and ritualistic objects. When they approach the portal, they enter an endless circling in a limbo of sensory hyperstimulation permeated by sensations of the end and a designed image of an accelerated world. Lost in the wormholes of a hellish neon void, they use their voice to fight a battle with more or less abstract images of the demons of our time. Shifting between levels-worlds, the players screamingly realise that they are the key agents of anxiety driving this lore.

THE AUTHOR

Dorijan Šiško is a graphic designer and multimedia artist whose practice also extends to the fields of video games, animation, installation art, theatre and VJing. In his practice, he is interested in the speculative, critical, experimental and transmedia aspects of designing and art. Through creating visual-theoretical worlds, his works explore topics such as fringe digital culture, the dark sides of the internet, the future of humanity, tribalism, post-truth, virtual worlds, science fiction and popular culture. In 2019, he obtained his master’s degree in Graphic Design with honours from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana with his speculative design project TRIBE. He has received two Brumen Awards and a TRESK award. He is a member of the Freštreš and Nimaš Izbire collectives. His work was also presented at the 34th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts – Iskra Delta.