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.

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.

Everybody in The Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992
A film by Jeremy Deller

Screening
Tuesday, 18 October 2022 at 7 PM
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

Ticket: 5 €

61 min
Language: English with Slovenian subtitles

In the framework of Akcija!, a cycle of screening events

In Everybody in The Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2018), British artist Jeremy Deller explores the socio-political history and contemporary legacy of the ‘Second Summer of Love’. Based on a real-life lecture he delivered to a class of A-level Politics students, Deller utilises rare and unseen archive footage to illustrate his telling of this significant cultural movement.

From the genesis of house music in the gay clubs of Chicago and the Post-Industrial wasteland of Detroit, through sound systems of British-Caribbean communities to the Balearic bliss of Shroom, Deller charts the momentum that exploded from illicit underground dance floors, cementing acid house and rave music in the mainstream conscious.

As the Second Summer of Love dawned, Deller explains how for a down-trodden nation recovering from the wounds of the Miners’ strike, the liberal inclusivity of this new music – and drugs – offered a much-needed opportunity for collective catharsis. Ultimately, the proliferation of this counter culture laid bare the stagnation of cultural production in a society constrained by boundaries of class, identity and geography – a moment of seismic change born out of necessity but driven by music.

Deller’s film looks in detail at the social makeup of Britain in the mid to late 1980s, from the initial wave of hysteria and vilification that greeted acid house, to its rebirth through the prodigiously attended raves of 1988-1990 and ultimately its demise as a revolutionary force by the end of 1993.

Kvadratni meter
Welcome

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
12 October 2022–20 November 2022

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

The Kvadratni meter art collective draws attention to the issue of the increasing inaccessibility of the “commons”, of public and residential spaces – from restrictions in public spaces due to them becoming elite to the construction of luxury real estate and a lack of housing for the underprivileged population, from social anxieties arising from the housing crisis to personal difficulties related to badly planned and ever-smaller living environments. Space is increasingly subjected to the interests of capital, aggravating the overall socio-economic distress of the population.

In their latest art project Welcome, the artists shed light on how the arrival of online platforms in the fields of tourism and real estate contributes to the housing problem in complex (yet anecdotally very palpable) ways. The collective that, in 2019, resoundingly “updated” the scale model of Ljubljana with tags of “Airbnbs” now expands its artistic gesture to the dimensions of an actual real estate – the Aksioma Project Space.

One of the largest online platforms for renting apartments, founded by “three guys” who “turned renting an air mattress in their apartment into a multi-billion dollar company”, [1] is part of the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis, which, through the hardships of individuals, gave impetus to the platform economy. In practice, it turned out that the platform is not an example of the sharing economy, but a story of entrepreneurship and ingenuity, which transformed apartments, basements and bike sheds into a means of mass tourism and investments. It finally established its identity by promoting the value and the right to “live anywhere” – in tree houses, windmills, caves and transport containers … Anywhere but in an affordable, long-term rental or owner-occupied apartment with a suitable floor space, it seems.   

Their response to the criticism about the negative impact on the long-term rental possibilities for the locals and the effect on the rise in real estate prices, gentrification and the overburdening of cities with mass tourism is that they envision the platform will also pursue long-term rentals in the future. In light of the approaching crisis, the platform sees the perfect opportunity to add more hosts, while the accommodations become even more interesting for flexible remote workers.

With its project Welcome, the Kvadratni meter collective places Aksioma on Airbnb’s map as the next in the series of accommodations under the tag “Apartment in Ljubljana”. With an uncompromising artistic appropriation of the logic of capital, the artists turned the gallery into an actual accommodation on Airbnb and barred visitors from entering the exhibition venue, which is now open only for short-term rental. With their transformative gesture, the artists reflect on how we will reside in the near future and point out the urgent need for systemic changes, which will remain a pressing issue in the upcoming “season” as well.

[1] Aydin, R. (2019, September 20). How 3 guys turned renting air mattresses in their apartment into a $31 billion company, Airbnb. Insider. Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://www.businessinsider.com/how-airbnb-was-founded-a-visual-history-2016-2

THE AUTHOR

Kvadratni meter is a collective of four artists that has been active since 2019. They express their sensitivity to social issues, especially the right of residence, through performances, installations, sculptures and interventions in public spaces, and address the issues of gentrification, inaccessibility of housing and lower living standards, both locally and globally. Their projects include A Monument to the Housing Crisis (plaza in the Metelkova Museum Quarter), rent+expenses (Cirkulacija2), Stealing Land (Alkatraz Gallery) and two interventions in public space: Real Estate Market in Republic Square and Updating the Scale Model of Ljubljana.

Price: 15€

The seven essays in this book examine the desires and impulses that drive digital culture, focusing on the shift from commons to NFTs, from new forms of sharing to the expansion of private ownership and tradable commodities. They reveal just how much our culture has been transformed in the last 20 years, but also unearth surprising continuities between the commons and some of the truly experimental uses of blockchains.

Written by artists, researchers, curators and technologists from Europe, North America and East Asia, these essays bring much-needed first-hand experience and long-term perspective to the discussion.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 120 pp | B/W | soft cover | 2022
ISBN 978-961-7173-17-8

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

FaceOrFactory
The Face of Corporate Building

Exhibition
24 August–23 September 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

The Face of Corporate Building is a research project that explores various strategies of formulating narratives and specific rhetorical patterns that are crucial in creating artistic NFT platforms. The process of documenting and analysing the phrases, online posts, statements of platforms and individual examples of  NFT artworks and events is designed as a video game in which the visitors gradually discover the specific economic and digital landscape as a new form of contemporary mythology in which the (human) face is ambivalently involved: on the one hand, the place of identity and representation, on the other, the front side, the face of discourses, economic transactions and political neutralisation. By collaging various pop and theoretical references and the form of trivia quizzes and appropriating the visual language of NFT platforms, the video game presents a critical reading of contemporary NFT production, while the project constantly ironically analyses the (impossible) position of its own creators, their working conditions and art practice to the formulation of the very critique of the contemporary economic market.  

THE AUTHOR

FaceOrFactory (Aljaž Rudolf and Eva Smrekar) is an art platform that uses various approaches to explore the characteristics, the place and the functions of the (human) face in contemporary society. By harvesting DNA samples and the photogrammetry of the faces of volunteers, who become members of the FaceOrFactory corporation by donating their biological and digital material, the platform creates its own facial and informational archive, which represents the main material of its artworks. So far, FaceOrFactory’s works have been exhibited at the Kapelica Gallery, the Simulaker Gallery, Ars Electronica (Linz), Bozar (Brussels) and the 36^th Youth Salon (Zagreb).

The Byzantine Generals Problem

Curated by
Domenico Quaranta

Exhibition
4 July–end of the internet
distant.gallery

Featuring works by
Anna Ridler, Ben Grosser, Constant Dullaart, DIS, FaceOrFactory, Kyle McDonald, LaTurbo Avedon, Moxie Marlinspike, Nascent, Rhea Myers, Sarah Friend, Sarah Meyohas, Simon Denny, Guile Twardowski, Cosmographia, Sterling Crispin, The Miha Artnak

An alternative to capitalism, or capitalism at its worst? An emancipatory network economy where everyone has a stake, or a dystopian panopticon where only the best man wins? An opportunity for democracy, or a techno-libertarian wet dream? A new creative economy or a pyramid scheme? A planet saver or a planet burner? Rarely has the debate around a technology been so polarized as with blockchains, web3 and NFTs. We are facing a problem of consensus, trapped within a Byzantine Generals Problem. 

Some generals are besieging Byzantium. In order to avoid catastrophic failure, they must agree on a concerted strategy, but some of them are unreliable. Used to illustrate how consensus is reached within distributed systems, this allegory can be applied to blockchains and to societies as well. Yet, in a peer-to-peer debate with no central authority, consensus is hard to reach for a reason; and the disagreeing general, the unreliable actor, may be our best resource against the common sense of the crypto-yuppies.

The Byzantine Generals Problem is an online exhibition focused on artworks which, while not avoiding to engage with blockchains and crypto culture, do it in a critically constructive way: questioning dominant narratives, raising problems, and sometimes proposing alternative solutions.

THE CURATOR

Domenico Quaranta is an art critic, curator and educator interested in the ways art reflects the current technological shift. His texts have appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, books and catalogues. He is the author, among other things, of Beyond New Media Art (2013) and Surfing with Satoshi. Art, Blockchain and NFTs (2022) and the editor of several books, including GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (2006, with M. Bittanti). Since 2005 he has curated several exhibitions, including Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (Brescia 2011; Basel and New York 2012); Cyphoria (Quadriennale 2016, Rome) and Hyperemployment (MGLC, Ljubljana 2019–2020). He lectures in Interactive Systems and is a co-founder of the Link Art Center (2011–2019).

RELATED PUBLICATION

Domenico Quaranta
Surfing with Satoshi – Art, Blockchain and NFTs

Written amidst an explosion of technological hype and a speculative frenzy, the book sets the promise of the NFT market in a historical context, investigating the technologies it is based on, the role of certificates and contracts in contemporary art, and the evolution of the media art market over the last thirty years.

Igor Štromajer
with Sakrowski:
ƒ(x)=ax³+bx²+cx+d

Exhibition
28 June–22 July 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Until a few years ago, it was mostly video gamers, compulsive social media users and people who, for various reasons, had to spend most of their time online that shared the feeling of living in a hybrid, material and digital reality. The pandemic has made this experience commonplace. Words that were once exotic, like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), are now increasingly applied to our daily routine and mundane tasks and activities. As is common with digital experiences, hybrid realities have become a habit before we were even aware of them.

With its monumental and tautological representation of the possibility for inhabiting different realities, Igor Štromajer’s hybrid installation ƒ(x)=ax³+bx²+cx+d* produces and confirms this awareness and questions the different levels of perception and the ways in which the concepts of presence, ownership and accessibility relate to them.

In the installation, the central role is occupied by a 1 m³ concrete cube balanced on one of its vertices, representing the transposition into a physical space of the iconic GIF animation created by the artist in 1996 and recreated in 2021 for AR environments by art historian and curator Sakrowski.

The first two iterations of this trilogy complete the installation by materialising on the screens of visitors’ electronic devices.

* Cubic function

THE AUTHORS

Igor Štromajer, a non-amateur level para-artist – »le Pavarotti du HTML« (Libération) – researches tactical a=tF², intimate guerrilla, and traumatic low-tech communication strategies. He has shown his work at more than two hundred fifty exhibitions in more than sixty countries (transmediale, ISEA, EMAF, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica Futurelab, V2_, IMPAKT, CYNETART, Manifesta, FILE, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Hamburg Kunsthalle, ARCO, Microwave, Banff Centre, Les Rencontres Internationales, The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale and in numerous other galleries and museums worldwide) and received a number of awards (in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Dresden, Moscow, Belfort, Madrid, Maribor, Podgorica). His net art works form part of the permanent collections of the prestigious art institutions, among them Le Centre national d’art et de Culture Georges Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, France; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Computerfinearts – net and media art collection, New York, USA; Maribor Art Gallery, Maribor, Slovenia. As a guest artist he lectures at universities and contemporary art institutes. MORE

Sakrowski holds a master’s degree in art history and works as a freelance curator in Berlin. From 1999 to 2003 he curated and organised exhibitions and lectures on net art as part of the project netart-datenbank.org. From 2007 to 2009 he worked as a freelance researcher on the “Net Pioneers 1.0” research project at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research in Linz. Since 2007 he has been working intensively on the web.video phenomena under the name CuratingYouTube.net and has presented his own video online tool gridr.org (2012). In 2014/15 he worked for the transmediale festival “capture all” as curator. Since October 2016 he has been managing and curating the panke.gallery in Berlin-Wedding. He is a founding member (2019) of the Zentrum für Netzkunst Berlin.

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PostScript^UM #43

Valentina Tanni
The Great Algorithm

The works of US-based artist and programmer Ben Grosser have defined, revealed and defused how software activates the desire for more, as it follows the growth-obsessed corporate culture of Silicon Valley. His most recent project – presented at Aksioma Project Space – is the outcome of a new experiment that aims to generate “Software for Less”: less profit, less data and fewer users. It provides users with new tools to resist these tendencies and keep their agency in the digital era: a time where automated software systems increasingly take over every aspect of human existence, pushing the users to develop new tactics of resistance. In her essay, art historian, curator and lecturer Valentina Tanni discusses many of these spontaneous tactics to cheat the Great Algorithm used by social networks: some of these aim to reach more visibility, some aim to hide, some to invent a new language, some to exploit entropy. However weak and sparse, they represent a genuine and creative form of everyday survival.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 17 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2022
ISBN 978-961-7173-14-7 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-7173-15-4 (Digital)

Price: 24€

The craze for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that erupted in early 2021 thrust the art world into the debate on the blockchain, the decentralised public ledger that holds these tokens, as well as cryptocurrencies, and promises to make “verifiable digital scarcity” a reality. Born out of the 2008 financial crisis and seen by many as the cornerstone of a new, more private, more secure Web3, the blockchain has changed the global economy and is now reshaping the digital environment in which art is increasingly being created, distributed and exchanged. Written amidst an explosion of technological hype and a speculative frenzy, Surfing with Satoshi sets the promise of the NFT market in a historical context, investigating the technologies it is based on, the role of certificates and contracts in contemporary art, and the evolution of the media art market over the last thirty years. Riding the wave of the ongoing debate, the book tackles a series of as yet open questions, including: what does art have to do with the blockchain? Does it make sense to talk about “Crypto Art”, and if so what can be said to define it, apart from the way it is traded? Is speculation the be-all and end-all of this trend? How on earth can an infinitely reproducible digital file be deemed “unique”? Will the blockchain’s promise of disintermediation destroy the art world as we know it? And how is the art world reacting to the situation? Are NFTs an opportunity for artists or a scam perpetrated against them? Who are the collectors willing to pay millions for a certificate of authenticity, and why are they doing it? And why do the visual arts seem to have acquired such a central role in the crypto economy?

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 384 pp | B/W and 1/32 colour | soft cover | 2022
ISBN 978-961-7173-12-3

Related event: The Byzantine Generals Problem

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French edition

PostScript^UM #42

Dušan Kažić, Clémence Seurat
No One Has Ever Produced Anything

As part of the art-science research project Post Growth, initiated by the DISNOVATION.ORG – a working group aiming to question the dominant techno-positivist ideologies – Clémence Seurat spoke with French researcher Dušan Kažić. Kažić, a plant anthropologist who has studied the many types of relationships that farmers form with the plants they grow, invites us in this conversation to imagine agriculture and a world without production. The misconception that humanity cannot live without production is deeply rooted in our societies and has the status of common sense. Through the concept of production, economists deanimate living beings in order to make a resource out of them. Thus, we can begin to move away from production by animating living beings in order to maintain relationships with them and live with them. We live in an era of seeking ways of living with plants instead of producing to live. We need a new type of materialism that does not neglect other beings.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 22 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2022
ISBN 978-961-7173-08-6 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-7173-10-9 (Digital)

FR | 14.8 x 21 cm | 22 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2022
ISBN 978-961-7173-07-9 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-7173-09-3 (Digital)

French edition