!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Selena Savić, Gordan Savičić
One Star Review Tour

Curated by
!Mediengruppe Bitnik

Exhibition
3–26 April 2024
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics&Practice #15: (Un)real Data – Real Effects

With One Star Review Tour, Selena Savić, Gordan Savičić and !Mediengruppe Bitnik look at how rating systems shape the perception and experience of a place. In contemporary data-driven environments, credit scores, social influence rankings and product/service reviews dictate choices regarding, for example, selecting a doctor, shopping or dining out. One of the most widely used evaluation schemes online is the five-star system. Its popularity stems from the ease of judgement it proposes, its implied clarity (five is better than one) and the way it transforms personal opinions into objective values by way of aggregation (individual reasoning doesn’t matter if many people come to the same conclusion).

While the reviews are often nothing more than personal opinions, their cumulative values have become a driving force for the service and tourist industries as well as many other sectors of the economy. For businesses, reviews have become a feared measure of success or bust.

Not all sites, services or products can align with conventional consumer requirements. To obtain the five-star rating, they must be easy to consume, readily available, impressive, fun or “instagrammable”. And while privately owned companies can fight bad online reviews, public spaces can hardly talk back or ask Google to leave them alone.

The exhibition at Aksioma explores what it means when places we love are scrutinised and publicly rated: it investigates the politics of rating systems and engages with the power of reviews to produce real effects.

1 ⭐ Review Tour Ljubljana
Video, 4K UHD, sound, 16 min 15 sec, loop. Yellow PVC lamella curtain, automatic massage chair, screen, speakers.

The 1 ⭐ Review Tour Ljubljana is a virtual tour of Ljubljana using one star reviews as a guide. The video-based tour leads to 180 one star reviews scraped from Google Maps. The installation contrasts the negativity of the reviews with the comfort of a fully automated massage chair. The anger provoked by listening to so many complaints about places we hold dear is counteracted by the massage, creating a 5 star setting for 1 star opinions.

1 ⭐ Review Tour Secrets
Video, 4K UHD, 60 fps, sound, 20 min 15 sec, loop. Portable massage chair, tablet, tablet holder, headphones. 

The 1 ⭐ Review Tour Secrets is a video essay which explores the politics of rating systems and their real world consequences. Juxtaposing the well-known format of silent city walks with a whispered narrative, the history of reviews is told between the contrasting contexts of public and private. The essay is viewed through the headrest of a shiatsu chair, with the body suspended in the expectation of a relaxing massage.

1 ⭐ Review Tour Browser Extension
Browser extension for Chrome and Firefox. Lying face down gaming cushion, foldable yoga mat, screen, mouse. 

The 1 ⭐ Review Tour Browser Extension is a browser based artwork that filters reviews on Google Maps to show only one star ratings. By focusing on the poetics of failed expectations, the 1 ⭐ Review Tour Browser Extension shifts perspectives on the places you visit. 1 ⭐ Review Tour Browser Extension cuts the utilitarian connection we have with review systems. Instead of using online reviews to chose the five star option, we focus on the negative, as a way of engaging with the politics of rating systems and their power to influence real world spaces.

1 out of 5
Light installation. Five polyethylene stars, custom electronics.

1 out of 5 is a light sculpture and part of a series of works that explore the politics of rating systems and the power ratings have to produce real effects.

THE AUTHORS

!Mediengruppe Bitnik (read: the not Mediengruppe Bitnik) are contemporary artists working on, and with, the internet. Their practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. In the past, they have been known to subvert surveillance cameras, bug an opera house to broadcast its performances to people at home, send a parcel containing a camera to Julian Assange and physically glitch a building. In 2014, they sent a bot called Random Darknet Shopper on a three-month shopping spree in the darknets where it randomly bought items like keys, cigarettes, trainers and Ecstasy, and had them sent directly to the gallery space. !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s works are shown internationally, and the group has received various awards including the Swiss Art Award, the PAX Art Award and the Golden Cube from Dokfest Kassel.

Selena Savić is a researcher and trained architect. Since 2023, she has been Assistant Professor of Protohistory of Artificial Intelligence and Machines in the Arts at the University of Amsterdam. After a PhD at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and an SNSF-funded postdoc at Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, TU Vienna, she worked at the Basel Academy of Art and Design, where she led the Make/Sense PhD programme. She has edited four books (Radio Explorations, forthcoming; Teaching Artistic Strategies, forthcoming; Ghosts of Transparency, 2019; and Unpleasant Design, 2013) and written numerous book and journal contributions on computational modelling, feminist hacking and posthuman networks in the context of art, design and architecture. Her research interests animate a practice at the intersection of computational processes and posthumanist and postcolonial critique of technology. Her current research focuses on data and measurement, offering a generative perspective on the interrelations between technicity of making art and technicity of circulating it.

Gordan Savičić is an artist and critical engineer whose work investigates the impact of digital culture on society through a diverse range of media. His artistic research focuses on rendering invisible infrastructures visible, probing the significance of datafication and performing digital interventions, both on- and offline. Born in Vienna, he pursued studies in media art and design in Vienna and Rotterdam, currently holding a teaching position in Lucerne. Recognitions include awards and honorary mentions from transmediale, Rhizome and Ars Electronica. He regularly collaborates with groups like Berlin’s weise7 in organising workshops, exhibitions and publications that focus on networking, tactical media and software art.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

PUBLICATION

(un)real data ☁️ – (🧊)real effects

Contributors: Régine Debatty, Thomas Spies, Xiaowei Wang, Milia Xin Bi, Günseli Yalçınkaya

Editors: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Janez Fakin Janša

► ORDER

WORKSHOP

!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Selena Savić, Gordan Savičić
⭐ 1 Star Workshop
TUE, 2 April 2024, 3-6 PM
ALUO, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana