The 15th century Voynich Manuscript, Kandinsky’s abstract painting with a secret encoded message, militant jihadists using porn images for hidden communication and most recently computer malware embedding virus code into images on infected computers (and perhaps this text too) are examples of steganography, which can be also found in Amy Suo Wu’s works. By using Cardan Grille, substitution ciphers and camouflaged text within text in combination with invisible inks, Wu’s works are more than just highly enjoyable pieces of visual art and calligraphic design. As a combination of exhibition works, toolkit manuals and workshops, they are also pieces of practical ...

A mysterious and controversial technology is among us: the blockchain. Constructed by unicorns piecing together the necessary building blocks of code, cryptography and incentives, it can lead humankind to Utopia, or to the Final Solution – the End. If it’s true that “It Is Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism,” as a popular bumper sticker warns, the artist Jaya Klara Brekke, currently pursuing a PhD on the political geographies of blockchain infrastructures, invites us to come back from elsewhere in the future to stay here and now, and not to fear indeterminacy. Written ...

“What the Internet stood for, for a long time, is something that I’m still nostalgically supporting,” said Constant Dullaart in an interview. The Dutch artist, lecturer and curator grew up in an age of the Internet “designed to be used by everyone”. In its first years, the Internet proved to be the place of warm, authentic relationships, the place where one looked for friends, not followers, and where one engaged in peer-to-peer discussions, not in simply adding a number to a stack. Now we work in corporate backyards and, especially in social network environments, we are very easily and almost ...

In 2010, drawing on Richard Grusin’s theory of “premediation”, the Italian artist collective IOCOSE – specializing in pranks and hoaxes – released the video In the Long Run. The video is the realistic reconstruction of the media event “death of a star”. It was realized following the ritual rules of news format displayed in such cases, staging the death of Madonna as narrated by the BBC. As the art curator and critic Domenico Quaranta explains, there is a long tradition of fake media events, the most famous being The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles. In the Long Run, however, differs from ...

The Slovenian philosopher, sociologist and politician Lev Kreft ascribes All About You, the new work by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, to the tradition of the Readymade and Self-portrait. But very peculiar ones: the ordinary objects turned into an artwork are IDs and personalized bank cards, the self-portrait is the ID card itself, but also all data about the account and money transfers a given bank card holds. How far can a card owner make his own personal credit card? As well as a citizen has to respect some limitations when changing his name, a bank customer has ...

After a historical recognition of electronic music and sound’s exploration performed in art galleries – i.e. not in the spaces traditionally dedicated to music – the architect and art curator Jurij Krpan describes Batista’s projects collected in the exhibition Temporary Objects and Hybrid Ambients 2008–2010. Batista – who is a tech-mixed-media artist, sound researcher, video experimentalist and AV performer – creates hardware environments that establish connections between digital and analogic, electronic and mechanic, visual and sound, audience and machines. He manages to change the perception of electronic as the realm of precision and perfection, showing its characteristics of unintelligibility and imprecision. Through ...

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 ...

Is the idea of society as the totality of individuals the only way of envisioning human sociality, or is it only a historically determined construct? What other dimensions emerge when we shift from thinking in terms of individuals to dividuals and their assembling into condividuals? Which are the political implications of this shift in the contemporary capitalism that already operates on a condividual level? Starting from these questions, the Dutch media theorist Daniel de Zeeuw explored the visions exposed during a two-day event, inspired by Marco Deseriis’s book, Proper and Improper Names – Identity in the Information Society (Ljubljana, 17–18 ...

A conversation between Or Ettlinger and Pablo Garcia about the definition of virtual space on the occasion of Pablo Garcia’s exhibition at Aksioma, “Adventures in Virtuality”. Both Ettlinger and Garcia are academics, the former teaches Virtual Architecture and Media Theory in Ljubljana, the latter Contemporary Practices at the Art Institute of Chicago; they both share an interest in sci-fi, classical arts and both studied Architecture. Is “digital” a synonym for virtual? Are simulations virtual realities? Is the mental space a virtual space? These are the main questions discussed in this conversation and the answers are not so obvious. Virtual spaces are as ...

At the 8th edition of the MoneyLab conference, hosted by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Nika Mahnič interviewed RYBN about their work as a part of the Tax havens: Normalized Grand Theft panel. RYBN is an artist collective formed in 1999 that has, over the past years, researched the economy and the global financial system in their contemporary manifestations, thus offering a privileged vantage point from which one can view the transformations brought about by cybernetics. In this interview, they delve into their background, their achievements in databasing, the golden passport phenomenon and why offshoring was and remains a ...

Bojana Kunst, philosopher, dramaturg and contemporary art theorist, writes about “the theatre by other means” performed by BADco., on occasion of their Responsibility for Things Seen spatial intervention and video installation in the Aksioma art gallery. BADco. is a Zagreb-based performance collective formed in 2000 by four choreographers and dancers, two dramaturgs and one philosopher. Their performances – which have been presented throughout Europe and the U.S. – do not follow a linear dramaturgical structure, but create the theatre event as a complex synchronization of actions, shifts, speeches and movements, focusing on a concrete political interest. The choreographies, images, spaces ...