Alessandro Ludovico
Artist and media critic Alessandro Ludovico interviews the three artists named Janez Janša. It’s no coincidence that they have the same name and not by chance that they share it with the former Slovenian Prime minister: they deliberately and officially changed the names they’d had from birth to Janez Janša. They also joined the right-wing SDS party led by their homonymous counterpart. After that they experienced a “visible disappearance” from having canceled their previous names but simultaneously having gained huge visibility thanks to their radical gesture. Changing your name is similar to dying: it affects more people other than just ...
“The network is everlasting,” wrote Robert Filliou and George Brecht in 1967, a statement that, at first glance, still seems to be true of today’s world. Yet there are also signs that the omnipresence of networks is evolving into another reality. In recent times, the limits of networks rather than their endless possibilities have been brought into focus. Ongoing media debates about hate speech, fake news, and algorithmic bias swirl into a growing backlash against networks. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the contemporary reach and relevance of the network imaginary.
Accompanying transmediale 2020 End to End’s exhibition The Eternal Network, ...
A micro-publication about the artwork Profiling The Profilers by DISNOVATION.ORG.
Based on state of the art big data analytics techniques, Profiling The Profilers is an artwork that generates a series of highly detailed digital profiles of Big Tech companies—i.e. psychological, cultural and political profiles—similar to the ones constantly generated for each user by these very same companies. In other words, this algorithm performs a sousveillance of Big Tech companies using their own tools.
2005
We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself – but in the end “we” own it! By establishing this autocannibalistic model we deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model. After this process we hand over the common ownership of “our” Google Shares to the GTTP Ltd. [Google To The People Public Company] which distributes them back to the users (clickers) / public.
I Read Where I Am contains visionary texts about the future of reading and the status of the word. We read anytime and anywhere. We read of screens, we read out on the streets, we read in the office but less and less we read a book at home on the couch. We are, or are becoming, a different type of reader. How will we grapple with compressed narratives and the fluid bombardment of text? What are the dialectics between image and word? How will our information machines generate new reading cultures? Can reading become a live, mobile social experience? To ...
Unfold experiments with the digital folder as a space for curatorial and artistic inquiry.
Unfold is an online library of folders in motion, progressively generated by invited guest curators. One after the other they will expand, reorganize and reshape the library engendering new research perspectives.
Each Unfold issue hosts shifting constellations of artistic content, books, found objects and software, both newly commissioned and already existing. Like all libraries, this is a space of copies, copies of copies, appropriations, heterogeneity and contradictions.
Unfold manifests itself as one transmuting folder to be disclosed and navigated. Its previous stages are preserved as ZIP files. These archived ...
Sara Giannini Dear Alessandro, thanks so much for your participation to Unfold as our 4th guest curator. Your Unfold#4: daily_unfold(ing) seems to show a structuralist approach to the digital folder, constituting the most meta Unfold issue so far! I am referring to the fact that the folders are rarely only containers but rather enunciation and narrative devices. Where did this exploration of the folder structure lead you?
Alessandro Ludovico The folder has been used for its symbolic qualities by net artists and software artists since the ‘90s. These qualities include being a container which has a universal icon, but whose content is only limited by the OS structure or the ...
The Unlike Us Reader offers a critical examination of social media, bringing together theoretical essays, personal discussions, and artistic manifestos. How can we understand the social media we use everyday, or consciously choose not to use? We know very well that monopolies control social media, but what are the alternatives? While Facebook continues to increase its user population and combines loose privacy restrictions with control over data, many researchers, programmers, and activists turn towards designing a decentralized future. Through understanding the big networks from within, be it by philosophy or art, new perspectives emerge.
Unlike Us is a research network of ...
