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 ...

Invisible flying machines are in the skies above us, remotely controlled, led by software, suspended between wonder and terror. For the artist and writer James Bridle “the drone stands in part for the network itself: an invisible, inherently connected technology making possible sight and action at a distance”. To be aware of “the cloud” we are living in is a matter of power and to make the network visible is a recurrent concern in Bridle’s work. Writer and critic Mirthe Berentsen starts from here to write a fictional futuristic short story about drones, death and digital post mortem life. Can we ...

Jon Lackman, art historian and writer, tells the story of RDS, Random Darknet Shopper, a bot created by the Swiss artists Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo, known as !Mediengruppe Bitnik. RDS is a piece of software that can operate nearly autonomously, blindly selecting an item costing less than $100 from an online black market, then paying for it from its own Bitcoin account, and having the item shipped to the address of the gallery or museum in which RDS resides at the moment. Its story began in September 2014, in an art gallery in St. Gallen, Switzerland, when it first bought a “Fire brigade master-keys set”. ...

Nicolas Maigret is a critical media artist and curator. In the Pirate Cinema, he explores piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing of audio-visual contents: a monitoring machine shows P2P transfers in real time on networks using the BitTorrent protocol. The P2P Sharing protocol is based on small-sample file fragmentation: when all the “chunks” have been downloaded, the file can then be reconstructed sample by sample until completion, from chaotic scraps received from distinct users around the world. In this essay, Geoff Cox (Associate Professor at the Dept. of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, and Adjunct Faculty at Transart Institute) opens up ...

The American born artist Jennifer Lyn Morone registered herself as a corporation in 2014, founding Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc. As the founder, CEO, owner, shareholder and product of her own company, she sells, leases, rents or invests her personal data for her own profit. She has commercialised her hormones and diamonds made from her hair, advertising them through satirical videos. In the Netopticon, the panopticon in which we live using platforms such as Facebook and Google, our data are vacuumed up to generate profits in an extreme form of capitalism. Artist and curator Marc Garrett (www.furtherfield.org) says that Jennifer Lyn ...

In her most recent research project – which culminated in the exhibition Uncertainty-in-the-Loop (2020) – the Slovenian artist Sanela Jahić presented a further stage of her multiyear project. She converted her labour as an artist – her work, research and interests of the past 14 years – into data. The dataset was elaborated by a predictive algorithm that predicted her next artwork. The independent art theoretician and curator Aude Launay placed Jahić’s work amongst works that question the concept of authorship, as she questions whether the predictive algorithms used by her can be considered to be the author of the ...

Bruce Sterling, the world famous cyberpunk sci-fi writer and ideologue of hacktivism, writes about the Italian media conceptual artist Paolo Cirio’s works on the occasion of his personal exhibition Realityflowhacked. According to Sterling, Cirio thinks as a programmer and through aggregation, contextualization and fabrication, he “sculpts” data. He draws flow diagrams – which represent the way he sees and understands reality – to show maps of vulnerabilities possibly subject to be hacked. Cirio’s diagrams function at the same time as works of art with a precise aesthetics and as operating instructions. They are meant to reveal the unethical and obfuscating ...

In this essay, initially published in Italian by NERO, the Rotterdam based writer, artist and designer Silvio Lorusso, discusses his idea of the “delegation society”, which he briefly outlined in his book Entreprecariat: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur. Nobody Is Safe (2018). The delegation society is no longer divided into Marxian classes but is instead formed into a new pyramidal order. At the top sits the professional élite who delegate reproductive work to the lower levels in order to gain time and be able to work more; at the bottom lies the highly fragmented servant class. In the middle an unstable professional class ...