PostScript
Series Editor Janez Janša
Publishing Agent Marcela Okretič
Proofreader Rebecca Cachia
Designs Luka Umek, Sonja Grdina
Publishing Agent Marcela Okretič
Proofreader Rebecca Cachia
Designs Luka Umek, Sonja Grdina
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana is a non-profit cultural institution based in Ljubljana (Slovenia), interested in projects that utilize new technologies in order to investigate and discuss the structures of modern society. Aksioma creates international projects and activities that foster collaborations and exchanges with artists and cultural institutions inside and outside Slovenia.
Series Titles
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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 ... -
Since the second half of the 90s, storytelling has become a central strategy in hacktivism and media art, whereas before, actions and performances aimed at creating disturbance, boycotts and resistance. To Inke Arns – theorist of media art and artistic director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund – media artists and performers such as Yes Men, Christoph Schlingensief, RTMark, Laibach and Ubermorgen have chosen the strategy of “over identification”, which uses narrative and storytelling, in many of their works. In the projects Voteauction (2000), Psych|OS (2002), EKMRZ-Trilogy(2005–2008), through narratives and counter-narratives, the artist duo Ubermorgen.com enable the audience to understand the complex structures that underlie the functioning ... -
Some media events have real effects on the world simply by taking place, states writer and editor Steve Rushton. They are “pseudo events”, a concept coined by Daniel Boorstin in 1962 to describe events designed only to be reported. Rushton collaborated in the visual artist Rod Dickinson’s Closed Circuit – Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, a live performance in which a totally realistic presidential speech to the press is staged. The script was created by Rushton, who composed it from fragments of speeches delivered on both sides of the Iron Curtain since the Cold War, with the aim of showing ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
Art critic Ida Hiršenfelder interviews Trevor Paglen, a radical geographer with an academic background, muckraking author and outlaw artist who has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies for several years. Hiršenfelder and Paglen discuss here four projects: Simbology (2006) – a collection of insignia and patches used in secret operations, Missing Persons – a list of fake names used to cover up CIA agents in the war on terror, Code Names – a catalogue of words, phrases and terms employed for active military programs, and Limit Telephotography Project, which unveils the geographies of classified ... -
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 ... -
monochrom is an Austrian art-technology-philosophy group active since 1993. Through the years, monochrom has collected Zeigerpointer images in the form of newspaper clippings, in an operation of media-cultural archaeology.Zeigerpointer is a term used to describe images used by printed media – especially local free magazines – to illustrate the aftermath of crimes and accidents where only the witness is left, showing emptiness. Instead of the object of the article, Zeigerpointerimages portray witnesses who point at the place where something happened.In the project The Wonderful World of Absence, a selection of these printed pictures has been painted in oil to be shown to the public. An ... -
Fuck the Systsem! And the Illiterate! Conversation with Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG PostScriptVuk Ćosić, the Serbian pioneer of net.art, monologues with Franco and Eva Mattes, the famous Italian pair of art pranksters, also known as 0100101110101101.org. He leaves blanks to be filled by them in another moment, creating an asynchronous text performance. They build a dissertation about their recent works – like Freedom, No Fun and Plan C – as Eva and Franco Mattes add comments and further explanations to Ćosic’s observations and hints. The readers will find out that the three artists had met in Slovenia way back in 1998, when they were all the same person, Luther Blissett. Touchingly, Eva and Franco give thanks to Vuk for ... -
To media art curator and critic Ida Hiršenfelder, Antoine Schmitt’s art and his project Time Slip ask us: nowadays, who can divide the virtual from the real? Time Slip is a LED news ticker operating in real time: a computer software transcribes official online news released by news agencies, changing the past tense to the future tense. In doing this, it constructs an ambiguous relation between the present, the past and the potential. Time Slip is about the relation between cause, effect, randomness and free will: reading news about facts that have already happened disallows the audience’s ability to be active about them; whereas, oppositely, ... -
From the first human artistic expression in cave paintings until now, black has been constantly reinvented by art. Like other 20th-century artists (Rothko, Malevic, Klein) before him have done, Belgian Frederik De Wilde explores the nature of colors and produces monochromatic works, but focusing on black in a radical and scientific manner. In Hostage, as art historian Elise Aspord explains, he has created a material made up of a vertical alignment of nanotubes of carbon that can absorb almost all rays of light, thus giving a new universal reference for black. This work is the result of a close collaboration between ... -
Domenico Quaranta, art curator and critic, writes about the 2004 project Evidence Locker by Jill Magid, now part of the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of New York. Jill Magid is a visual artist who has focused her work since the beginning (the end of the 90s) on surveillance infrastructures and the relationship between observers and the observed. In Evidence Locker, she has built an epistolary romantic relationship with the City Watch System of Liverpool – the largest video surveillance system in all of Britain – bringing into being a story in which love and seduction become tools for ... -
The journalist and dramaturg Andreja Kopač and the media art critic Ida Hiršenfelder here discuss the unique aesthetics and discursive strategies in the work of Neven Korda. In his career that spans three decades, Neven Korda has created a range of specific performative practices that emerge at the intersection of the textual, the visual and the musical. With his projects, Korda has been emphasising the importance of theatre both in its nature of communal space as well as in the appropriation of the performative that it allows. Every instalment or performance unravels and deepens his intentions, namely searching for the ... -
Régine Debatty, Belgian curator, critic and blogger, writes about the art of Evan Roth, focusing on his TSA Communication project. Evan Roth is a graffiti artist, a hacker and an open source coder. He believes in the free circulation of anything that is digital. His works with F.A.T. lab steer attention onto the fantastic five – Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft – and related issues with humor and a mix of digital and analogic practices. In TSA Communication, he has taken his artistic creativity inside one of the most controlled and liberty-killing places in our contemporary world: airports and airplanes. He ... -
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 ... -
In the summer of 2007, three artists from Slovenia legally changed their names to “Janez Janša”. They have claimed that it was not for artistic purposes but was an intimate, personal decision. Art curator and critic Domenico Quaranta takes them seriously, quoting Boris Groys: in today’s biopolitical age, life can be an art form. The three Janšas have gone beyond this, as they have canceled the border between art and life. Making life and art coincide has many consequences, for example in the Troika exhibition, by presenting their original and valid ID cards, passports and bank cards as artworks, they ... -
Historians divide geological eras into different “ages”, and we can say that ours is the Plastic Age. This human-generated organic material is now part of the natural world, as the Great Pacific Plastic Patch shows. For Daniela Silvestrin, a cultural manager and curator specialized in bioart, this is where the artistic speculation of artist Pinar Yolas starts. What if life started today in these plastic wreck-filled oceans? What kinds of life forms would emerge out of this contemporary primordial ooze? Yoldas’ Ecosystem of Excess is the answer to these questions. She makes us face the issue of climate change, imagining the post-human world ... -
Originally published in the catalogue of the group exhibition Eternal September – The rise of amateur culture, this essay by the Slovenian art collective Smetnjak is an excursus about Internet memes, especially about the kind known as the image macro. The image macro – a picture combined with superimposed texts in order to produce a humorous effect – represents one of the most popular means of expression on the Internet for years. The assemblage of an image and a caption seems to respond to the call Walter Benjamin made in his book about Charles Baudelaire The Writer of Modern Life, a call ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
Molleindustria, the “brand” name of Italian game designer Paolo Pedercini, has been a project of reappropriation of video games and a call for the radicalization of popular culture since 2003. On the occasion of the All Work, No Play exhibition at Aksioma Project Space in June 2015, a significant selection of its games was made. The exhibited games deal with the theme of the conflict between life and work, as (video)games can be used to address critically socio-political issues such as flexibility, precariousness and alienation. In this essay, Paolo Ruffino, member of the art group IOCOSE and academic, explores the working ... -
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”. ... -
The philosopher Tomislav Medak takes the works and the research of Sašo Sedlaček as a vantage point from which to consider how forms of social domination structure technological development in the present and how the present technological configuration is functional for the reproduction of those forms of social domination. Sedlaček’s works show the advancement of technology as a source of waste. They also deploy methods of re-purposing the technologies that grow in the shadows of capitalist technoscience – obsolete hardware, free software, alternative technology design and indigenous techniques. The marginal status of such alternative technologies speaks to the fact that ... -
“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 ... -
This tale by Slovenian writer and philosopher Mojca Kumerdej tells of Moo, a woman who lives in a prehistoric age when the passing of time is marked by “bigmoons”, when animals are both sacred and hunted, both enemies and allies, and when the only medicine available are herbs provided by a shaman. Moo, who knows how to listen to the voice of nature, has been chosen to be the new shaman of her clan in a world at the dawn of civilization, where incest is condemned and wisdom is passed by word of mouth from generation to generation. In other ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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 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 ... -
During the last 15 years – when technology has become more natural and habitual, thus causing people to lose control over it – an emerging scene of network practitioners from different fields has been actively involved in building alternative networks of communication and file sharing. Among the practitioners of this DIY networking scene, a growing number of artists have been playing a crucial role as facilitator, mediator, and commoner of knowledge and experience. The artists have been offering tools of understanding based on their will to expose and make accessible opaque systems in an effort to empower people. Daphne Dragona ... -
James Bridle (one of Wired magazine’s 100 most influential people in Europe) is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. In 2018, he curated the exhibition and conference Transnationalisms, produced by Aksioma in the framework of the international cooperation project State Machines. Bridle has spent the recent years researching citizenship-by-investment and related technologies: special economic zones and free trade areas, freeports and seasteads, blockchain and other supposedly emancipatory but inhuman and asset-based protocols for identity management. At every level, the mass movement of peoples and the rise of planetary-scale computation is changing the way we think and understand ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
Highways, antennas, containers, storehouses, pipes, submarine cables, sensors: the word infrastructure usually refers to “matter that enables the movement of other matter”, the underlying organized structures and mediators that support human exchanges and the value people associate with them. However, simple observation suggests that something increasingly valuable is happening not simply “above”, but both within and outside, as well as in-between our so-called infra-structures while humans design and inhabit them in ever more convoluted ways, investing their emotions in them and using them to measure, automate and build world visions and expectations about the future. This essay is an introduction ... -
The essay is a commentary of the last ten years of Smetnjak’s intellectually, politically and ethically outstanding production. Intellectually as a collection of theoretic – yet not academic – references, which makes them contemporary, to the point and intriguing and not a part of the canon established for the purpose of raising epigons of one ‘school’ or another. Politically as an exercise in thought, which does not assume fixed sides or viewpoints – not because it would be vague or opportunistic, but because it is too intense to be caught in the fixed positions of identity. Ethically as an attitude ... -
In their space race the gurus of the NewSpace movement are expanding an imaginary that hybridizes individualism, libertarianism, neoliberal economics, counterculture and utopianism. Why I Want to Fuck Elon Musk plays with these cultural references, taking inspiration from the most emblematic statements spoken or tweeted by Elon Musk in recent years. Daniel Rourke, a London-based writer, artist and academic, has resorted to working with the OpenAI Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) language model to imagine and narrate chronicles from a near future in which blockchains have materialized and the deepfakes of Bezos and Musk have colonized Mars. The fictional universe thus ... -
Analysis, Exposure and Addition: The Aesthetic and Ecological Logics of Joana Moll’s Carbolytics PostScriptDespite their ubiquity and relevance, data collection practices remain opaque and their carbon footprint has rarely been investigated. What is more, data collection is a key resource in the global supply chain of AdTech, the primary business model of the data economy system. The Carbolytics project, developed by artist and researcher Joana Moll in collaboration with researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, is a way of understanding the collective existence of cookies and their role in the outsourced production of carbon dioxide. The interactive web-based installation shows the average global volume of cookie traffic in real time and demonstrates how cookies parasitize ... -
Ever since 1990, computing has been opening up entirely new types of resources for extraction. In the digital context, the notion of extractivism points to the fact that “data is taken without meaningful consent and fair compensation for the producers and sources of that data.” Felix Stalder, professor of Digital Culture at the Zurich University of the Arts, points out that computing has boosted the great acceleration of human activities that has moved the Earth system into the Anthropocene. If we are to prevent the deeply authoritarian responses to the impending climate breakdown, we should unveil the colonialist character and ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
So far, many of the things we build on and with blockchains have presented themselves as new types of property enclosures. From cryptocurrencies to NFTs, decentralized ledger technology seems mostly dominated by the asset logic of financialization. But the landscape of blockchain-enabled digital culture is fantastically diverse and can encode much more than a desire for wealth and ownership. In this short essay, media theory and digital art researcher Martin Zeilinger explores what might become possible – for artists, activists or community organizers – when we reimagine blockchains not as property-oriented infrastructure, but as structures of belonging. Doing so may ...
