Our friend Luka is performing in Image Snatchers: Technoburlesque is a mute comedy of the body that mocks rigidity of social roles. It uncritically appropriates, copies and glues together femininity, masculinity, family relationships, machismo and other degenerated social roles that are unrighteous considered to be normative. When Image Snatchers totally expose themselves — and remove their social dresses layer by layer — they do not find the essence, but realize that the essence is nothingness, and the performed travesties opium that makes living bearable. This amusing play in cross-dressing and their behavior are a result of great sexual and bodily liberation from social bands. Satisfied in eclectic noise of media images they stretch popular snap-shots and bite them to their unheard-of forms that provoke burst of laughter or despair. Image Snatchers don’t seek for meaning but pleasure. As pleasure is the hedonistic polish with which they smeared everyday objects and made something exceptional out of them. Technoburlesque is an intersection of (program/cybernetic) code and subjectivity; a laying bare of the physical and emotional body indivisibly bound up with the information matrix of contemporaneity.
“I am riddled with ambivalence. I am both the rule and its exception, the law and its outcast, the doctor and the hysteric, I cannot be one without the other. I do not reject the images that consume me. I become them.” (Mady Schutzman)
Author: admin
Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation
24/7. Algorithmic sovereignty. Anxiety. Artificial intelligence. Automation. Crowdfunding. Data extraction. Entreprecariat. Exploitation. Free labour. Free time. Gig working. Human-in-the-loop. Logistics. Machine vision. Man-machine complexity. Micro-labour. No future. Outsourcing. Peripheral work. Platform economy. Post-capitalism. Post-work. Procrastination. Quantification. Self-improvement. Social media fatigue. Time management. Unemployment. These are arguably just a few of the many keywords required to navigate our fragile, troubled, scattered present, in which the borders between life and work, home and office, sleep and wake, private and public, human and machine have faded, and in which the personal is not just political but economic. Edited by Domenico Quaranta and Janez Janša, featuring words by !Mediengruppe Bitnik (Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo) and Felix Stalder, Silvio Lorusso, Luciana Parisi, and Domenico Quaranta and works by !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Danilo Correale, Elisa Giardina Papa, Sanela Jahić, Silvio Lorusso, Jonas Lund, Michael Mandiberg, Eva and Franco Mattes, Anna Ridler, Sebastian Schmieg, Sašo Sedlaček, and Guido Segni, Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation is an attempt to scrutinise and explore some of these issues. A catchphrase borrowed from media theorist Ian Bogost, describing “the Exhausting Work of the Technology User,” hyperemployment allows us to grasp a situation which the current pandemic has turned endemic, to analyse the present and discuss possible futures.
You Are What You Buy
We took part in the YAWYB workshops. Excerpt from Times of Maltaabout YAWYB: An artistic research project held between 2016 and 2017 questioned the effects of consumption on buyers. This year, a second edition is delving deeper into the subject and is particularly looking at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our production, shopping and consumption habits.
You Are What You Buy (YAWYB) reacts to current issues on consumption and consumerism, offering an alternative artistic experience. The first edition was a year-long transdisciplinary project that departed from a reflection on our need to affirm ourselves as consumers. The research process and final presentation were set in a supermarket in Malta, offering a different possibility of where and how to experience art − away from the art institution.
Since then, the team continued thinking on how they could develop the project further.
“In the wake of the pandemic, it felt like a natural progression to revisit the project − it almost felt like a responsibility not to ignore all the changes in our production, shopping and consumption habits resulting from the impact of the pandemic. This is how YAWYB ‒ A Remote ReVisit came about,” artist Kristina Borg says.
“Also, YAWYB has always anticipated to catalyse change in our production, shopping and consumption habits, specifically inviting us producers and consumers to engage in more intelligent thinking processes while we produce and shop, with the aim of contributing to a new normal that guarantees responsible production and consumption for sustainable cities and communities. And what better time, when we’re affected by the pandemic, to reflect on this?” she continues.
In answering the research question (see box on right) and more, YAWYB – A Remote ReVisit moves outside and beyond the supermarket space to incorporate other spaces and places of production and consumption in our neighbourhoods. These include, but are not limited to, the local grocery store or the mini-market, the open markets, the supermarket, the household store, the clothes store, the coffee place, the restaurant and online platforms.
This second edition focuses mainly on research; however, the outcomes are presented through artistic and creative means.
Similar to the first edition, this second edition also collaborates with a group of community co-creators as well as with service providers. This was done remotely due to the pandemic, hence the ‘remote’ in the title. In the wake of the pandemic, it felt like a natural progression to revisit the project
“With this in mind, it is important to mention that such remote means allowed the project to widen its audience to a European-based one, attracting survey respondents and community co-creators based in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK,” Borg enthuses.
“This has also provided a wider spectrum of shared experiences as affected by different degrees and levels of the pandemic in different countries.”
DIY Synth Building Workshop
Introducing: the ‘Storbju Noise Monger’ – a simple electronic noise generating device designed by Mike Desira and Frank Cachia.
Mike and Frank will be presenting a workshop on how to build the Storbju Noise Monger – a DIY synthesizer kit built around the Texas Intruments CD40106 chip. The chip consists of 6 Schmitt-trigger circuits and with it, our designers managed to invent a 6-oscillator noise device – with 3 high speed and 3 low speed oscillators.
This baby can be powered by a range of DC voltages of up to 9 volts. Its oscillators can be connected in a modular fashion; using small jump leads in a series of small connectors. A series of 7 potentiometers are used to control the main and individual oscillator frequencies and an optical detector can also be used to change the overall frequency.
The aim during the workshop will be to provide users with basic soldering skills as well as the knowledge of how to build this specific kit. So, participants will be required to bring with them their own Storbju Noise Monger kit.
Tracking, Networks and Data
With their exploration of logistics infrastructures, !Mediengruppe Bitnik provides insights into systems that usually work invisibly. From the investigation of algorithms that evaluate our social media profiles in their work Flagged for Political Speech to interference with the greatly automated mail system in Decisions Decisions Decisions the artistic duo observes the anatomy of these fully optimized automated systems that assist our daily lives and reveals their gaps and flaws.
Now it’s time for you to join the workshop with !Mediengruppe Bitnik and explore the hidden, unmapped networks of the world around you. Using five mini GPS trackers as tactical tools we will explore the service networks, waste management, transport networks of the city while the position data generated by the trackers will allow us to make visible movements as maps.
The two-day workshop in the form of a presentation and planning on the first day, and practical work on the second, will take place via Zoom. All participants will be able to follow the movement of devices on the map online for a continuous period of 5 to 10 days. Participants will work in teams of 3 and can either enroll as a group or individually. No special skills are required, however all partakers should have access to an end device and a good internet connection.
Sensoria
The human sensorium (or the world of sensory stimuli) has always been mediated. But over the past few decades that condition has greatly intensified. The microspeaker in the ear, the drug in the blood, the nanosurgical implant, the simulated taste in the mouth – these “enhancements” no longer provoke the apocalyptic excitement… The relative calm this situation provides, gives us time for reflection: a propitious moment for artists and other culture workers to interpret, think, and reckon with the sense of our mediated sensorium.” (Carolin Jones, “Sensorium”, MIT 2006).
The RIXC symposium offers a vision by artists and theorists on the world of the aesthetics of augmented senses and experience, stretching from the earliest beginnings of sensory data research to the interaction of immersive and sensory technologies between various perception sensors of the human body.
Harnessing the Power of Sound in Immersive Storytelling
Creative Director and Immersive Artist Tamara Shogaolu will discuss the role of sound in her immersive storytelling process. In a medium often focused on visual achievement, Shogaolu will speak to the potential of pushing the boundaries of sound. Although varying in theme and form her recent projects are all connected by the centrality of sound. Her transmedia series Queer in a Time of Forced Migration is based on oral histories of LGBTQ refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Her full dome experience, Echoes of Silence, is told entirely using archival audio from world cinema set in space. Sound is also a vital ingredient in her upcoming immersive experience, Anouschka which is to be voiced in spoken word. As an animated, interactive experience — designed for Ado Ato’s new story room platform Bemmbé Immersive™ — ANOUSCHKA invites the audience to play an active role in the storytelling through the use of immersive audio and different interactive lyrical components. The same is true for her soon to premiere collaboration with Frontline PBS, Un(re)solved. Shogaolu’s studio is working in tandem with the legacy news organization to further champion their mission to innovate storytelling. Un(re)solved will examine the FBI’s efforts to investigate over 100 potentially racist killings, while illuminating stories of those still seeking justice. In her talk, Shogaolu will discuss what follows when you allow the sound to shape the world of story.
Tamara Shogaolu is the founder and creative director of Ado Ato Pictures. She has worked for Sony Pictures Animation. The Tribeca Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art in New York and National Gallery of Indonesia have featured her work. The Guardian, Forbes Magazine and Vogue have named her as a leader in the field of new and immersive media. She was a 2018 Sundance Fellow, a 2019 Gouden Kalf Nominee, a 2020 Creative Capital Award Recipient, and a 2020 Sundance Grantee.
Further resources:
Lecture Videos MIT Open Documentary Lab
Immerse
XR@ODL
ODL and Co-Creation Studio fellows
Docubase
Co-Creation Studio
Algoregimes
Dérives in the Digital: Avant-garde Ideology in Hacker Cultures
With many decision systems within our societies moving towards automation they are becoming increasingly data-driven. Algorithms are assigned a central role within these systems to make the decisions based on numbers. This evolving landscape of decision-making is hard to disentangle because many parts – the data sources, the algorithms, the processes – are deliberately kept secret and opaque. How can aesthetic practices help gain insights into these systems? And what could we do with this insight?
The upcoming streaming event entitled #ALGOREGIMES is an informal conversation between !Mediengruppe Bitnik and Felix Stalder on topics such as the invisibility of institutional processes, the functioning of infrastructures and logistics, and freedom and control in the data economy.
Decisions Decisions Decisions
The work DECISIONS DECISIONS DECISIONS seeks out the imperfections in the logistic systems in which nowadays computers calculate nearly all necessary decisions. To do so, 27 packages were shipped out from Berlin via the logistics services provider DHL. Each package was, however, given two delivery addresses: one for Aksioma in Ljubljana and one for Drugo More in Rijeka. One address on each side of the parcel.
The resulting installation at the two exhibition spaces is formed from the letters that randomly arrive at each location, leaving the authorship of work as much to the artists as the postal machines.
Before reaching their final destinations, many of the parcels travel back and forth between different postal facilities. Depending on which side is scanned, they change directions multiple times. A TV screen in the gallery shows the recordings of the movements for each parcel, documenting the surrealist journey of the piece.
The now-empty boxes are presented in the gallery as the remaining envelope of the work and skeletons of the process.
The work experiments with forcing a decision-making process on the postal system which does not usually decide – only routes. The work reinterprets The Postman’s Choice by Ben Vautier from the year 1965 in which a postal worker decides where a postcard that has two delivery addresses is finally to be sent. As it was back then, the standard rule in digital shipping operations is that for every shipping unit there must be one sender and one clear recipient. In today’s fully automated logistics systems, it is no longer the postman’s choice, but rather a question of which side of a parcel is “up” for the automated scanning process to read. The logistics system works mechanically by means of barcodes, scanners and programmed directives. Until the human supervisor spots and corrects the anomaly of the undecided recipient.
The Black Book of push-backs
A 1500-page ‘Black Book’ that documents the horrific violence suffered by over 12,000 people at the hands of authorities on the EU’s external borders has been released today – International Migrants Day – by The Left in the European Parliament. Compiled by BVMN and printed over two volumes, the ‘Black Book of Pushbacks’ is a collection of hundreds of testimonies of migrants and asylum seekers who have experienced human rights violations at external borders.