SOCIAL GLITCH

Radical aesthetics and the consequences of extreme events SYLVIA ECKERMANN, GERALD NESTLER, MAXIMILIAN THOMAN

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Radikale Ästhetik und die Konsequenzen extremer Ereignisse 25 09 2015 – 05 12 2015 SYLVIA ECKERMANN, GERALD NESTLER, MAXIMILIAN THOMAN

LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN, HEATH BUNTING, PABLO CHIEREGIN, INES DOUJAK & JOHN BARKER, EARTH SENSING ASSOCIATION / NABIL AHMED, SYLVIA ECKERMANN, URSULA ENDLICHER, HARUN FAROCKI, THOMAS FEUERSTEIN, FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE (SUSAN SCHUPPLI, EYAL WEIZMAN, ET AL.), BERNHARD GARNICNIG & LUKAS HEISTINGER, CHRISTINA GOESTL, AYESHA HAMEED, DEBORAH HAZLER, HOELB/HOEB, MATHIAS KESSLER, ELVEDIN KLACAR, VOLKMAR KLIEN, MARK LOMBARDI, MANU LUKSCH, JENNIFER MATTES, GERALD NESTLER, GODOFREDO PEREIRA, AXEL STOCKBURGER, GERALD STRAUB, SZELY, TECHNOPOLITICS, UBERMORGEN, STEFANIE WUSCHITZ.

SOCIAL GLITCH Radikale Ästhetik und die Konsequenzen extremer Ereignisse 25 09 2015 – 05 12 2015

Eine Ausstellung im KUNSTRAUM NIEDEROESTERREICH mit Projekten im öffentlichen Raum Wiens und in Zusammenarbeit mit TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien und WUK.performing.arts Kuratiert von Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler und Maximilian Thoman Performances, kokuratiert von Bettina Kogler Klanginstallationen, kokuratiert von Georg Weckwerth Workshops und Interventionen, kokuratiert von Gerald Straub

Ein Projekt von

In Kooperation mit medien.kunst.tirol

INHALT CONTENT

Christiane Krejs

VORWORT PREFACE 5

Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler, Maximilian Thoman SOCIAL GLITCH Radikale Ästhetik und die Konsequenzen extremer Ereignisse 17 SOCIAL GLITCH Radical Aesthetics and the Consequences of Extreme Events 16

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION Lawrence Abu Hamdan 19 Ines Doujak & John Barker 21 Earth Sensing Association / Nabil Ahmed 25 Sylvia Eckermann 29 Harun Farocki 33 Thomas Feuerstein 35 Forensic Architecture 39 Christina Goestl 41 Ayesha Hameed 43 Mathias Kessler 45 Mark Lombardi 49 Jennifer Mattes 50 Gerald Nestler 53 Godofredo Pereira 57 Axel Stockburger 61 UBERMORGEN 63 Technopolitics 65

KLANGINSTALLATIONEN SOUND INSTALLATIONS Volkmar Klien 71 Szely 73

WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONEN WORSHOPS & INTERVENTIONS Heath Bunting 79 Pablo Chieregin, hoelb/hoeb, Elvedin Klacar � 81 Manu Luksch 85 Gerald Straub 87 Stefanie Wuschitz 89

PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCES Ursula Endlicher 91 Deborah Hazler 95

PANEL DISKUSSIONEN PANEL DISCUSSIONS

99 continent. 4.4 / 2015 special issue on SOCIAL GLITCH 101 BIOGRAFIEN BIOGRAPHIES IMPRESSUM IMPRINT

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PREFACE

SOCIAL GLITCH Never before has art dealt so intensely with the societal and social impact of Internet political agitation and developments. We are now all aware that everywhere we go on the Internet, using our credit cards, leaving comments on Facebook, posting photographs, expressing or sharing opinions, or just writing emails, we leave behind data. Saved information is classified, interpreted, read, and used or abused economically, politically, technologically, or militarily. Codes define a digital parallel world. Fictional individuals are constructed, a “virtual self” that is impossible to grasp, moves around online. But individuals tend to reflect little about this. Instead, we place our faith in algorithms and bots that promise the discovery of truth and knowledge, a dream of humanity ever since the lie detector was discovered. The belief that human fallibility could be abolished using machines and computers justifies all too often a careless use of the digital information world.

“Total surveillance is the accepted and tolerated scenario in Western democracies. Its widespread acceptance goes back to the early modern period . . . State surveillance is considered protection,” as Krystian Woznicki recently wrote in Spingerin (Winter 2015, 11). That is now changing. Surveillance has become anonymous. Those doing the surveillance no longer take on responsibility, are no longer protectors of civil society but only profit-oriented beneficiaries. But since the Snowden case, an opposition to the uncontrolled use of data has been gradually on the rise.

The trust that was until now placed in the digital world and its structures of networking made us blind to the unexpectedly faulty functions that are not only immanent to human beings, but also to technological systems. The smallest disturbances and imprecision can cause massive shifts in the societal and social structure.

Miniscule mistakes in the development of living beings are ultimately what allowed the human being to develop from single-cell beings. Mistakes are productive and drive evolution forward. But they can also destroy. The curator team Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler and Maximilian Thoman look at possible errors, slips, disruptions in the digital information system, the glitch and its consequences and potentials. The show presents artworks around the phenomenon of unexpected “glitches” with far-reaching social and political implications.

With the exhibition SOCIAL GLITCH, accompanied by interventions, performances, and rounds of discussion featuring leading artists and theorists, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich takes up an explosive political subject in this cooperation with WUK performing arts and TONSPUR Kunstverein, and with a variety of artistic approaches it seeks to explore the issue in depth.

Christiane Krejs Artistic director, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich

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VORWORT

SOCIAL GLITCH Nie zuvor hat sich die Kunst so intensiv mit den gesellschaftlichen und sozialen Auswirkungen netzpolitischer Agitationen und Entwicklungen auseinandergesetzt.

Dass wir überall, wo wir uns im Internet bewegen, Kreditkarten verwenden, auf Facebook unsere Kommentare abgeben und Fotos zeigen, Meinungen äußern und teilen oder einfach nur E-Mails schreiben, auch Daten hinterlassen, ist uns mittlerweile bewusst. Gespeicherte Informationen werden zugeordnet, interpretiert, gedeutet und sowohl ökonomisch, politisch, technologisch als auch militärisch genutzt und missbraucht. Codes bestimmen eine digitale Parallelwelt. Fiktive Personen werden konstruiert, ein „virtuelles Ich“, das nicht nachvollziehbar ist, bewegt sich im Netz. Die Reflexion des Individuums darüber ist aber gering. Vielmehr vertrauen wir Algorithmen und Bots, die die Aufdeckung von Wahrheit und Erkenntnis versprechen. Ein Menschheitstraum, seit es den Lügendetektor gibt. Der Glaube, die menschliche Fehlbarkeit durch den Einsatz von Maschinen und Rechensystemen ausschalten zu können, rechtfertigt oft unseren achtlosen Umgang mit der digitalen Informationswelt. „Totalüberwachung gehört in westlichen Demokratien zu den angenommenen und geduldeten Szenarien. Die weit verbreitete Akzeptanz geht auf die Neuzeit zurück. (…) Die staatlichen Überwacher galten als Beschützer.“, schreibt Krystian Woznicki in der Spingerin (Heft 1 Winter 2015, S.11). Das hat sich heute verändert. Die ÜberwacherInnen sind anonym geworden. Sie übernehmen keine Verantwortung mehr, sind nicht mehr Beschützer der Zivilgesellschaft, sondern nur noch profitorientierte Nutznießer. Seit dem Fall Edward Snowden zeigt sich langsam Unmut über die völlig unkontrollierbare Datennutzung.

Das Vertrauen, das in die digitale Welt und ihre Vernetzungsstrukturen bislang gesetzt wurde, hat uns blind gemacht für unerwartete Fehlfunktionen, die nicht nur dem Menschen, sondern auch den technologischen Systemen immanent sind. Kleinste Störungen und Unschärfen können massive Verschiebungen im gesellschaftlichen und sozialen Gefüge bewirken.

Kleinste Fehler in der Entwicklung der Lebewesen haben aus Einzellern den Menschen entstehen lassen. Fehler sind produktiv und treiben die Evolution voran. Sie können aber auch zerstören. Dem möglichen Fehler, der Panne, der Störung im digitalen Informationssystem, dem „Glitch“ und seinen Konsequenzen bzw. Potentialen widmet sich das KuratorInnen- und KünstlerInnen Team Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler und Maximilian Thoman. Die Schau zeigt künstlerische Arbeiten rund um das Phänomen unerwarteter Fehlfunktionen mit weitreichenden sozialen und politischen Konsequenzen. Mit der Ausstellung SOCIAL GLITCH und Interventionen, Performances und Diskussionsrunden hochkarätiger KünstlerInnen und TheoretikerInnen in Kooperation mit WUK performing arts und TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien greift der Kunstraum Niederoesterreich ein brisantes politisches Thema auf, die Schau leistet durch die Vielfalt der künstlerischen Zugänge eine intensive Auseinandersetzung.

Christiane Krejs Künstlerische Leiterin Kunstraum Niederoesterreich

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SOCIAL GLITCH Radical Aesthetics and the Consequences of Extreme Events Code facilitates social practices and communication.

Code drives imaging media in science, art and economy.

Code defines the new aesthetics of algorithmic procedures.

Code informs human and nonhuman existence by normalizing technological, legal, and political exchange.

These discrete operations—executed in-between processes of modeling, evaluation, debugging and optimization—are, however, subject to the contingency of unexpected events.

“Glitch” is a term that denotes electric and electronic malfunctions in data flows. Against the background of a world shaped by technology and science, the term describes media-immanent flaws manifesting in image interferences, blurs and bugs, amongst others. While they display undesired problem areas in the art of engineering, their effects and artifacts have been made the material of aesthetic experiments in digital, sound, and performance art since the 1960s.

Today, the peaks of glitches increasingly flash over, affecting various collectives. Information capitalism penetrates and molds our relations to one another, to other species, and to nature. New technological, legal, and social codes merge matter and biological life into a speculative realm in which time collapses into a future-at-present. Hybrid and volatile types of existence emerge from complex contingencies, prone to escalate into new glitches: disruptions, breaches, bubbles, manipulation, violence as well as leaks dominate our violent mass-media world.

SOCIAL GLITCH addresses the consequences of this paradigmatic shift by raising the question as to how it affects both human and non-human actors. The term Social Glitch describes this provocation in terms of a historic-technological continuity of intensifying escalations. The invited artists focus on occurrences that—in a kind of negative transcendence—inscribe their actuality on social, natural, and individual biographies. Thus, they reveal central issues at stake today, be they caused by apparent defects, produced deliberately or as the result of algorithmic forms of speech. The artworks range from subversive and playful interventions to fictive and performative narratives; from speculative experiments to researchbased visualizations and interpretations of factual circumstances. The common theme behind these approaches is an (often activist) engagement with and a radical interest in the deep horizons of the sea changes we are witnessing today, together with efforts to enhance the resolution of what we perceive in order to tackle the uncertainties, the intricate risks inherent in knowledge-production, decision-making, and comprehensive participation.

SOCIAL GLITCH broadens and at the same time differentiates the aesthetics of error, which have shaped the glitch theme, in favor of an aesthetics in the field of consequences in which art evokes and advances concrete social, technological and political potentials and interventions. The project examines whether art can still deliver radical responses beyond the normalizing speculations of the art market by re-orienting our perception and agency towards practices that can be described as forms of cultural communism.

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SYLVIA ECKERMANN, GERALD NESTLER, MAXIMILIAN THOMAN

SOCIAL GLITCH Radikale Ästhetik und die Konsequenzen extremer Ereignisse Codes fördern soziale Praxen und Kommunikation.

Codes treiben die bildgebenden Medien in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Wirtschaft.

Codes definieren die New Aesthetics computerbasierter Algorithmen.

Codes informieren menschliche und nicht-menschliche Existenzweisen durch technologische, gesetzliche und politische Normalisierung.

Ihre diskreten Operationen – deren Prozesse im Spannungsfeld von Modellierung, Evaluation, Fehlerbehebung und Optimierung ablaufen – unterliegen jedoch der Kontingenz unerwarteter Ereignisse.

Der Ausdruck „Glitch“ bezeichnet Störungen, die technische Geräte bzw. Informationsflüsse korrumpieren. Vor dem Hintergrund unserer wissenschaftlich geprägten Erfahrungswelt beschreibt der Begriff medienimmanente Brüche und Unschärfen, die sich etwa in Bildstörungen oder Computerbugs manifestieren. Während sie als unerwünschte Alltagserfahrung Problemzonen der Ingenieurskunst sichtbar machen, werden ihre Effekte und Artefakte seit den 1960er Jahren in der digitalen, der performativen und der Klangkunst produktiv transformiert und vielfältigen ästhetischen Experimenten unterworfen.

Die Spitzen dieser Störimpulse schlagen jedoch längst auf gesellschaftliche Bereiche über und wirken sich auf unterschiedlichste Kollektive aus. Technologische, rechtliche und soziale Codes durchdringen unsere Beziehungen zueinander, zu anderen Lebewesen, zur Natur. Die Zeit kollabiert im spekulativen Zugriff auf eine stets gegenwärtige Zukunft. Hybride, volatile Existenzen bilden und lösen sich auf, ihre komplexe Kontingenz eskaliert in neuen Glitches: Störfälle, Bubbles, Zusammenbrüche, Manipulationen und Leaks begleiten unseren medialisierten Alltag.

SOCIAL GLITCH thematisiert die Konsequenzen dieses Paradigmenwandels und hinterfragt, wie er sich auf menschliche und nicht-menschliche Akteure auswirkt. Der Begriff Social Glitch beschreibt dies im Sinne einer historisch-technologischen Kontinuität der Eskalation. Die eingeladenen KünstlerInnen beschäftigen sich mit Ereignissen, die – in einer Art „negativer Transzendenz“ – über das Medium hinaus in Gesellschaft und Natur wirken. Sie legen akute Problemzonen offen, ob diese von Defekten verursacht oder vorsätzlich produziert werden oder das Resultat neuer algorithmischen Sprachformen sind.

Die künstlerischen Zugänge reichen von spielerisch-subversiven Interventionen zu fiktiv-performativen Erzählformen, von spekulativen Experimenten zu forschungsbasierten Auslegungen. Was die unterschiedlichen Ansätze vereint, ist ein engagiertes, aktivistisch-radikales Interesse am „tiefen Horizont“ gegenwärtiger Umbrüche. SOCIAL GLITCH differenziert die (Medien-)Ästhetik des Fehlers, welche die Glitch-Thematik in den letzten Jahrzehnten prägte, im Sinne einer Ästhetik im Feld der Konsequenzen aus, in der die Kunst soziale, technologische und politische Konfrontationen und Interventionen konkret evoziert bzw. formuliert.

SOCIAL GLITCH handelt vom Potential der Kunst im Informationszeitalter. Die vorgestellten Arbeiten lenken unsere Wahrnehmung und Handlungsfähigkeit in Richtung gemeinsamer radikaler Praxen, die als kultureller Kommunismus bezeichnet werden können.

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AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN

[LB/GB]

The Whole Truth 2012 Ton, Lügendetektor, Spiegel, Bank.

Anlass für das Audio Documentary The Whole Truth ist die aktuelle Praxis der Stimmanalyse als Methode der Lügendetektion, wie sie kürzlich von Regierungen in Europa, Russland und Israel erprobt wurde und von Grenzbehörden oder Versicherungsgesellschaften in aller Welt bereits angewendet wird. Bei dieser Technologie wird die Stimme als eine Art Stethoskop verwendet, als Instrument zum Messen innerer Körperreaktionen auf Stress und Anspannung.

Unter Umgehung der gesprochenen Sprache dringen die Institutionen über diesen Kanal tief in den Körper der getesteten Person ein.

Die dokumentarische Arbeit, die mit Radio-Konventionen experimentiert, besteht aus einer Sammlung von Interviews mit Software-Entwicklern, Anthropologen und BiometrieUnternehmern aus Holland, den USA und anderen Ländern. Die Zuhörer gewinnen einen frischen Blick darauf, wie die Wahrheit beschaffen ist, für wen sie wichtig ist und wer sie für sich nutzen kann. Die aktuellen Konventionen bezüglich Aussagen mit Wahrheitsanspruch sowie deren Beziehung zum Trauma, zur freien Rede, zur Technologie und zum Körper erfahren eine Komplizierung.

The Whole Truth 2012 Audio, lie detector, mirror, bench.

The trigger for the audio documentary The Whole Truth is the current application of voice analysis as a lie detection method recently piloted by European, Russian and Israeli governments as well as being employed in border agencies and insurance companies all over the world. This technology uses the voice as a kind of stethoscope, an instrument to measure internal bodily responses to stress and tension; a material channel that allows the law’s listening to bypass speech and delve deeper into the body of its subjects.

The documentary, which experiments with the conventions of radio, consists of a collection of interviews with software developers, anthropologists and entrepreneurs of the biometric industry, from the Netherlands, USA and elsewhere. To the listeners, it offers a fresh look into how truth is constituted, to whom truth matters and who can use it; it complicates the current conventions of testimony and its relationship to trauma, free speech, technology and the body.

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AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

INES DOUJAK & JOHN BARKER

[AT/GB]

06 Kriminalaffe 2015 Wandtapete, Skulptur (Schaum, Haare), Performance. Ines Doujak mit John Barker und Matthew Hyland

Die fundamentale Frage lautet doch: Warum sind die Dinge so wie sie sind?

Das Paradies ging verloren, dem Vernehmen nach aus Verschulden der Frau. Bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt bestand für das glückliche Paar keine Notwendigkeit zu arbeiten – die Früchte des Baumes erfüllten ihre sämtlichen Bedürfnisse. Seither haben nur faule Schlawiner wie die Affen es ohne Arbeit durchs Leben geschafft, rundum sorglose Jäger und Sammler, nur dann zur Jagd bereit, wenn wenig Mühe damit verbunden war. In der Gefangenschaft haben sie gelernt, für ihr Abendessen zu singen; in den Zoos mussten sie lernen, sich die Köpfe an den Gitterstäben ihrer Käfige nicht blutig zu schlagen; in Versuchsanstalten wie jener Wolfgang Köhlers, des Mitbegründers der Gestaltpsychologie, mussten sie all ihren Scharfsinn zusammennehmen, um an das benötigte Fressen zu kommen.

Den Arbeitern im Kapitalismus, in der ältesten Management-Wissenschaft als „intelligente Gorillas“ beschrieben, wurde schon immer ihr Scharfsinn abgenommen und im Interesse der Kapitalakkumulierung eingesetzt, was dann Effizienz genannt wurde. Doch dieser Scharfsinn muss immer beschnitten werden, damit er ja nicht dazu benutzt wird, aus dem Käfig auszubrechen und ein Leben ohne die Herren anzustreben. Derartige Beschneidungsmaßnahmen umfassten Strategien wie den spaltenden Rassismus, für den das Bild des stupiden und bedrohlichen Affen herhalten musste, und den Entzug der Überlebensgrundlagen für einen überwiegenden Teil der Weltbevölkerung. Wie bei den Affen in den Versuchslaboren besteht das Ziel darin, keine Zeit für die grundlegende Frage übrig zu lassen: Warum sind die Dinge so wie sie sind?

06 Kriminalaffe 2015 Wallpaper / cloth design, sculpture (foam, hair), essay, performance.

Ines Doujak with John Barker and Matthew Hyland

The fundamental question is why are things as they are?!

Paradise was lost, the woman’s fault by all accounts. Until then there had been no need to work for the happy couple, the fruit of the trees satisfied all their wants. Since then only lazy scoundrels like the ape have got away with not working, hunter-gatherers without a care in the world, and only bothering to hunt when little effort was required. In captivity they have learned to sing for their supper; in zoos by refraining from beating their brains out on the bars of the cage; in experimental stations like that of Gestalt co-founder Wolfgang Köhler’s experimental station by having to use all their ingenuity to get the food they needed.

Workers under capitalism, described by the first managerial scientist as “intelligent gorillas” have always had their ingenuity captured and used in the interests of capital accumulation masquerading as efficiency. But this ingenuity must always be curtailed lest it be used to break out of the cage and make a life without masters. Curtailment has involved strategies such as divisive racism –using the image of the stupid and threatening ape, and the withdrawal of the means of survival to the most people of the world.

Like the apes in experimental stations, the aim is to allow no time for that basic question: Why are things as they are?

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AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

EARTH SENSING ASSOCIATION / NABIL AHMED

[GB]

Feuerring 2015 Modell, Collage, Satelliten-Fernerkundungsaufnahme, Karte, Simulation, 2:14 Min.

Die Grasberg-Mine im militarisierten Gebiet Westneuguinea befindet sich am nordwestlichen Rand des Pazifischen Feuerrings, der die Erde mit ungeheuren seismischen Aktivitäten und Vulkanen aufreißt und eine mineralische Grenze an den Rändern des Pazifiks bildet.

Gleichsam als Diagramm politischer Geologie fließt der Feuerring in die Erde hinein und hebt sich aus dieser heraus, in langsamer Bewegung vom indonesischen Archipel bis zu dessen Antipoden. Die mehrteilige Installation verfolgt die Geschichte eines Langzeitkonflikts über Selbstbestimmung und Kontaminierung in Westneuguinea. Mit ihren modifizierten, seismischen Unterwasser-Audio- und Satellitendaten erschließt sie den BetrachterInnen neue Möglichkeiten, Politik und Geologie sowie den Kampf der indigenen Bevölkerung um ihr Territorium gegen den Staat und das Kapital in Beziehung zu setzen. „Im viktorianischen England arbeiteten die Kriminellen im Schutz von Industriesmog, Nebel und Gaslicht. Heute verschmutzen die Bergbauunternehmen in einer der wolkenreichsten Gegenden der Welt unter einer dicken Wolkendecke die Luft und benutzen das Erdklima als Ausrede. Wir mussten jedes Pixel der 199 Landsat-Satelliten-Überflüge zwischen 1987–2014 untersuchen und extrahieren, um den Blick auf die vergiftete Umwelt Westneuguinea werfen zu können.“ Nabil Ahmed

Ring of Fire 2015 Model, collage, remote sensing image, map, simulation video, 2:14 min.

Grasberg mine in the militarized territory of West Papua sits on the northwestern edge of the Ring of Fire, slicing the earth with immense seismic activity, volcanoes and forming a mineral frontier along the edges of the Pacific Ocean. A diagram for political geology, the Ring of Fire flows in and out of the earth, moving slowly from the Indonesian archipelago towards its antipode. The multipart installation, which includes modified underwater seismic audio and satellite data, traces the history of a prolonged conflict over self-determination and contamination in West Papua offering the viewer new ways of relating politics and geology, indigenous territorial struggles against state and capital.

“In Victorian England, criminals operated under the cover of industrial smog, fog and gaslight.

Today, in one of the cloudiest areas of the planet, the mining corporations pollute under heavy cloud cover using the earth’s climate as alibi. We had to examine and extract every pixel of the 199 Landsat satellite overpasses between 1987–2014 in order to make visible the poisoned environment of West Papua.” Nabil Ahmed 27

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

SYLVIA ECKERMANN

[AT]

Singularium 2015 Interpassives Objekt. 4-Kanal-Sound, Polystyrolplatten- und spiegel, 4 Lautsprecher, Monitor, Kamera, Computer, 160 x 160 x 80 cm. Komposition der Stimmen: Szely. Konstruktion: Bela Eckermann.

Die Einzigartigkeit und Unverwechselbarkeit des Individuums ist nicht mehr nur Behauptung.

Sie wird gemessen und evaluiert. Die Messung erzeugt das Gemessene. Das durch digitale Methoden vermessene Individuum wird unter der Datenlupe modifiziert. Aus Zahlen werden Normen, aus Maßen werden Maßstäbe. Durch diese „Reduktion der Komplexität“ (Niklas Luhmann) ordnen Zahlen unsere Welt. Vom Ordnen zum Bewerten ist nur ein kleiner Schritt.

Die Bewegung unserer Körper, Handlungen und Gefühle sowie unser Kapital stehen unter dauerhafter Beobachtung. Wir befinden uns in einem gewaltigen Feedback-Loop, gespeist aus den Daten unseres eigenen Verhaltens. Das Kollektiv der Datengeber sind die Berechneten, die nicht zurückrechnen können – sie werden durchschaut und können nicht zurückschauen.

Diese Intransparenz ist Ausdruck der Macht, nicht des Wesens der Algorithmen.

In diesem Spannungsfeld bewegt sich die Arbeit SINGULARIUM – ein invertierter Kristall als Blackbox, in den die Besucherin eintaucht. In der Begegnung mit dem eigenen Fremdbild erfährt sie, distanziert und fragmentarisch, eine „Realität die unwahrscheinlich ist“ (Elena Esposito), sich aber dennoch konkretisiert.

Singularium 2015 Interpassive object. 4 channel sound. Polystyrene sheets and mirrors, 4 loudspeakers, monitor, camera, computer, 160 x 160 x 80 cm. Composition of the voices: Szely. Construction: Bela Eckermann.

The uniqueness and singularity of the individual is no longer just a claim. It is measured and evaluated. The measurement creates the measured. The individual measured through digital methods is modified under the data loupe. Numbers become norms, measurements become standards. Through this “reduction of complexity” (Niklas Luhmann) numbers order our world. It is only a small step from ordering to evaluation. The movement of our bodies, behaviours and feelings, and our capital are subject to permanent observation. We find ourselves in a colossal feedback loop fed by data about our own behaviour. The collective of the data suppliers are the counted who cannot count back—they are seen through but cannot look back.

This lack of transparency is an expression of the power, not of the nature of the algorithms.

SINGULARIUM investigates this territory—an inverted crystal as a black box that immerses the visitors. In the encounter with their own external image, they experience, distanced and fragmentary, a “reality that is improbable” (Elena Esposito) yet becomes more concrete.

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Serious Games I: Watson is Down. 2010 video (double projection, color, sound). 8 min. Director: Harun Farocki.

Cinematographer: Ingo Kratisch. Sound: Matthias Rajmann. Editing: Harun Farocki. Online-editing: Max Reimann, Jan Ralske. Script: Harun Farocki, Matthias Rajmann. Production: Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Berlin.

Supported by medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH, Bienal de Sao Paulo and KUB, Kunsthaus Bregenz.

HARUN FAROCKI (1944-2014) on Serious Games 1: Watson is Down: “In the autumn of 2009 we filmed a drill at the Marine Corps Base 29 Palms in California. Four marines sitting in a class represented the crew of a tank. They had laptops in front of them on which they steered their own vehicle and watched others in the unit being driven through a computer animation landscape.

The simulated Afghanistan is based on geographical data from the country. A street in the computer landscape runs exactly as it would in the real Afghanistan; the same holds for every tree, the vegetation on the ground or the mountain ranges. The instructor places explosive devices and sets insurgents out in the area. A sniper shot the tank gunner, which we documented with the camera. When the tank drives over the fallow it kicks up a dust tail. The more vegetation there is, the less dust. On the asphalt street, no dust. Even with all this attention to detail, death in the computer game is still something different than the real one.�

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AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

HARUN FAROCKI

[DE]

Ernste Spiele 1. Watson ist hin. 2010 Video (Farbe, Ton), 8 Min., Regie: Harun Farocki.

Kamera: Ingo Kratisch. Ton: Matthias Rajmann. Schnitt: Harun Farocki. Online-Editing: Max Reimann, Jan Ralske.

Drehbuch: Harun Farocki, Matthias Rajmann. Produktion: Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Berlin.

Gefördert durch medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH. Hergestellt mit Unterstützung von Bienal de Sao Paulo und KUB, Kunsthaus Bregenz.

HARUN FAROCKI (1944-2014) über Ernste Spiele 1: „Im Herbst 2009 filmten wir auf dem Stützpunkt der Marine in 29 Palms, Kalifornien, eine Übung. Vier Marines, die in einem Klassenraum saßen, stellten die Besatzung eines Panzerfahrzeugs dar. Sie hatten Laptops vor sich, auf denen sie das eigene Fahrzeug und andere des Verbandes durch eine ComputerAnimationslandschaft lenkten und fahren sahen. Das simulierte afghanische Gelände geht auf die geografischen Daten Afghanistans zurück. Eine Straße in der Computer-Landschaft verläuft so, wie sie auch im wirklichen Afghanistan verläuft; das Gleiche gilt für jeden Baum, den Bewuchs des Bodens oder die Höhenzüge. Wenn ein Panzerfahrzeug über das Brachland fährt, wirbelt es einen Staubschweif auf. Je mehr Bewuchs es gibt, desto weniger Staub. Auf der Asphaltstraße gar kein Staub. Der Ausbilder platziert Sprengsätze und setzt im Gelände „insurgents“, Aufständische, aus. Ein Heckenschütze erschoss den Bordschützen des Panzerfahrzeugs, das wir mit der Kamera dokumentierten. Bei all dieser Treue im Detail ist der Tod im Computerspiel etwas anderes als der reale.“ 35

P.O.P., 2008 C-print on aluminium, 60 x 40 cm

EMPIRE BIULDER, 2008 C-print on aluminium, 60 x 40 cm

COMMON CELL, 2008 C-print on aluminium, 40 x 29 cm

WORK ON SOCIAL FLESH, 2008 C-print on aluminium, 60 x 43 cm

SOLITARY CELL, 2008 C-print on aluminium, 40 x 29 cm Courtesy Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck/Vienna, Galerie Nicola von Senger, Zurich

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

THOMAS FEUERSTEIN

[AT]

PARLAMENT 2010 Glas, Myxomyceten (Physarum ssp.), Vitrinenschrank, 170 x 85 x 75 cm.

Biotechnologische Umsetzung: Thomas Seppi, Department für Strahlentherapie und Radioonkologie, Medizinische Universität Innsbruck. Courtesy Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck/Wien, Galerie Nicola von Senger, Zürich.

In der Arbeit PARLAMENT lässt Thomas Feuerstein in einem gläsernen Bioreaktor Myxomyceten (Schleimpilze) wachsen. Im Unterschied zu herkömmlichen Pilzen und anderen biologischen Organismen formieren sich Myxomyceten aus einzelligen Amöben, die sich unter bestimmten Umweltbedingungen zu Plasmodien oder Riesenzellen zusammenschließen.

Feuersteins Parlament setzt sich aus einer zentralen Kammer zusammen, die über sechs Röhren mit sechs Rundkolben am Fuß des Gefäßes verbunden ist. In den Kolben befinden sich unterschiedliche Kulturstämme der Schleimpilzart Physarum, die auf Suche nach Nahrung die Röhren durchwandern, um in der oberen Kammer an ein Nährstoffdepot zu gelangen. Die sechs Zellen treffen sich in der Kammer des Parlaments, wo sie vor der Wahl stehen, zu koalieren und ineinander zu verschmelzen oder separiert zu bleiben.

Begleitend zu Feuersteins Projekten entstehen neben Fotografien, Videos oder Texten vor allem Zeichnungen, die für die Arbeit PARLAMENT im Werkblock P.O.P. (Plasmodium Organism Politics) zusammengefasst sind.

PARLIAMENT 2010 Glass, myxomycete (Physarum ssp.) vitrine, 170 x 85 x 75 cm Biotechnological realisation: Thomas Seppi, Department of Radiotherapy and Radiooncology, Medical University of Innsbruck. Courtesy Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck/Vienna, Galerie Nicola von Senger, Zurich

The glass sculpture PARLIAMENT serves as a bioreactor in which myxomycetes grow. In contrast to conventional fungi and other biological organisms, myxomycetes, also called slime moulds, form plasmodia, or giant cells, which can extend across several square metres, depending on the species. The glass vessel consists of a central chamber that is connected to six round-bottom flasks by six coiled pipes. The flasks hold various cultures of the slime mould species Physarum, which wander the pipes in search of nourishment, finally to arrive at a food depot in the upper chamber. The six cells meet in the chamber of parliament and are faced with the choice of merging or remaining separate.

Feuerstein’s projects are accompanied by photographs, videos, texts and above all by drawings. For the work PARLIAMENT the latter have been compiled in the work series P.O.P. (Plasmodium Organism Politics).

37

DRONE STRIKES 2013 Case study no. 2: “The Architecture of Memory�, Mir Ali, North Waziristan, 4. Oct. 2010.

HD Video (color, sound), 9:36 min. In collaboration with SITU Research.

Investigating covert operations through spatial media.

One of the most under-researched aspects of drone warfare has been the spatial; that is, the territorial, urban, and architectural dimension of these campaigns. Forensic Architecture has investigated several issues relating to the spatial mapping of drone warfare; for example, the geographical patterns of strikes in relationship to the kind of settlements (towns or villages) targeted and types of buildings targeted. Our aim was to explore what potential connections there might be between these spatial patterns and the numbers of casualties, especially civilian casualties.

On October 4, 2010, a US drone struck a home in the town of Mir Ali, North Waziristan, in Pakistan, killing five people. One of the surviving witnesses to this attack is a German woman, who lived in the house at the time with her two-year-old boy and her husband. Together with Forensic Architecture, this witness built a digital model of her home, which no longer exists. During a day-long process of computer modeling, the witness slowly reconstructed every architectural element of her house. Placed virtually within the space and time of the attack, the witness was able to recollect and recount the events around the strike.

40

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

[GB]

DRONE STRIKES 2013 Case study no. 2: „The Architecture of Memory”, Mir Ali, North Waziristan, 4. Okt. 2010.

HD-Video (Farbe, Ton), 9:36 Min. In Zusammenarbeit mit SITU Research.

Zur Untersuchung geheimer Operationen mittels räumlicher Medien.

Am 4. Oktober 2010 schlug eine US-Drohne in ein Haus in der Stadt Mir Ali im pakistanischen NordWasiristan ein und tötete fünf Menschen. Eine der überlebenden ZeugInnen dieses Angriffs ist eine aus Deutschland stammende Frau, die mit ihrem zwei Jahre alten Sohn und ihrem Mann in diesem Haus gewohnt hatte. Auf Einladung von Forensic Architecture hat sie als Zeugin bei der Erstellung eines digitalen Modells ihres nicht mehr existierenden Hauses mitgewirkt. Während einer behutsamen eintägigen Computer-Modellierung konnte sie jedes architektonische Element ihres Hauses rekonstruieren.

Virtuell in den Raum und in die Zeit des Angriffes versetzt, war sie in der Lage, die Ereignisse rund um den Anschlag zu erinnern und wiederzugeben.

Ein kaum untersuchter Aspekt der Kriegsführung mit Drohnen ist der räumliche – also die territoriale, urbane und architektonische Dimension derartiger Kampfhandlungen. Forensic Architecture beschäftigt sich mit Fragen zur räumlichen Vermessung des Drohnen-Krieges, wie den geografischen Mustern der Angriffe in Relation zur Art der angepeilten Siedlungen (Städte oder Dörfer) und Gebäude. Uns ging es darum, herauszufinden, welche potentiellen Verbindungen zwischen diesen räumlichen Mustern und der Anzahl an Opfern, insbesondere zivilen Opfern, bestehen könnten.

41

Shift, Whole Body Experience Fragments [1087 1091 1092 1096 1107 1126] 2013—2015, HD Video (color, sound), 9:38 min. Sound: Boris Kopeinig

A camera is focused on the details of a body and its internal dynamics. A body becomes actor. Corporealities that rub up against social and cultural concepts of body and corporeality—in terms of age and gender for instance—are introduced, visual codes of a normative body(image)production are undermined and re-configured.

Shift is an expedition to explore, experiment with, and invent new ways of modifying the body in order to investigate them further. The work contradicts common images, pursues alternative options, operates with twists, reversals subtle shifts. The body images are dancing. A space is created in which ideas of corporeality become corporeally tangible.

42

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

CHRISTINA GOESTL

[AT]

Shift, Whole Body Experience Fragments [1087 1091 1092 1096 1107 1126] 2013—2015, HD-Video (Farbe, Ton), 9:38 Min. Sound: Boris Kopeinig

Eine Kamera fokussiert auf Körperdetails und ihr Eigenleben. Ein Körper wird Akteur.

Körperlichkeiten, die sich in Bezug auf Alter und Geschlecht an gesellschaftlich und kulturell produzierten Vorstellungen von Körper und Körperlichkeit reiben, unterwandern in Shift visuelle Codes normativer Körper(bild)-Produktion und konfigurieren diese neu.

Shift ist eine Entdeckungsreise, die mit Möglichkeiten der Körpermodifizierung experimentiert, indem sie diese erfindet und erforscht. Die Arbeit widerspricht gängigen Bildern, geht Alternativen nach. Sie operiert mit Verdrehungen, Umkehrungen und subtilen Verschiebungen.

Die Körperbilder tanzen, ein Raum entsteht, in dem Vorstellungen von Körperlichkeit körperlich erfahrbar werden.

43

Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) 2015 Video (digitized 16 mm film), 4:52 min. Video (Text) 8:34 min.

To live means to leave traces —Walter Benjamin We were huddled in front of the thin light of a fire in an abandoned house on a cold January night in Calais. X was making another cup of very sugary tea. Y, stirring the kindling, yelled as he accidentally grabbed a burning twig. “Are you trying to clean your fingerprints?” laughed X. A Rough History is a film essay that looks at the coalescence of skin and data in the collection and destruction of fingerprints in the Eurodac in the EU. The artist looks at the life and circulation of the image of the fingerprint and the different life of the fingerprint attached to a body that produces that image. This is a speculative history that travels from border checks to early gestures in film.

44

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

AYESHA HAMEED

[CA/GB]

A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) 2015 Video (16-mm-Film, digitalisiert), 4:52 Min. Video (Text) 8:34 Min.

Wohnen heißt, Spuren hinterlassen —Walter Benjamin Wir saßen zusammengekauert vor dem schwachen Lichtschein eines Feuers in einem aufgelassenen Haus in einer kalten Januarnacht in Calais. X machte noch eine Tasse stark gezuckerten Tee. Y stocherte im Feuerholz herum und stieß einen Schrei aus, als er unabsichtlich einen brennenden Ast in die Hand nahm. „Versuchst du, deine Fingerabdrücke zu verwischen?“, lachte X. A Rough History ist ein Film-Essay, der sich das Verschmelzen von Haut und Daten bei der Sammlung und Zerstörung von Fingerabdrücken im Eurodac der EU zum Thema macht. Die Künstlerin betrachtet das Leben und die Zirkulation des Bildes vom Fingerabdruck und das unterschiedliche Leben des an einem Körper haftenden Fingerabdruckes, der dieses Bild erzeugt hat. Eine spekulative Geschichte, die von Grenzkontrollen zu frühen Gesten im Film reicht.

45

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

MATHIAS KESSLER

[AT/USA]

Hidden Agendas: Jarrells Cemetery, N37º53.96’ W81º34.71’, Eunice Mountain, West Virginia 2012 Detail eines Friedhofs , Tintenstrahldruck auf Tapete

Impact CF034499, West Virginia 2012 Tintenstrahldruck auf Tapete

Restaging Narratives Matewan 2014 – laufend Installation mit TV-Gerät. Vier Narrative, eine Geschichte: eine Nachstellung des Matewan-Massakers in den 1920er Jahren in Matewan, WV; gefilmt 2012, 2013 und 2014, kombiniert mit Aufnahmen aus dem Hollywoodfilm Matewan (1987) unter der Regie von John Sayles.

Am 19. Mai 1920 traf die Baldin Felts Detective Agency in Matewan ein, um Familien zu vertreiben, die bei einer Kohlenmine gelebt hatten. Der Polizeichef Sid Hadfield intervenierte im Namen der Bergarbeiter, und der Streit endete im bekannten Matewan-Massaker – einer Schießerei, die auf beiden Seiten zahlreiche Menschenleben forderte.

Kessler reist häufig nach Matewan, um die historischen sozial Kämpfe ebenso zu untersuchen wie die moderne Tabletop-Abbaupraxis, bei der ganze Bergkuppen entfernt werden, um raschen und kostengünstigen Zugang zu den darunterliegenden Kohleflözen zu gewinnen.

Diese aggressive Form des Tagebaus hinterlässt eine Spur der Verwüstung, die der Künstler als eine Art Ressourcen-Gentrifizierung beschreibt, deren Kriterium der Bedarf an Energie und anderen Materialien für die wachsenden urbanen Megacities ist. In West Virginia werden ganze Dörfer geopfert und in die Luft gejagt, um an die Kohle zu kommen.

Kessler kombiniert seine Fotos mit Digital-Mapping-Programmen auf Basis von Algorithmen zu großen, malereiähnlichen Tableaus. Der Algorithmus erzeugt eine diskontinuierliche, teilweise erfundene Kartographie der fotografierten Landschaft. Anhand dieser Arbeiten untersucht ein Video narrative Strukturen und wie Geschichte geschrieben und inszeniert wird. Das laufende Filmprojekt nimmt Bezug auf die Schießerei und deren jährliche Wiederaufführung.

Die Aufnahmen wurden über vier Zeitachsen aufbereitet: Die ZuschauerInnen sehen die eigentliche Wiederaufführung am 19. Mai 2010, eine Probe im Jahr 2011, eine Sonderaufnahme für Kessler im Jahr 2014 und Ausschnitte aus John Saylers Film Matewan.

Die fortgesetzte Beschäftigung Kesslers und anderer mit den Bergarbeitern und Aktivisten ermöglichte neue Kommunikationskanäle über soziale Gräben hinweg. Die Gemeinde hat das West Virginia Mine Wars Museum (Bergbau-Kriegsmuseum) eröffnet und andere Initiativen ergriffen, die den Tourismus und die einheimischen Unternehmen in dieser wirtschaftlich darniederliegenden Stadt unterstützen. Für Kessler ist „das Kunstwerk eine Konversation, deren Risse und Ritzen sich zu neuen Realitäten hin öffnen.“

47

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

MATHIAS KESSLER

[AT/USA]

Hidden Agendas: Jarrells Cemetery, N37º53.96’ W81º34.71’, Eunice Mountain, West Virginia 2012 Detail of graveyard, Inkjet print on site-specific wallpaper

Impact CF034499, West Virginia 2012 Inkjet print on site-specific wallpaper

Restaging Narratives Matewan 2014 – ongoing media collage (length varies), film stills, installation with projectors or TV set.

Four narratives, one history: a 1920’s reenactment of the Matewan Massacre in Matewan, WV, filmed in 2012, 2013 and 2014, combined with footage from the 1987 Hollywood movie, Matewan, directed by John Sayles.

On May 19th 1920, the Baldin Felts Detective Agency arrived in Matewan in order to evict families that had been living in a coal camp. The chief of police, Sid Hadfield, intervened in the name of the miners and the argument ended in what is known as the Matewan Massacre—a shoot-out that left many people from each party dead.

Kessler travels to Matewan frequently to explore both the historical social struggle and today’s tabletop mining practice in which entire mountain knolls are removed in order to gain quick and cost-effective access to the underlying coal seams. This aggressive form of strip mining leaves a trail of destruction behind that the artist describes as a form of resource-gentrification, which offsets the needs for energy and other materials for growing urban megacities. In West Virginia, whole villages are sacrificed and blown up to get to the coal.

Kessler uses digital mapping programs based on algorithms to combine his photographs into large painting-like tableaus. The algorithm creates a discontinuous, partially invented cartography of the photographed landscape. Along these works a video investigates narrative structures and how history is written and enacted. The ongoing film project relates to the shoot-out and it’s yearly reenactment. Edited over 4 timelines, viewers see the actual reenactment on May 19th, 2010, a 2011 rehearsal, a special shoot for Kessler in 2014, and sequences of John Sayler’s movie Matewan.

Kessler’s and other people’s continued engagement with both the miners and the activists has created new channels of communication across social divides. The community opened the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum and has engaged in other ventures that support tourism and local businesses in this economical depressed town. For Kessler “the art piece is a conversation whose cracks open to new realities.”

49

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

MARC LOMBARDI

[USA]

George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, c. 1979–91 4th version 1998 Zeichnung, gerahmt. Leihgeber: Privatsammlung Robert Tolksdorf, Berlin, 56 x 1179 x 3 cm

Harken/Bush gehört mit zu den politisch brisantesten Netzwerken, mit denen sich Lombardi (1951–2000) beschäftigte. Es entstanden mehrere Versionen dieser narrativen Strukturen.

Inhaltlich kartographiert Lombardi die Verstrickungen der Ölexportfirma Georg W. Bushs, des Energie-konzerns Harken Energy, und ihre Verbindungen zum Einmarsch Saddam Husseins in Kuwait und dem darauf folgenden 2. Golfkrieg. Die nachgezeichneten Linien klären nicht über die Art der Beziehung zwischen den angeführten Namen auf. Die BetrachterInnen müssen ihre eigenen Spekulationen anstellen bzw. die narrative Information selbst entschlüsseln.

George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, c. 1979–91 4th version 1998 Drawing, framed. Courtesy of: private collection Robert Tolksdorf, Berlin.

Harken/Bush is one of Lombardi’s most politically charged networks. Several versions of these controversial narrative structures exist with which the artist mapped out the entrapment between George W. Bush’s oil export company and Harken Energy, including their association with the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein and the subsequent Gulf War. The lines Lombardi drew do not elucidate the nature of the relationship between the actors. Rather, the spectators have to speculate on the narrative structure and decode the content matter by themselves.

51

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

JENNIFER MATTES

[DE/AT]

Trading Stories. A Cargo Named Desire 2015 HD-Video (Farbe, Ton), 41:56 Min.

Trading Stories ist eine auf einer im Jahr 1905 unternommenen Reise von Hamburg nach Qingdao basierende Spurensuche. Heute ist dieser Seeweg eine wichtige Handelsroute.

Als ironisch-kritische Reflexion setzt sich das Video mit der gegenwärtigen komplexen politischen, sozialen und ökonomischen Situation auseinander, in der sich innerhalb des kapitalistischen Systems Liebe, Ökonomie, Handel und individuelle, historische und kollektive Geschichte gegenüberstehen. In einer Collage aus dokumentarischem Bildmaterial, Found Footage und Text wird das ständige Zwischen-den-Möglichkeiten von Empfinden und Anziehung verhandelt, das im Kontext globaler Marktstrukturen steht. Die Geschichte wird zur Botschaft einer Flaschenpost. Sie ist von Zufall und dem Nichtkontrollierbaren innerhalb einer Welt der Kontrolle ohne Zufälle bestimmt. Das Containerschiff wird zur Metapher für das Unbewusste, zum symbolischen Repräsentanten des Körpers einer Gesellschaft, und spiegelt seine Spannungen, Ambivalenzen und Widersprüche wider. Die Bestandteile der Geschichte und ihrer ProtagonistInnen sind Klischees und Wiederholungen, Massenprodukte und endlose Kreisläufe – wie der Markt selbst.

Trading Stories. A Cargo Named Desire 2015 HD Video (color, sound), 41:56 min.

Trading Stories is originally based on a journey from Hamburg to Qingdao in 1905—today an important maritime trade route. The film is an ironic-critical reflection on the current complex political, social and economic situation. Within the capitalist system, love, the economy and trade are confronted with individual, historical and collective history. A collage of documentary and found footage as well as text, the work negotiates the constant swaying between possible emotions and attractions in the context of global market structures. The story becomes a message in a bottle that is contingent on chance and the uncontrollable within a world of control devoid of coincidence. The container ship is a metaphor for the unconscious, the symbolic representative of the body of a society as well as a mirror of its tensions, ambivalences and contradictions. The components of the story and its protagonists are clichés and repetitions, mass products and endless cycles—just like the market itself.

53

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

GERALD NESTLER

[AT]

The Disruption Principle. A Conformation Game 2015 Text und mathematische Formulierungen, Kreide, Tafel (Blackboard), 120 x 246 cm, 2 Tablets, Video (Farbe, Ton), 12:18 Min., Animation 2:04 Min., Schriftzug: Klebebuchstaben, 10 x 730 cm.

Blackboard entstand in Kooperation mit dem Mathematiker und Quant Paul Wilmott während seiner Lecture Performance am 5. Mai 2015 zur Eröffnung einer Ausstellung von Gerald Nestler im Kunstraum Bernsteiner.

Die Assemblage skizziert die Verschmelzung scheinbar gegensätzlicher Kräfte, die im Kondensationskern des Informationskapitalismus aktiv sind: Adaption (Anpassung) und Intervention (Störung). Diese durch kleinste Kontaminationspartikel provozierte Fusion, in der affektive Qualitäten zu quantitativen Operationen diskretisiert werden, löst eine unaufhörliche Kettenrektion aus, die sich als Randomisierung möglicher Optionen beschreiben lässt. Es bildet sich ein neuer Aggregatzustand, der durch einen Überfluss an disruptiver Störung charakterisiert ist – denn erst dadurch wird Anpassung an die Informationsumwelt gewährleistet (Grundbedingung dafür ist die Nichtexistenz alternativer Optionen, sobald die Phasenverschiebung einen kritischen Punkt überschritten hat). In der Frühzeit die Domäne menschlicher SpielerInnen, die kybernetische Regelkreise und Spieltheorie als Erweiterung ihrer Handlungspotentiale einführten, handelt es sich heute zunehmend um ein Habitat für algorithmische Existenzen, die den affektiven Grundpegel mittels Null-Latenz zu absorbieren suchen. Die Adaption an dieses sozio-technologische Paradigma wird mittels kreativem Potential enggeführt – also durch ständige Infusion von Störung und Diskontinuität.

Das Disruptionsprinzip besagt somit, dass die Anpassung an die informationskapitalistische Spielkonfiguration durch Regelbrüche gelingt. Wenn menschliche wie nichtmenschliche Spieler diese Option akzeptieren (wie oben ausgeführt, wird keine andere angeboten), stabilisiert sich der Aggregatzustand und die universelle Konsolidierung vollendet sich.

55

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

GERALD NESTLER

[AT]

The Disruption Principle. A Conformation Game 2015 Blackboard, chalk, textual and mathematical formulations, 120 x 246 cm, 2 Tablets, video (color, sound), 12:18 min., animation, 2:04 min.; letters (adhesive tape), 10 x 730 cm.

Blackboard is the result of a cooperation with mathematician and quant Paul Wilmott for a lecture performance at Kunstraum Bernsteiner, May 5, 2015.

The assemblage delineates the edgy conflation of the seemingly contradictory forces of interference and adaptation, disorder and order that underlie information capitalism’s condensation core. The “fusion” of affective qualities into quantitative operations is provoked by even the smallest particles of contamination, which serve as triggers for an incessant chain reaction that churns out randomization of choices within the new state of matter. Disruptive contamination becomes superabundant, as it ensures acclimatization to the environment (with the basic condition that no alternative is at choice, as the phase transition has been consummated to a critical degree). Formerly the realm of human players (that introduced cybernetics and game theory to extend agency), the field has turned into the habitat of algorithms, which adopt the affective substratum on the level low latency clashes. Adaptation to the socio-technological paradigm is reintroduced by creative potential—a constant infusion of disruption and discontinuity.

Hence, the disruption principle states that adaptation to information capitalism is generated by the disruption of the game’s rules and moves. When players conform (as stated above, no other choice is disclosed), the state of matter stabilizes and universal consolidation is achieved.

57

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

GODOFREDO PEREIRA

[PT/GB]

Axiomatics 2014–2015 Klassifizierungs-Matrix, Leuchtkasten, Ölproben, Archivmaterial, Video, 20:29 Min.

Axiomatics ist ein Projekt, in dem erforscht wird, wie technisch-wissenschaftliche Modi zur Klassifizierung der Erde zum Gegenstand politischer Auseinandersetzung werden können. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei der Orinoco Oil Belt in Venezuela, anhand dessen gezeigt wird, wie ein Streit über die Klassifizierung unterirdischer Ressourcen sich zu einem wesentlichen Element der bolivianischen Revolution entwickelte.

Es geht um eine Neueinstufung von Venezuelas Kohlenwasserstoffreserven von Bitumen auf Schweröl.

Während mehrere Regierungen in den 90er Jahren der Meinung waren, Bitumen sei im internationalen Energiemarkt ein profitables Produkt, kam die Regierung Hugo Chávez auf die Idee, Schweröl würde für den Staat mehr Einnahmen generieren und die Umsetzung der sozialen und territorialen Projekte Boliviens ermöglichen.

Im Kontext einer ölbasierten Volkswirtschaft stellte eine solche Klassifizierungsänderung eine radikale semiotische Wandlung im Staatswesen dar. Indem es aufzeigt, wie Chávez die von technisch-wissenschaftlichen Unbestimmtheiten offengelassenen Räume für ein eigenes Narrativ nützt, demonstriert dieses Werk das politische Potenzial einer anti-hegemonistischen Verwendung hegemonistischer Instrumente.

Axiomatics 2014-2015 Classification matrix, light box, oil samples, archival material, video (color, sound), 20:29 min.

Axiomatics is a project that explores how techno-scientific modes of classifying the Earth become sites of political struggle. The piece focuses on the Orinoco Oil Belt in Venezuela to show how a dispute over the classification of underground resources became central to the Bolivarian revolution.

At stake is a shift in the classification of Venezuela’s hydrocarbon reserves from bitumen to heavy oils.

While several governments during the 1990s found bitumen to be profitable in the international energy market, the government led by Hugo Chávez was concerned with how heavy-oil would provide more revenues to the state and enable the Bolivarian revolution’s social and territorial projects.

In the context of an oil-based economy, such a shift in classification constituted a radical semiotic transmutation of the body politic. By showing how Chávez narrates the spaces left by techno-science’s indeterminacies, this piece foregrounds the political potential of a counter-hegemonic use of hegemonic tools.

59

Fat Finger Confession 2013 HD-video (color, sound), 21:00 min.

Concept/Text/Post-Production: Axel Stockburger; Camera/Light: Lukas Heistinger; Actor: Joe Remick

The term “fat finger incident” is used in the context of the world of finance in order to designate human errors, such as wrong keystrokes. A very prominent example is the so-called “flash crash,” which took place on May 6, 2010 and wiped out billions of dollars worth of stock. While most media assumed a fat finger incident as the cause of the crash, it is highly probable that so called “rogue algorithms”—computer programs employed for automated high frequency trading—are to blame. The video stages an interview with a trader who confesses to be the culprit behind this historical crash.

Contemporary trading is automated to such an extent that it seems almost soothing to assume direct human responsibility for errors, thus marking the human being as the glitch in a digital cybernetic system. Since many automated trading systems operate on a speed that lies beyond that of human perception, the assumption that a single human could be responsible for catastrophic events has the function of an ideological operation pointing to a time in history when responsibility was still in the hands of human agents. Fat Finger Confession engages with the paradox that we seem to feel safer if a catastrophic event is caused by human agency rather than the automatic systems, which were, after all, invented by us.

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

AXEL STOCKBURGER

[AT]

Fat Finger Confession 2013 HD-Video (Farbe, Ton), 21:00 Min. Konzept/Text/Postproduktion: Axel Stockburger, Kamera/Licht: Lukas Heistinger, Darsteller: Joe Remick

Der Begriff „fat finger incident“ stammt aus der Welt der Börse und bezeichnet menschliches Versagen, wie etwa falsche Eingaben am Computer, die starke Preisschwankungen von Aktientiteln auslösen. Ein prominentes Beispiel ist der sogenannte „Flash Crash“, der am 6. Mai 2010 stattfand und temporär enorme Kursschwankungen an der Börse zur Folge hatte. Während dieser Crash von den Medien zunächst mit einem fat-finger-Ereignis erklärt wurde, scheint es heute gesichert, dass er von Algorithmen ausgelöst wurde, die im Hochgeschwindigkeitshandel eingesetzt werden.

Das Video Fat Finger Confession inszeniert ein Interview mit einem Börsenhändler, der für diesen historischen Crash die Verantwortung übernimmt. Der automatische Börsenhandel hat mittlerweile derartige Ausmaße angenommen, dass es beinahe beruhigend wirkt, wenn man menschliches Fehlverhalten als Ursache für Störungen annehmen kann. Damit wird der Mensch zum ‚Glitch’ in einem kybernetischen System, das enorme Auswirkungen auf unsere gegenwärtige Lebenswelt hat.

63

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

UBERMORGEN

[USA/CH/AT]

Killliste 2015 Mixed-Media-Installation, Killliste.txt, 4 Beagle Bones, Kunstharz, 35 x 35 x 5,5 cm Courtesy the Artist and Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London.

„We will have tears in our eyes and hurt in our heart while blowing the targets‘ brains out.

We live in heroic and wild times. We are alive!“ Die Killliste ist eine Todesliste (Inhalt), ein Netzwerkprotokoll (Software) und eine elektronische Installation (Hardware), inspiriert von den US-Geheimdiensten und den von Militärs operierten stark störungsanfälligen Todeslisten (bspw. JPEL-Joint Prioritized Effects List). Die Ziele werden aufgrund von Kapitalumverteilungsdaten algorithmisch determiniert. Zurzeit stehen 362 Namen auf der Killliste.

Die Liste ist ein sich in permanenter Verhandlung befindliches ‚technisches‘ Objekt, das in flüssiger Partikelform verschlüsselt durchs Netz zirkuliert (Killliste-Protokoll). In der technischen Installation sind vier ‚Beagle Bones‘ seriell miteinander verschaltet, auch hier handelt es sich um Datenflüssigkeit, die konstant in Bewegung ist. Bei Stillstand wird das verschlüsselte File gelöscht und das System kollabiert.

Killlist 2015 Mixed media installation, Killliste.txt, 4 Beagle Bones, synthetic resin, 35 x 35 x 5.5 cm Courtesy the artist and Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London.

“We will have tears in our eyes and hurt in our heart while blowing the targets’ brains out.

We live in heroic and wild times. We are alive!”

The Killlist is a death list (content), a network protocol (software), and an electronic installation (hardware) inspired by the US secret service and the highly failure prone kill lists used by the military (e.g.

JPEL-Joint Prioritized Effects List). The targets are algorithmically determined on the basis of their capital redistribution data. At the moment there are 362 names on the Killlist. The list is a “technical” object in permanent negotiation that circulates encrypted through the web in a fluid particle form. In the technical installation four “Beagle Bones” are serially interconnected with one another—again, data fluidity is in constant motion. When it comes to a standstill, the encrypted file is deleted and the system collapses.

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AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

TECHNOPOLITICS

[AT]

Tracing Information Society – A Technopolitics Timeline 2015 Digitaldruck, Alurahmen, 700 x 200 cm

Tracing Information Society – A Technopolitics Timeline zeichnet die Entwicklungslinien der Entstehung des Informationszeitalters nach. Der Technopolitics–Arbeitskreis versteht die Timeline als künstlerisches Medium, um komplexe historische Zusammenhänge und Brüche visuell zu thematisieren und auf verschiedene Genealogien der Informationsgesellschaft aufmerksam zu machen.

Mitwirkende: John Barker, Sylvia Eckermann, Doron Goldfarb, Armin Medosch, Gerald Nestler, Felix Stalder, Axel Stockburger, Thomas Taler, Matthias Tarasiewicz und Ina Zwerger.

Grafik: Fatih Aydogdu.

Technopolitics bezeichnet den Versuch, einen theoretischen Rahmen zu finden, der es ermöglicht, komplexe und vielschichtige historische Entwicklungen in ihrem Zusammenwirken zu verstehen. 2009 von Brian Holmes und Armin Medosch entwickelt, existiert die Arbeitsgruppe Technopolitics seit 2011 in Wien, wo sie regelmäßige Vorträge und Diskussionsveranstaltungen organisiert.

Tracing Information Society – A Technopolitics Timeline 2015 Digital print, aluminum frame, 700 x 200 cm

Tracing Information Society – A Technopolitics Timeline traces the evolution of the information society. The Technopolitics working group conceives the timeline as an artistic medium for visually addressing complex historical relationships and breaks and drawing attention to the different genealogies of information society.

Participants: John Barker, Sylvia Eckermann, Doron Goldfarb, Armin Medosch, Gerald Nestler, Felix Stalder, Axel Stockburger, Thomas Taler, Matthias Tarasiewicz, and Ina Zwerger.

Graphic design: Fatih Aydogdu.

Technopolitics describes the attempt to develop a theoretical framework that facilitates an understanding of complex and multilayered historical developments and their interplay.

Initially founded by Brian Holmes and Armin Medosch in 2009, the Technopolitics research group has been active in Vienna since 2011 and regularly organizes talks and discussion events.

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TRACING INFORMATION SOCIETY – A TIMELINE Tracing Information Society is the new project of the Technopolitics Working Group.1 This informal group comprises about 10 core members and about 30 contributors. Most of us work as artists, theoreticians, curators or journalists inside and outside major institutions. What brings us together is an interest in the impossible project of analyzing the Information Society as an open totality, that is, an integrated network of actors and events with dimensions that change depending on the perspective taken. The aim is to produce cultural criticism and art works that engage with the deeper structures of the present as a contribution to the globally distributed efforts of transforming them.

The concept of the Information Society, after being over-hyped in the 1980s and 1990s and used as a pretense for many dubious political projects (for example, by Newt Gringrich or Tony Blair) at the time, has fallen out of use lately. This offers us the freedom to repurpose it as an umbrella term to connect multiple strands that drive complex societal transformations. One strand is the emergence of a distinct technoeconomic paradigm, usually called post-Fordism, following the economic crisis of the 1970s. Since the 1990s, processes of financialization have become ever more important. Another strand concerns the political transformation that brought about a system of governance which privileges market-structures in all areas of life—what is usually called neo-liberalism. A third strand is the social transformations and pluralizations of subjectivity, of gender and of what has become known as the non-human that challenge the dominant models of Western universalism and of patriarchy. A fourth strand has been created by environmental movements which have begun to transform the human relationship with nature, a task made all the more urgent by the increasingly pressing reality of climate change. Using the concept of the Information Society as an umbrella—like the group‘s own title Technopolitics—emphasizes the role of the technological infrastructures that underpin, though do not determine, all of these developments.

Culture, society, nature and our own agency cannot be conceived of independently of these technological capacities.

The conceptual and technological foundations of the Information Society were laid in the first half of the 20th century. As a social formation it became dominant in the USA and Europe in the 1970s and globally after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. There is a considerable debate whether the contemporary economic and political transformation following the economic crisis, which started in 2008, necessitates a new umbrella term or not.

The goal of this impossibly large project is not to produce a new master narrative but to provide a framework for inquiry that is internally coherent and at the same time open to heterogeneous inputs and outputs. Moreover, the project provides complementary and competing pathways through an expansive and still shifting terrain. The coherence is provided by the emphasis on the simultaneous presence of all of these strands in all fields of inquiry while the openness is provided by an extreme variety of methods of research and formats of output. Thus, the projects cannot be contained within the knowledge practices provided by academia or the art system alone.

The main method of operation of the working group are regular, convivial face-to-face meetings, often with a potlatch of drinks and food, in which one member or invited guest presents his or her current research /artistic project as work in progress, which is then subjected to sympathetic but rigorous criticism from

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the point of view of the overall framework. These meetings, while not formally closed, are not aimed at a general public and are not recorded.

After a series of public talks we decided to engage together in a material project that couples artistic as well as theoretical research and practice and initiated Tracing Information Society – A Timeline. The Timeline provides a format that is both clearly structured—everything is organized according to its datum—and open to multiple perspectives as of what constitutes a relevant event. The value of a timeline is not to signal the return to a simple linear chronological model of historical development but to show the parallelism of heterogeneous events. So, for example, the year 1962 brings, among others, two entries next to each other: one is Beat the Dealer – probability theory and computation meet casino-gambling the other is the publication of Fritz Machlup’s groundbreaking empirical study of the “knowledge economy.”

It is the claim of the project that these events, while usually not considered together, are nevertheless directly related to one another.

The Timeline—in its current manifestation in print measures 2.8 x 7 meters—shows data on six main layers, color-encoded, and annotated with keywords that are considered relevant for the coming into being of this social formation. As heterogeneous as both the entries and the group are—there is no binding theory—they all come from a critical angle and hence articulate struggles and contradictions as well as turning points (such as major political events and natural disasters) via individual entries in a single but multilayered timeline. The idea was to bring things into a relation that is not necessarily a causal one. By showing things together, new associations arise.

The Timeline is a work-in-progress with a participatory angle: The visitors of the exhibition are invited to make suggestions of their own and insert them in box placed next to the Timeline print. The Timeline can serve several functions: it serves as a heuristic device; by exploring new cross-connections such as in the example given above, it gives new insights into the process of self-instituting of information society; the printed Timeline can be shown in exhibitions and allow visitors to explore associations, memories and inspirations of their own; it can also be used as a teaching device, in workshops, and in particular in an extra-university and activist context. The aim is to produce further versions of the Timeline and to incorporate more diverse viewpoints as to which are the defining events in the historical development of the Information Society. Future versions of the work will include a digital version and an exhibition which transposes the 2D timeline into 3D exhibition space and electronic space.

To discuss the conceptual outreach, the potentials, and the implications of the project, a round table discussion was held on November 19th, 7 pm.

Tracing Information Society so far carries the shared input of: John Barker, Sylvia Eckermann, Doron Goldfarb, Armin Medosch, Gerald Nestler, Felix Stalder, Axel Stockburger, Matthias Tarasiewicz, Thomas Thaler and Ina Zwerger. Graphic Design: Fatih Aydogdu.

1

http://www.thenextlayer.org/technopolitics_group | http://www.thenextlayer.org/Technopolitics

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KLANGINSTALLATIONEN SOUND INSTALLATIONS

VOLKMAR KLIEN

[AT]

Haltung 2015 Aus: Rezeptionshaltungen – assistierte Exerzitien (2012–2015), Mixed Media, Holz, Messing, POMKunststoff, 1-kanalige Klangzuspielung (Loop 2‘50‘‘), 200 x 100 cm.

Während die Weiten digitaler Welten (vor allem zu Anfang) von Freiheit und Anarchie zu künden schienen, ist es de facto so, dass sie nur in strikter Entsprechung zu Vorgaben autorisierter Normierungsinstitute und internationaler Industrieverbände entstehen und aufrechterhalten werden können. Jede Teilnahme an ihnen erfordert Ein- und somit immer auch Unterordnung.

In der Musik verhält es sich sehr ähnlich; die Teilhabe am großen Ganzen, an der musizierenden Gemeinschaft, ist nur möglich, wenn das Rezeptionsangebot freudig an- und die vorgegebene Position eingenommen wird.

Die Rezipientin, der Rezipient nimmt die Haltung ein, kniet hin und legt das Haupt auf den dafür vorgesehenen Block, aus dem Musik in ihre bzw. seine Stirn tritt. Im Gegensatz zu dieser durchaus vorschriftsgemäßen Einnahme der Rezeptionshaltung entstanden die zu hörenden Klänge durch aktive Negation protokollgerechter Dekodierung digitaler Daten; das Ausgangsmaterial der Komposition bilden E-Books, die nicht als Text, sondern als Klangdateien interpretiert wurden.

Haltung 2015 From: Rezeptionshaltungen – assisted exercises (2012–2015). Mixed media, wood, brass, POM-plastic, 1-channel sound feed (loop 2’50’’), 200 x 100 cm.

While the broad digital worlds (especially at the start) appeared to proclaim freedom and anarchy, it is now so that they can only be created and maintained in strict adherence with terms and conditions set by authorised standardisation bodies and international industry. Any participation involves compliance, and so always subsumption. Much the same is true with music: Participation in the whole thing, in the music-making community, depends upon whether what is supplied for reception finds happy acceptance and adopts the desired position.

The recipient adopts the following position: One kneels, and places the forehead on the block provided, from which music enters his or her head. In contrast to the correct adoption of the position for reception, the sounds to be heard are generated by the active negation of protocoll-conform decoding of digital data. The original material for the composition is comprised of e-books, which are interpreted not as text but as sound data.

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74

KLANGINSTALLATIONEN SOUND INSTALLATIONS

SZELY

[AT]

In A Split Second 2015 8-Kanal-Klangkomposition Computer, Soundkarte, Verstärker, acht Lautsprecher, Kabel

In der Raumklanginstallation mit dem Titel In A Split Second geht es um den einen Moment, der ein Leben verändern kann. Während wir vor uns hinleben, ist uns oft nicht bewusst, dass nur der Bruchteil einer Sekunde ausreicht, um unseren Alltag gehörig ins Wanken zu bringen. Ein Autounfall zum Beispiel oder eine Demonstration, die aus den Fugen gerät; eine Schießerei auf der Straße wie unlängst in Wien, wo ein 13-jähriger Junge – ein völlig unbeteiligter Passant – angeschossen wurde; zwei Menschen, die sich prügeln wollen und wir mittendrin.

Unsere übliche Sicherheit, die Codes des sozialen Zusammenlebens, all das steht auf mehr und mehr wackeligen Beinen und ein kleiner Anstoß genügt, um uns in Situationen zu bringen, in denen wir nicht wissen, wie wir uns verhalten sollen und verhalten werden. Diese sogenannten „Glitches“ in unserem Alltag bilden den Ausgangspunkt der Klangkomposition und Klanginstallation. Diese unternimmt den Versuch, die Dynamik von extremen Situationen mittels einer 8-Kanal-Klangstruktur in den Raum zu projizieren. Die BesucherInnen und KundInnen der Buchhandlung im Wiener MuseumsQuartier stöbern und lesen in Büchern, suchen gezielt nach einer Publikation oder sind vertieft in Kataloge und Zeitschriften.

Plötzlich – „in a split second“ – ändert sich die Raumatmosphäre. Ein Autounfall wird über die Lautsprecher in den Raum projiziert; eine Demonstration bewegt sich durch den Raum; Schüsse fallen und ein Banküberfall findet statt. Das dauert 30, 60 oder 90 Sekunden und dann ist alles wieder beim Alten. Aber in diesen 30, 60 oder 90 Sekunden würde sich das Leben aller Anwesenden geändert haben, hätte der Moment im realen Leben stattgefunden.

Abfolge und Länge der 18 Klangminiaturen: Lavastrom 0’35’’ • Dynamitdetonation 0’10’’ • Demonstration 1’30’’ • Autoexplosion 0’31’’ • Unwetter 1’23’’ • Hauseinsturz 0’06’’ • Autounfall 0’23’’ • Reanimation 0’30’’ • Tsunamialarm 0’15’’ • Häuserkampf 1’17’’ • Hagel 1’38’’ • Zugunfall 0’58’’ • Feuer 0’41’’ • Flugzeugabsturz 0’29’’ • Gasexplosion 0’40’’ • Herzstillstand 0’19’’ • Autobombe 0’10’’ • Gletscherbruch 0’37’’.

Unterstützt durch ein Kompositionsstipendium der Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien.

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KLANGINSTALLATIONEN SOUND INSTALLATIONS

SZELY

[AT]

In A Split Second 2015 8-channel sound composition Computer, audio card, amplifier, eight loudspeakers, cabels

The sound installation titled In A Split Second engages with the one moment that can change a life. We all live our daily lives, and we‘re often unaware that only the fraction of a second is enough to give our everyday lives a serious shaking up. A car crash, for example, or a demonstration that runs out of control; a shooting incident on the street, like the one recently in Vienna where a thirteen year old boy, an innocent passer-by, was shot; two people starting a fight, and we are right in the middle...

Our everyday safety, the codes of social coexistence, all of that is on increasingly unsteady ground, and a small trigger is enough to bring us into situations where we don‘t know what to do or how to behave. These so-called “glitches” in our everyday lives form the starting point for the sound composition and sound installation. This is an attempt to project the dynamics of extreme situations into the space using an 8-channel sound structure. The visitors to and customers of the bookshop in the Vienna MuseumsQuartier are browsing and peering in books, looking for a particular publication, or are engrossed in catalogues and magazines.

Suddenly—in a split second—the atmosphere in the space changes. A car crash is projected into the space on the loudspeakers; a demonstration moves through the room; shots are fired and a bank robbery is underway. It lasts 30, 60 or 90 seconds, and then everything returns to the way it was. But in these 30, 60 or 90 seconds the lives of all those present would have changed had that moment occurred in real life.

Order and duration of the 18 sound miniatures: Lava stream 0’35’’ • dynamite detonation 0’10’’ • demonstration 1’30’’ • car explosion 0’31’’ • storm 1’23’’ • house collapse 0’06’’ • car crash 0’23’’ • reanimation 0’30’’ • tsunami alert 0’15’’ • urban warfare 1’17’’ • hail 1’38’’ • railway crash 0’58’’ • fire 0’41’’ • air crash 0’29’’ • gas explosion 0’40’’ • asystole 0’19’’ • car bomb 0’10’’ • icefall 0’37’’.

Supported through a stipend by the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna.

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WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONEN WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONS

HEATH BUNTING

[GB]

Digging deep 18 11 2015 — in Zusammenarbeit mit Gerald Straub

Der britische Künstler Heath Bunting ist für seine sozialpolitischen Interventionen bekannt, die von Border-Crossings über fiktive Identitäten zu postdemokratischen Überlebenstechniken reichen. Im Zuge der Ausstellung SOCIAL GLITCH entwickelt der Künstler gemeinsam mit den TeilnehmerInnen Strategien, Methoden und Taktiken, die wirkungsvoll gegen Systemübergriffe eingesetzt werden können.

Der Workshop vermittelte einerseits einfache Überlebenstechniken wie Feuermachen, widmete sich aber auch komplexeren und aufwendigeren Ansätzen wie etwa dem Aufbau gemeinschaftlicher “Corporations” (Körperschaften), um neue Formen von Anonymität und Autarkie im ökonomischen wie politischen Sinn zu entwickeln und umzusetzen.

Heath Bunting ist Mitbegründer von „net.art“ und „sport-art“. Seine Kunst gilt als authentisch, unabhängig, unkompliziert und direkt. Wegen seiner Anti-Genetik und Border-Crossing Arbeiten wurde er mit einem lebenslangen Einreiseverbot in die USA belegt. www.irational.org/heath Im Rahmen der VIENNA ART WEEK.

Digging deep 18 11 2015 — in collaboration with Gerald Straub

Heath Bunting is a co-founder of both net.art and sport-art movements and banned for life from entering the US for his anti genetic and border-crossing work.

The workshop addressed techniques, strategies and methodologies of survival to out-live and act effectively against the invasion of corporate and political crime networks. It covered basic survival techniques such as fire lighting and discussed more advanced and complex approaches such as setting up a corporation for an anonymous and self-supporting collective. www.irational.org/heath In the framework of the VIENNA ART WEEK.

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Elvedin Klacar

hoelb/hoeb

Pablo Chieregin

WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONEN WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONS

PABLO CHIEREGIN [IT/AT], HOELB/HOEB [AT], ELVEDIN KLACAR [BIH/AT]

Instant Associations 2015 Kunstraum Niederoesterreich: im Hof links. Im Stiegenhaus rechts: Das „ökosoziale Forum”, ein politnaher Thinktank, der sich im Kontext der ökosozialen Marktwirtschaft Gedanken macht. Eine permanente Einrichtung, die zur 20-minütigen „Installation“ mutierte. Der Workshop Instant Associations im Rahmen der Ausstellung SOCIAL GLITCH ermöglichte ein Selbstverständnis, das die unmittelbar reale Umgebung in die Ausstellung bzw. in den Workshop miteinbezog. Für die TeilnehmerInnen machte es keinen Unterschied, ob es sich um eine Ausstellung handelt, die sich gesellschaftspolitischen Themen widmet, oder um einen politisch agierenden Thinktank, der im selben Gebäude agiert. Was zählt, sind Handlungen und deren Konsequenzen. Es wurde diskutiert, nachgedacht und dementsprechend gehandelt.

Gerald Straub

Instant Associations 2015 In the courtyard on your left: the Kunstraum Niederoesterreich. In the stairwell on your right: the Ecosocial Forum, a political think tank devoted to promoting the concept of an “Ecosocial Market Economy”. This permanent institution was turned into an installation for 20 minutes.

The workshop Instant Associations in the framework of SOCIAL GLITCH furthered a conception that includes the immediate vicinity into the exhibition and the workshop respectively. For the participants, it made no difference whether it concerned an exhibition on socio-political issues or a think tank in the same building that is active in politics. What mattered—and what was therefore discussed, contemplated and acted accordingly—are actions and their consequences.

Gerald Straub

A workshop as a discursive dialogue on unexpected failures. A meandering between worlds. An opportunity to think about leguminous plants and other things without having to adhere to disciplinary boundaries. When differing functional spaces collide with one another, codes of behaviour dissolve. Suddenly, there is no longer any conventional and supposedly secure scientific or artistic codex in effect; instead, a new one has to be developed mutually. It is important to support and encourage such an essayistic perspective on research (our main artistic methodology), which employs explicitly artistic means because unlike efforts subject to the scientific dictates of generalization and corroboration it allows for individual positions and the recognition of singular situations.

—hoelb/hoeb 83

Instant Associations was an attempt to cross the practice and the ideas of artists, curators and participants, with the plan to develop a new work. The exhibition Social Glitch was a complex playground that let us mix content and words on social control, information errors, and mock-up realities. The output of this narrative flow was a 30 meter long banner that the participants carried through the streets of Vienna as a kind of “longitudinal demonstration.”

—Pablo Chiereghin

Deformance or a mockery of words.

Thinking together on social glitches turned into a ‘nonexistent’ social outcry. The workshop addressed ecology, soil, and pulses, amongst other things, and finally culminated in a demonstration—a performance that actually didn’t happen as such, an undefined moment that I would call a “deformance.” All our actions in public space are predefined even when—as was the case at the end of the workshop—we spontaneously demonstrate on the streets and carry a banner of empty words. People passing by asked about the meaning and context of the words and analyzed them carefully. Does their power lie in the encoding of non-declaration? Or were we confronted with a social curiosity that is not aroused by what is already known?

But maybe it works differently: Maybe we should walk the streets more often and ask people about their standpoints on and their role in the city. Maybe we could at least improve communication or define it better in relation to what we know of each other and the environment.

The workshop and the deformance demonstrated that social nonsense is a form of social action. Every step I took brought me closer to the other side of (re)consideration.

—Elvedin Klacar

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WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONEN WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONS

MANU LUKSCH

[AT/GB]

Rahmensprengung 03 10 2015 Lange Nacht der Museen „Holt euch eine von hunderten LED-Taschenlampen für euren nächtlichen Spaziergang! Sprengt den Rahmen der Langen Nacht der Museen, indem ihr miteinander, mit eurer Umgebung und der Kunst interagiert.“ —Manu Luksch

Rahmensprengung 03 10 2015 Long Night Of Museums “Reframe the city, re-envision its art, reveal new tales throughout the Long Night of Museums.

Pick up one of the artist’s projector torches and become an agent of (Social) Glitch.”

—Manu Luksch

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WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONEN WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONS

GERALD STRAUB

[AT]

REAL ESTATE 2015 Werbeständer, Immobilienanzeigen, Telefonnummern

REAL ESTATE suggeriert eine potentielle Immobilienkrise und hinterfragt soziale Unverhältnismäßigkeiten – insbesondere die Entwicklung von Wohnwerten, ihres marktwirtschaftlichen Hintergrunds und der damit zusammenhängenden Konsequenzen. Anstatt der Kärtchen „Wollen Sie Ihr Auto verkaufen?“ werden in Prime Class Areas Kärtchen in Oberligawagen gesteckt, mit Zeilen wie: „Wollen Sie Ihr Apartment/Penthouse/Zinshaus verkaufen? Seriöser Anbieter zahlt unbürokratisch und schnell.“ Außerdem wird eine performative Tour mit Immobilienbesichtigungen angeboten (z.B. Goldene Quartiere, OligarchenSuites etc.).

REAL ESTATE 2015 Advertising stands, real estate ads, telephone numbers

REAL ESTATE conjectures a potential real estate crisis and investigates social disparities—in particular, the development of housing values, their background in the market economy, and the corresponding consequences. As opposed to cards with “Do you want to sell your car?,” cards with lines like “Do you want to sell your apartment/penthouse/tenement house? Trusted real estate provider pays unbureaucratically and promptly” are attached to luxury cars in prime class areas. A performative tour with property visits (e.g. through “golden quarters”, oligarch suites, etc.) is also offered.

We buy all prime class real estate. With or without active loans. We’re available 24 hours per day and buy without warranty and guarantee. Nationwide viewings and acquisitions (immediate payment). When you want to sell your apartment at any point in time, give us a call!

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WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONEN WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONS

STEFANIE WUSCHITZ

[AT]

DAS GROSSMUTTER-PROJEKT 27 11 2015 In den 60ern ließ der indonesische Präsident Suharto kommunistische Tendenzen im gesamten, noch jungen Nationalstaat Indonesien ausradieren. Davon war u.a. die feministische Bewegung ‚Gerwani‘ betroffen. Auf den Spuren dieser Bewegung finden wir heute noch eine Vielzahl an indonesischen Frauengruppierungen, die sich lokal organisieren, versorgen und DIY- und DIWO-Praktiken zelebrieren.

Ein Video mit Interviews stellt die Frage, inwieweit die heutige, stark wachsende Kultur des DIY (Do It Yourself) und DIWO (Do It With Others) in Indonesien ihre Wurzeln und Verbündeten in diesen frühen, selbst organisierten Gruppierungen hat.

Unser von Dezember 2014 bis März 2015 durchgeführtes NENEK PROJECT hattte Techniken, Tricks und Erfahrungen dieser Generation gesammelt. Der Workshop zu SOCIAL GLITCH vermittelte DIY- und DIWOMethoden, die uns Vertreterinnen verschiedener Gruppierungen in dieser Zeit beigebracht haben.

Interviews wurden geführt mit: Ibu Rini Astuti Nasution, Ibu Emirita AryatiIbu, Ibu Wahyuni Reksoatmodjo, Ibu Martizawari, Ibu Sumini Soeprapto, Ibu Theresia Pasaribu, Ibu Rukiyati, Ibu Syamsuri.

Das NENEK PROJECT ist eine Zusammenarbeit zwischen Lifepatch [ID], Cindy Lin Kaiying [SG], Stefanie Wuschitz [AT].

Gefördert von: Österreichische Botschaft Jakarta / Bundeskanzleramt Österreich, Kunst / Lifepatch.

THE NENEK PROJECT 27 11 2015 In the 1960s, the Indonesian president Suharto initiated the radical prosecution of communist tendencies within the young nation-state. ‘Gerwani’ was a feminist movement in Indonesia that suffered tremendously under this prosecution.

However, we can still find traces of this movement if we look at the rich variety of women groups today.

They organize and care for each other locally and celebrate DIY and DIWO practices.

We took interviews that raise the question in how far today’s strong growing DIY (Do It Yourself) and DIWO (Do It With Others) culture is built upon and influenced by these early, self-organized groups.

During our NENEK PROJECT—December 2014 until March 2015—we had tried to collect technologies, tricks and experiences of the generation of women, born between 1934 and 1954. The SOCIAL GLITCH workshop aimed to mediate DIY and DIWO practices we learned from our interview partners—mothers of actors in the contemporary DIY and DIWO scene.

Interviews with: Ibu Rini Astuti Nasution, Ibu Emirita AryatiIbu, Ibu Wahyuni Reksoatmodjo, Ibu Martizawari, Ibu Sumini Soeprapto, Ibu Theresia Pasaribu, Ibu Rukiyati, Ibu Syamsuri THE NENEK PROJECT is a collaboration among Lifepatch [ID], Cindy Lin Kaiying [SG] and Stefanie Wuschitz [AT].

Supported by: Austrian Embassy Jakarta / Austrian Federal Chancellery, Arts / Lifepatch.

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PERFORMANCES WUK.PERFORMING.ARTS

URSULA ENDLICHER

[AT/USA]

FAR FLUNG’s FUTURE 20 11 2015, 19 und 21 Uhr Far-Flung’s future ist eine Medien-Performance-Installation, die unterschiedliche Aspekte der Mensch-Computer-Beziehung hinterfragt und von Echtzeitdaten choreografiert wird. Live performte Bewegung sowie computergeneriertes Video, Licht und Audio werden von den gleichen Datenstrukturen beeinflusst: Physische Gegebenheiten (u.a. Wetterbedingungen und Tageszeiten in Städten rund um den Globus) verändern den Theaterraum von einem Moment zum anderen. Die Gesamtstruktur der Performance wird per Zufallsprinzip bestimmt und teilt den Ablauf der Arbeit in unvorhersehbare Abschnitte (Akte) von „on“ und „off“.

Konzept/Medien/Szenografie Licht Programmierung Set Production

Sound

Performer

Ursula Endlicher Thomas J. Jelinek Klaus Filip Lee Day Ernst Endlicher Szely Ursula Endlicher Mzamo Nondlwana Evandro Pedroni Frans Poelstra Yuka Takahashi

Zwischen den beiden Aufführungen fand ein von Bettina Kogler (WUK.performing.arts) moderiertes Gespräch zwischen Ursula Endlicher, Marian Kaiser (Medientheoretiker) und Gerald Nestler (Kokurator SOCIAL GLITCH) statt.

Mit Unterstützung der Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien.

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PERFORMANCES WUK.PERFORMING.ARTS

URSULA ENDLICHER

[AT/USA]

FAR FLUNG’s FUTURE 20 11 2015, 7 and 9 pm Far-Flung’s future is a media-performance-installation which investigates different aspects in the relationship between humans and machines and is choreographed by real-time computer processes. Live-performed movement and computer generated video, lighting, and sound are influenced by the same data structures—weather conditions and time-of-day data from locations around the globe are changing the theater space from one moment to the next. The score of the performance is determined by the “system” and structured into random time units.

A cast of computer functionalities turned human carry out their labors within unpredictable sequences—acts—of “on” and “off”.

“A crash, triggered by an overly eager Internet user clicking away just that one time too much, switches the motor of the control system over to human impatience. There, where software and hardware interfaced, where language and metal embraced, where command lines and circuitry turned digital somersaults together, right there, the human behind the machine pushed himself right through and into it - and everything changed. Now computer time and human time intersect, the logic of the machine, now broken and infected by its physical surrounding, oozes out, while remote data structures take control of a whole theater space, reducing the flow of a once so lovely story, to an unpredictable series of 0s and 1s.”

—From the introduction to Far-Flung’s future Artistic direction/concept/media/scenography Ursula Endlicher Programming Klaus Filip Light installation Thomas J. Jelinek Sound Szely Set production Lee Day and Ernst Endlicher Performers

Ursula Endlicher Mzamo Nondlwana Evandro Pedroni Frans Poelstra Yuka Takahashi

Between the two performances, Bettina Kogler (WUK.performing.arts) moderated a discussion about the project between Marian Kaiser (media theorist), Gerald Nestler (cocurator of SOCIAL GLITCH) and Ursula Endlicher.

Supported by the cultural section of the City of Vienna.

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PERFORMANCES WUK.PERFORMING.ARTS

DEBORAH HAZLER

[AT]

NOISE FOR NOTHING WUK 13 und 14 11 2015

In Noise for Nothing arbeiten sich Deborah Hazler, Nanina Kotlowski und Olivia Schellander an der Verkörperung des Begriffs „noise“ in der Pluralität seiner Bedeutungen ab. Noise steht für Lärm, aber auch für Rauschen und Störgeräusch, Bildrauschen oder am Finanzmarkt für das Gegenteil von Information. Die Performerinnen bringen Merkmale von noise in eine körperlich abstrakte Form. Sie machen sich auf die Suche nach dem „Glitch-Moment“, nach dem Fehler, der Unordnung, der Sinnlosigkeit und dem damit verbundenen Potenzial. So spielen sie etwa mit der Konnotation des Begriffs noise als Überlagerung von vielen unabhängigen Einzelelementen und übersetzen ihn in unvorhersehbare und unberechenbare Bewegungen.

Noise for Nothing WUK 13 and 14 11 2015

In Noise for Nothing Deborah Hazler, Nanina Kotlowski and Olivia Schellander attempt to embody the concept of “noise” in the plurality of its meanings. There is the familiar acoustic noise but there is also signal and interference noise, and even the stock market knows the term noise as the contrary to information. The performers manifest the qualities of noise in a physically abstract form. They search for the “glitch moment”, for the error, the disorder, the pointlessness, and the corresponding potential. They play, for example, with the connotation of the term noise as a superimposition of many independent individual elements and translate them into unpredictable and erratic movements.

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Matthias Tarasiewicz, Aneta Stojnic, Christiane Krejs, Gerald Nestler

TECHNOPOLITICS SALON @ SOCIAL GLITCH: Tracing Information Society – A Timeline

Contingencies of Power and the Complexification of Consequences 98

PANELDISKUSSIONEN PANEL DISCUSSIONS

Felix Stalder, Armin Medosch

CONTINGENCIES OF POWER AND THE COMPLEXIFICATION OF CONSEQUENCES, With Lizvlx (UBERMORGEN), Adam Kleinman, Godofredo Pereira and Ayesha Hameed Panel discussion, moderated by Gerald Nestler, 25 09 2015, 4 pm TECHNOPOLITICS SALON @ SOCIAL GLITCH: Tracing Information Society – A Timeline With Noit Banai, Aneta Stojnic and the Technopolitics research group Panel discussion, moderated by Armin Medosch, 19 11 2015, 7 pm SOCIAL GLITCH – AN ORGANISM’S WORD FOR STIMULATING DISTURBANCES With Thomas Feuerstein, Karin Harrasser, Thomas Raab and Axel Stockburger Panel discussion, moderated by Sylvia Eckermann, 27 11 2015, 6 pm

Lizvlx (UBERMORGEN), Adam Kleinman, Godofredo Pereira and Ayesha Hameed 99

The SOCIAL GLITCH issue is an online resource of project-related text, video and image material that extend and deepen the discussion on the project’s theme beyond the end of the exhibition.

We thank the authors and the continent. team for there commitment and support.

The quotes on the following pages are taken from the text contributions to the SOCIAL GLITCH issue of continent.—except where indicated with an asterisk (*). A text-based collage, this contingent conversation is set within the “depth” of a thick surface composed of socio-technological assemblages of power as well as counter-action and offers radical trajectories towards an aesthetics in the field of consequences.

Edited by Gerald Nestler and Maximilian Thoman.

continent. 4.4 / 2015

SOCIAL GLITCH

continent. maps

This special issue of

a topology of

continent. is part of the

unstable confluences

project SOCIAL GLITCH.

and ranges across

Radical Aesthetics and

new thinking,

the Consequences of

traversing interstices

Extreme Events.

and alternate directions in culture, theory, biopolitics and art. continentcontinent.cc

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Lawrence Abu Hamdan Keynote Lecture at What Now? The Politics of Listening organized by Art in General at the New School, 2015 Nabil Ahmed Land Rights: Counter-mapping West Papua, material by courtesy of the author.

Ines Doujak, John Barker Kriminalaffe: Sultan at the Dole Office, material by courtesy of the author.

Harun Farocki “War always finds a Way,” in: Gagarin, no. 21 (2010), 60-72.

Thomas Feuerstein “For He’s a jelly goo fellow: Daimon Cult”, in: Thomas Feuerstein: Psychoprosa, ed. by Beate Ermacora, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck (Snoeck: Cologne 2015).

“The Sociographic Kick”, irst published in: The Sociagraphic View, ed. by Stefan Bidner, Cologne 2006, 31 - 41.* Ayesha Hameed “The Petrification of the Image,” in: Savage Objects, ed. by Godofredo Pereira, Guimares 2012—European Capital of Culture in partnership with Imprensa Nacional−Casa da Moeda 2012.

Karin Harrasser “Koine Aisthesis: Probing the Deep Tissue of Tactile Media,” in: Texte zur Kunst issue no 98 / June 2015 „Media“.

Gerald Nestler The Renegade; An Aesthetics of Resolution. Some Thoughts on a Techno-Imaginative Toolbox and its Potential for Art as — and beyond — Critique, short paper presentation at ISEA 2015, Vancouver: http://sched.co/3NS4 Godofredo Pereira The Underground Frontier, material by courtesy of the author.

Thomas Raab Data Driven Narcissism: The Stupidity Part, material by courtesy of the author.* Susan Schuppli “Deadly Algorithms. Can Legal Codes Hold Software Accountable for Code That Kills?” in: radical philosophy philosophical journal of the independent Left, RP 187 (Sept/Oct 2014) / Commentary.

UBERMORGEN Killliste. Statement #1, material by courtesy of the author.

Eyal Weizman “Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums,” in: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: dOCUMENTA (13): Series 062, Ostfildern 2012.

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WARNING:

Your user data feed back on you! —Thomas Raab

New

forms of eco-political and aesthetic practices are called for, to hold accountable those who profit from […] violence and those in whom we place our trust for protection. —Nabil Ahmed

to the imagination of European explorers and popular culture, the Contrary vast forests of Papua were not ‘pristine’ scenes of natural history populated by Stone Age savages. Rather, even the scarce and scant paleo-ecological evidence shows human impact on the island going back over 30,000 years. The indigenous people of Papua, through the practice of agriculture, clearance, burning, produced “human landscapes, such as grasslands, secondary forests, and coastal woodlands”.1 While the indigenous Papuans managed to alter their landscapes as shepherds of the forests over thousands of years, mineral exploitation by Freeport [eds.: the transnational mining company that owns Grasberg mine in West Papua] accelerated radical negative ecological impacts that have altered the landscape permanently. While the first established a new balance, the latter took the ecology out of balance and when it’s empty they would move out. It is the landscape that we turn to and forms of resistance, counter mapping as hacking habitat. In Amungme cosmology, spirits inhabit their landscapes. One of the most respected of the spirits is Tu Ni Me Ni, representing fertility and embodied in the landscape with “her head in the mountains, her breasts and wombs in the valley and her legs stretched out toward the distant coast”.2 When Freeport sliced off their mountain they destroyed their spirit. Evidencing the violence on Papuan landscape from the sky and ground is evidencing cosmological crimes. —Nabil Ahmed science, technology, and capital can be clearly The complicity ofdiscerned in the underground frontier […] which emerges from a context in which the earth and its constituent elements are increasingly abstracted into discrete sets of data. According to Laymert Garcia dos Santos, this is a consequence of the information paradigm, which, emerging from cybernetic debates, proposes to understand the whole world, human or non-human, animal or machine, according to a common epistemic principle.3 —Godofredo Pereira

1 2 3

Bechler and Marshall, The Ecology of Papua, 1087.

Chris Ballard, “The signature of terror: violence, memory and landscape at Freeport”. Bruno David and Meredith Wilson eds., Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place, Honolulu 2002, 13–26.

Laymert Garcia dos Santos, “High-Tech Plundering, Biodiversity and Cultural Erosion: The Case of Brazil”, in: Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies, edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, London 2007.

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If,

as Raymond Williams writes, “we have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out,”4 then human agency and the agency of the earth are thoroughly mixed up. This entanglement is no longer only about labour power that is transforming our planet.

Human action resulting in environmental degradation, deforestation, ecosystem destruction and species extinction and climate change, in the form of rising sea levels and greenhouse gases, are another form of planetary violence. While we share responsibility for pollution through our patterns of consumption, the responsibility for planning, releasing, activating, regulating contaminants and therefore exposing populations to harm on a territorial scale, lie mostly with a small number of powerful actors—states, capital, transnational corporations—that dictate, control and compete over resources as vast tracts of the earth are laid to waste. —Nabil Ahmed “The key question is: WHAT are we? Out of what matter are we made? What is matter and how does it begin to live? Accademia dei Secreti has found the answer in P+. P+ reveals being as slime. It liberates the objects of perception from any false phenomenology and makes them into true objects of cognition.

Enslaved matter raped for the sake of its exchange value and staged use value is rendered naked. P+ opens the door into the depths of matter, into the psychedelic crevasses and fantasia of the flesh.” —Thomas Feuerstein

The attribution

of liability to material things is almost as old as law itself. It can be traced to the origins of ancient Greece, where a class of Athenian judges presided over a special court in charge of cases brought against unknown agents and inanimate objects. Miguel Tamen, who discussed this capacity of things, described a curious incident in which a statue of Theagenes made after the athlete’s death was beaten by one of his rivals by way of revenge, until the statue fell and killed him. The statue was put on trial for murder, judged guilty, and thrown into the sea, only to be reinstated years later.5 The proportionality principle of international humanitarian law offers a contemporary method of passing judgment on things. The trials of the West Bank Separation Wall in Jerusalem, for example, were not trials of people but rather trials of an apparatus. Instead of witnesses, maps and territorial models were called in. Proportionality was used as the legal measure to judge and moderate the behaviour of the wall. The wall was found to disproportionately violate an entire territory that included people, fields, houses, roads, military bases, colonies. The verdict demanded that the apparatus should change its route—into what was later argued to be “the best of all possible walls”; and so aggressive acts of colonization and dispossession were presented as a tragic necessity administered with care and responsibility. —Eyal Weizman

4 5

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Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, London 1980, 83.

Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects, Cambridge, 2004, 79–80.

Mattei

and Nader6 trace how the rule of the law was central to the Western imperialist and colonial project (for instance, the doctrine of terra nullius denied the existence and prior rights of original inhabitants),7 and argue that it has expanded into a mechanism of global plunder working within regimes of transnational law and supporting the neoliberal project. We witness this role of law at work today in the multiplication of special economic zones, enclaves with exceptional taxation regimes and labour regulations that circumvent the democratic accountability of the nation-state, having become today the most common territorial mechanisms of capital expansion. Oil extraction and mining operate through state-sponsored enclave regimes, this being one of the reasons why many argue they undermine the state’s legitimacy.8 —Godofredo Pereira

In

the early 19th century the astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace, with his celestial mechanics and theory of probability, provided the basis for Adolphe Quêtelet, a contemporary, and presumably also student of his, to develop his very own theory of “social physics”. Laplace, who strove to reduce the entire worldly mechanism to mathematical formulae so as to make all future events predictable, inspired Quêtelet to postulate his “l’homme moyen”, the calculable average person.

While Laplace started out from the idea that, should we want to determine past and future states, a demon would have to measure the position and the speed of all physical particles present in space at a certain moment in time, Quêtelet based his “mécanique sociale” on human particles. In his treatise “Sur l’homme et le développement de se facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale”, published in 1835, Quêtelet describes the quantitative laws of the social process: “Above all we have to take the single man as an abstract and shall only regard him as a mere fraction of the entire race from now on. By stripping him of his individuality we remove everything that is arbitrary – the individual peculiarities that have no, or little, influence on the mass will then disappear automatically and leave us to arrive at universal results.”9 Which leads him to the conclusion: “The same applies to moral abilities as does to physical ones, and one can estimate them provided that they stand in relation to their effects.”10 —Thomas Feuerstein

The intersection

of history and nature in the form of natural history, however, reveals the contingency, the transitory nature, the tactical quality of both. We can see what these reified

6 7

Mattei, Ugo, and Laura Nader, Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal, Malden 2008.

The term Terra Nullius is used to describe a quasi-legal mechanism common to European colonial powers (1th and 18th centuries) whereby any land that would be considered empty could be acquired by a sovereign state; and that the laws of that state would henceforth be applied to that territory. As a consequence, its peoples would, at best, become subjects of the new sovereign power, and at worst killed or enslaved. Importantly, existing social and political arrangements, customary laws, forms of property or ownership were disregarded.

8 Gudynas, Eduardo, 2009,“Diez Tesis Urgentes Sobre El Nueveo Extractivismo: Contextos y demandas bajo el progresismo sudamericano actual”, in Extractivismo, Política y Sociedad, Quito: Centro Andino de Acción Popular, Centro Latinoamericano de Ecologia Social.

9 Adolphe Quêtelet, “Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale”, quoted and translated from the German edition: Soziale Physik oder Abhandlung über die Entwicklung der Fähigkeiten des Menschen, Jena 1914, 103.

10 Ibid. 141.

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concepts look like once they disenchant one another. These remnants of reified nature are the only way we can move from the world of appearances and totality, to things. In terms of this discussion, the primordiality, the ahistoricality, of the term ‘the jungle’ is demythified by revealing its complicity with the enforcement of the UK and the EU border regimes, and with revealing how the reification of migrant living conditions is used in the mobilization of unfeasible spatial solutions. —Ayesha Hameed

Modern racism

is not just ‘scientific’ but iconographic, showing dark-skinned people as apes: such images of Mrs. Obama especially are legion. It has never been ‘racially’ exclusive – or rather, ‘races’, apish and otherwise, have always been constituted by racism, their particular demographic make-up no more consistent than that of other made-up categories like ‘heretics’, ‘deserving poor’, ‘Great Men’, ‘the Elect. —Ines Doujak, John Barker

Even

assuming the anthropoid ape behaves intelligently in the sense in which the word is applied to man, there is from the start no doubt that, in this respect, he remains far behind man, becoming perplexed and making mistakes in relatively simple situations; but it is precisely for this reason that we may, under the simplest conditions, gain knowledge of the nature of intelligent acts.11Life on the alleged animal-human threshold—and how to make it work—had long preoccupied industrializing, colonizing powers. During the final century or so of mass chattel slavery – as it gave way to likewise massified ‘free’ labour and each took on characteristics of the other—management solutions were frantically sought for barely human labourers, the ones equipped with cognition but incapable of Higher Virtues, who added value but at the same time threatened with mayhem. —Ines Doujak, John Barker

A radical

form of listening took shape in Britain in 1984. This sonic avantgarde was not attached to any nameable cultural shift or trend, but in fact owed its origin to the passing of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE).

The legislation marked a crucial shift in the conventions of testimony and what the law recognized as “truth,” stretching the juridical ear beyond speech acts into speech itself— not simply hearing words spoken aloud, but actively listening to the process of speaking itself. Code E of PACE required police interview rooms to be equipped with audio recording machines, so that all interrogations could be recorded. This legislation was seen as a solution to claims that the police were falsifying confessions and altering statements made during interviews, as prior to this point all statements were simply written down “verbatim” by the police officers and then signed off on by the suspect. Were it not for a handful of linguists practicing a rare strand of forensic phonetic analysis, PACE would have remained a simple and transparent article of legal reform. Instead, the act exponentially increased the use of speaker profiling, voice identification, and voice prints, in order to, among other things, determine regional and ethnic identity as well as to facilitate so 11 Wolfgang Koehler, The Mentality of Apes, New York 1926, 1

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called voice lineups. Emerging out of this legislation, this scientific field marked the voice as a new medium through which to conduct legal investigations. —Lawrence Abu Hamdan

“Frontiers

are not just edges; they are particular kinds of edges where the expansive nature of extraction comes into its own. Built from historical models of European conquest, frontiers create wildness so that some and not others may reap its rewards […]”12 According to such accounts it is not that the violence of resource extraction needs to be accounted for in law, but that law itself, and its history, is inseparable from the policies and violence of resource extraction. —Godofredo Pereira

the dissolution of boundaries gives rise to According totheKristeva, abject. To Kristeva, the boundary between the body and outside becomes difficult to differentiate from the body itself, making what is outside—the excremental, the grotesque and the unwanted—a part of the self. It dissolves the orderedness of identity and the world, and ushers in a state of indeterminacy, in-between-ness and ambiguity. —Ayesha Hameed

Forensic

listening begins every investigation with the obstinate idea that all sound/noise is a kind of speech if you only listen long and hard enough. And what becomes amplified in such investigations is the hermeneutic power and political potency of listening; the affirmation that listening is never simply a passive and receptive process, but an act that plays a fundamental role in the construction and facilitation of the speech of the other (person or thing, subject or object). Within the legal context, this philosophy of listening takes on alarming powers that can impact people’s lives. It is alarming because […] the fragile and deeply subjective process of listening starts to develop an air of objectivity and legal credence. —Lawrence Abu Hamdan

xenophobia, competitiveness and sexual proprietorship, Aggression, are concepts applied as though timeless, despite being many millennia newer than the genetic presets they’re supposed to represent. Like the ‘types’ of Personality psychology – another discipline with much to say about apes – these unmistakably 20th century categories are eternalized by circular reasoning: genetic programming changes more slowly than human history; tribalism and possessiveness are the currently favoured names for certain effects of such programming; therefore these names belong not to the historical time of their coinage but to the epochal time of the genetic code. Centuries of historical and linguistic mediation disappear thanks to this trick, letting it seem that everything done by the specimen (or the largest admissible unit, the specimen ‘tribe’) reflects genetic data directly, and that individual specimen psychology—being genetic and therefore generic—explains the collective life of the species. —Ines Doujak, John Barker

12 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 2005, Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, 27-28.

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increasing the application of forensic listening in legal investigations, By rapidly PACE widened the attention of the law to include not only the voice but also many of the other sounds that constitute our sonic environment. Soon, the forensic listener was required not only to identify the voice on a recording but also the sounds in the background so as to ascertain where, by what brand of machine, and at what time of day a recording was made. PACE was the catalyst, which enabled a complete spectrum of sonic frequencies to take the witness stand and testify. —Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Within

this meta-stable tribal framework sustained by computers, even in academia problems will only afford creative intelligence when the problem as such is as yet undefined. But by then the tribal “groupthink” born out of our generally “post-sincere condition” may yield false, or even catastrophic, results.13 And our “friends” on Facebook and LinkedIn might prove as no help. —Thomas Raab P+ is the smallest sculpture in the world; its production brings forth the largest sculpture. When making P+ massive amounts of slime aggregate, and at the same time if imbibed P+ liquefies our perception of the world to create a slimy state. In other words, the consumption of P+ changes our perception and our psyche, and the production of P+ modifies the composition of the material world. —Thomas Feuerstein

finance, the world today is conceived as a problem From genomics ofto coding, of managing increasing amounts of data.

Equally important is to notice how this process of coding has invested in (and benefited from) constant advances in technologies of data collection, analysis and interpretation. […] This multiplication of technological abilities is allowing an extensive classification of the earth in its minute details, a process whereby the sampling of minerals for energy extraction and the sampling of microorganisms for medical purposes fulfil similar purposes: be it human, animal, microbial or geologic, all aspects of the earth are made into resources once they are translated into datasets—the epitome of what Heidegger described many years ago as the age of the world picture, where the entirety of nature is framed as a standing-reserve (bestand).14 —Godofredo Pereira

Finance

reformats representation by forward activating it: the (derivative) pricing system calculates myriad trajectories for investing in expected powers to be. Here, representation serves as a professional tool invested in navigating shifting states rather than controlling a fixed state: price is performative. It is situated in the future, not in the present – the latter’s incremental convergence due to technological armament of algorithmic trading operations notwithstanding. Thus, price discovery has ushered in a surprising turnaround of the notion of risk: risk is less about

13 Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink, Boston 1972, Alan Richardson, “Performing bullshit and the post-sincere condition,” in Gary L. Hardcastle and George A. Reisch, eds, Bullshit and Philosophy, Chicago 2006, 83-97.

14 Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, New York 1977.

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insuring against than producing the future. In other words, risk is turned from scandal to precondition in order to quantitatively calibrate volatility (by stochastic calculus or other means), which in turn is the market’s measure of risk. In a sense, prices look back on us, from the future onto the present; derivatives constitute operations nested inside the future as a contingent dictate (a legal contract) to be fulfilled at present. Here, activated representation is virtual (and viral) in the sense that actualization creates a blank, a u-topos, a nowhere; an aniconic present without significance per se. —Gerald Nestler

These labs

now also investigate the acoustic propagation of sound at crime scenes; through a sonic reenactment of crimes, they attempt to establish what could have been heard on site. Who could have heard it? And how clearly could they have heard it? —Lawrence Abu Hamdan

the abject body collapses the registers of the state, The implication ofterritory and body onto the border. It also calls attention to the different strategies of containment that borders operate on, and the fears that are concomitant with their dissolution. The relocation of migrants from the parks of Calais to the Sangatte Refugee Centre, to the inhabitation of ‘the jungle’ outside Calais, can be seen as spatial, environmental strategies of containment in response to the infiltration and visibility of migrants in city centres. In this context, the border shifts around as well.

Through the Touquet Treaty, the UK border controls move into Calais, into train stations, and into jurisdiction of private companies like Eurostar. International law is established between EU states to circumvent internal laws in dealing with migrants. A game of pass-the-parcel is played between municipality and centre, between nations, around accountability in dealing fairly and systematically with asylum seekers. —Ayesha Hameed images that gave the impression of clean warfare were The operative certainly stronger than the counter-images of the dirty war—for instance, the images of the bunker in Baghdad in which hundreds of civilians were torn to pieces. The television viewer is meant to become transformed into a war technician by means of the aerial shots that are actually only meant for the eyes of war technicians, they are meant to empathize with the technology of war. —Harun Farocki

Within

the field of war-crime investigation, a methodological shift has recently led to a certain blurring. The primacy accorded to the witness and to the subjective and linguistic dimension of testimony, trauma, and memory—a primacy that has had such an enormous cultural, aesthetic, and political influence that it has reframed the end of the twentieth century as “the era of the witness”—is gradually being supplemented (not to say bypassed) by an emergent forensic sensibility, an object-oriented juridical culture immersed in matter and materialities, in code and form, and in the presentation of scientific investigations by experts. —Eyal Weizman

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has already been set for the arrival of a new cast of juridical The stage actors endowed perhaps not so much with freewill in the classical sense (that would provide the conditions for criminal liability), but intelligent systems which are wilfully free in the sense that they have been programmed to make decisions based upon their own algorithmic logic.15 —Susan Schuppli zone of touch, relations of the self to In the experimental contact its outside (conceived, in mysticism, as God, and subsequently as the social sphere or milieu/environment) are brought into being and sundered, instituted and negated. This liminal space is rife with possibilities; what makes it dangerous is that the possibility of the subject is being wounded, of the reality of pain, can never be ruled out. Passage through this zone may end in destruction (of the body or the ego). A late reference to this mystical-experimental complex can be heard in Leibniz’s description of the “small perceptions” as thorns and pricks that agitate the perceptive faculty and spur it into action.16 And even today, a theory of the social that is attentive to sensuality and sexuality is familiar with the metaphor of the porcupine representing the need to balance between closeness and distance: too much of the latter and we may freeze to death, but come too close and we’ll be wounded by the other’s spines. Judith Butler captures this precariousness of touch in the social in the trenchant observation that violence is “a touch of the worst order.”17 —Karin Harrasser

The

recently terminated practice of ‘signature strikes’ in which data-analytics were used to determine emblematic ‘terrorist’ behaviour and match these patterns to potential targets on the ground already points to a future in which intelligence gathering, assessment, and military action, including the calculation of who can legally be killed, will largely be performed by machines based upon an ever expanding database of aggregated information. —Susan Schuppli

premeditated killing of an individual Targeted killing byis thea state organization or institution outside a judicial procedure or a battlefield. —UBERMORGEN

Since

1920 in the USA, shots filmed from a position not normally taken by a person have been called phantom shots; for instance, from a camera positioned under a train track. Images from the perspective of a person are called subjectives. We can therefore regard the shot from the perspective of a bomb as a phantom subjective. The shots taken from a camera that crashes into its target—that is, from a suicide camera—cling to the memory. They were new and added something to the type

15 Gunther Teubner, “Rights of Non-Humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law,” Journal of Law & Society (2006) vol. 33, no. 4.

16 Daniel Heller-Roazan, The Inner Touch, New York 2007, 193-209 17 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, London 2004, 28.

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of image that we may have heard about since the cruise missiles in the eighties, but didn’t know anything specific about. They appeared together with the term intelligent weapons—that is, weapons that could recognize and hit a target on their own—connecting a rather glib idea of intelligence with an equally glib idea of subjectivity. —Harun Farocki

The moral

register around the decision-to-kill operates according to a different ethical framework that does not necessarily bind the individual to a contract enacted between the citizen and the state. Moral positions can thus be specific to individual values and beliefs whereas legal frameworks permit actions in our collective name as citizens contracted to a democratically elected body that acts on our behalf but with which we might be in political disagreement. —Susan Schuppli

today do not show images where vehicles can The military archives be seen, which would necessarily imply that people are present in the target area. It therefore becomes clear that making war and reporting war become a single project. The images that we get to see are created and controlled, militarily and politically. In film’s civilian life, it is common for production companies to make a documentary about a production alongside the primary film, tending to reserve the entire coverage of the product to themselves. —Harun Farocki

The multifaceted

semantic field of the term resolution and its technological as well as social significance—ranging from visualization, discrimination, and intelligence to intention, purpose, (common) initiative and (joint) decision-making—offer a collectivity that presents a conceptual basis for re-thinking socio-political constitutions as well as the conditions that in the name of proprietary and other interests make the ruptures and breaches of social contracts possible. It could thus play a crucial role in the effort to trace aesthetic, ethic as well as political consequences – in other words to move from mere aesthetics to a poietics (making) of dissent. —Gerald Nestler

This forensic

mode of sonic attention is astounding in its ability to reconceptualise the conventions of what constitutes the space of law; this process of listening expands the jurisdiction of the law into and completely across the national grid, pervading any space where the electricity is, almost silently, humming. Moreover, this example deepens our understanding of how national space is organized and territorially governed, as here the United Kingdom is reduced to a single linear pattern of oscillating frequency between 49 and 51 Hz that can be used to place its recorded subjects temporally within the invisible jurisdiction of the national grid. —Lawrence Abu Hamdan

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Resolution

techniques embody powerful and ambivalent contraptions of technowledge, a term I use to describe the fusion of technology and knowledge in the age of algorithmic automation. For one, resolution serves the construction of enclosures typical for the differentiation machine of information capitalism. It enables the generation of scarcity and allows parcelling materials into specific restrictions that belong to a category we have become used to call commodity; and which can be unlocked, i.e. sold and distributed, to consumer classes of varying affluence. By developing artificial senses and at the same time restricting access to their data, resolution techniques are an instrument of power to capitalize on visibility, or, as it were, invisibility – on what we are able, i.e. offered, to see/know; and by implication on what we are not able, i.e. not offered, to see/ know. Increasingly, we ‘lose sight’ of what there is we ought to see, i.e. what we ought to perceive, comprehend and make informed decisions on. The commodification of significant and relevant meaning – something resolution practically provides us with in a technological as well as political sense—produces competitive advantage. —Gerald Nestler “Let us drink P+! P+ is the molecular sculpture that will not gather dust in a museum. It should have an aesthetic effect in our bloodstream and brains, stimulating the senses. We want to be its base, its space, its medium. Language and images will no longer form separate spheres. Logic and the senses, reason and emotion will meld in a new synthesis. P+ forges the identity of mind and matter. One small molecule and the world has changed.” —Thomas Feuerstein

by quantification procedures, the earth is made Once captured commensurable with capitalist modes of valorisation and therefore becomes abstracted by capital as quantities whose differential relations are productive of surplus values.18 In this context science becomes a motor of accumulation: each new analysis allowing for new forms of valorisation and circulation. The epitome of this process is the transmutation of both people and materials into “decoded flows” in the operation of contemporary financial devices.19 —Godofredo Pereira

As

early as 1976 Drew McDermott20 powerfully argued that the sloppy language use and the lack of stringent definition in psychology had led computer scientists to believe their programs are “smart” because they contain a code section named “reasoning”. His reservations all the more hold true in face of the danger that many people believe the word that big data analysis is actually intelligent. —Thomas Raab

Hand

in hand with the emergence of a new techno-financial elite (so-called “quants”) we witness an increase in electronic resolution methodologies

18 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis 1983.

19 For a discussion of financial semiotic regimes and their reliance of the management of decoded flows see Lazzarato, Maurizio, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Los Angeles 2014.

20 Drew McDermott, “Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity,” ACM SIGART Bulletin 57 (1976) 4–9.

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both technically as well as socially. In its wake, the paradigm of resolution is shifting from colonizing macro-space to exploiting micro-time; a move that under the auspices of free-market ideology has had a tremendous impact beyond markets on the way we experience agency, security and decision-making in society. [...] Self-governing proprietary interests are prone to blur our shared vision of realities that affect us profoundly. As a consequence of such an-aesthetics, there is urgency to invigorate the notion of resolution across all the term’s semantic registers. —Gerald Nestler the emphasis towards a juridical account of algorithmic reasoning Shifting might prove useful when confronted with the real possibility that the kill list and other emergent matrices for managing the war on terror will be algorithmically derived as part of a techno-social assemblage in which it becomes impossible to isolate human from non-human agents. It does however ‘raise the bar’ for what we now need to ask the law to do. —Susan Schuppli the main effect of “smart” technologies, including big At first sight data statistics, on human intelligence seems quite straightforward.21 Intelligence, conceived as a general problem solving capacity, is reciprocally proportional to the use of sophisticated computer programs and gadgets. A GPS navigation system, for instance, will gradually corrupt your routine in solving orientation problems in the geographic domain. I am painfully aware that my concept of intelligence seems outmoded. Today the notion of intelligence as superficial “info combination” has already been puffed up to the “cool” ideology of entire milieus. Google’s Sergey Brin, for instance, defines intelligence as the optimization of computer searches for (meaningless) strings: “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence. [...] Certainly if you had the entire world’s information directly attached to your brain, you’d be better off”.22 —Thomas Raab are being enlisted to out-compute terrorism and When algorithms calculate who can and should be killed, we need to produce a politics appropriate to these radical modes of calculation and a legal framework that is sufficiently agile to deliberate over such events. —Susan Schuppli

In

the current legal and technological frameworks, which privilege property rights and self-regulation (a premise not only of the law but of cybernetics), an effective analysis of market events depends on insider knowledge. Only crisis—a scandal, a counter-provocation—can disrupt affiliations and break the veil of secrecy.

What this exposes is an ambivalent, contingent and marginal figure: the renegade, a 21 By “technology” I mean each method or, by extension, each man-made machine embodying a deterministic theory thereby replacing a goal-directed action hitherto performed by men only. According to this definition all applicable mathematics is already a technology.

22 As quoted in Nicholas Carr, “Is Google making us stupid?” Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education 107 (2008), 89–94.

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traitor and defector inside systems, she becomes an educator not only for regulatory authorities but for the public at large. The whistle-blower, for instance, is an expert acting from a point of no return, a risk taker at the point of ultimate crisis who rises up against what she perceives as a wrong. Moreover, her act proceeds from mere dissent to concrete insurrection. And her counter-violent act—essentially a violation of current custom, rule or law—produces a host of viable renegade resolution materials ranging from visualization, discrimination to decision-making. —Gerald Nestler the rather hollow idea that intelligence consists of “information Leaving aside retrieval” as well as the fact that it has been proven that more online information does not necessarily lead to a better knowledge quality,23 the conceptually tricky thing is the teleology implied in slogans such as Brin’s. Given the argument of Turing’s test even the parrot-like declamation of Wikipedia sentences can count as intelligence as long as it is viable in the social sense, i.e., as long as some others are applauding. Is this what Brin means by “better off”? —Thomas Raab at the core of global finance does not only define markets The pricing regime but every field in which expectations and anticipations of future outcomes rule. Such a „technology of the future“ (as the financial engineer and philosopher Elie Ayache calls derivatives) produces the future not simply by anticipating it, that is, by pure prediction. Rather, the derivative pricing of contingent expectations serves as a resolution regime to move along (in parallel with) the uncertainty of the future. Hence, mathematical recalibration computed to render prices for any conceivable outcome, i.e. risk potential, ‘creates’ the future at any present moment of trading. The present as we know it has no bearing here; at the moment when it emerges (every moment), it arrives as price and instantly turns into historic data to enter a new cycle of calculating profit probabilities. [...] Thus, in what I term the derivative condition of social relations, not only those contingent futures “collapse” that emerge from subjectivities and their relations; what decays in microseconds is the present as the moment in which subjectivity and agency are born in the first place. —Gerald Nestler

There

are a few thousand key people and families controlling and manipulating large parts of our lives and of the lives of the majority of the humans populating earth. These financial terrorists are accumulating wealth in unbelievable quantities. They kill large quantities of humans, animals and plants intentionally or as a byproduct of their wealth amassement. This has to stop now. It is not only a crime of unthinkable proportion but it also creates bad karma and it endangers the whole species. —UBERMORGEN

23 James A. Evans, “Electronic publication and the narrowing of science

and scholarship,” in: Science 321 (2008), 395–399.

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Can

there be a counter-cartography that brings together the epistemological diversity of the peoples whose land is under threat yet one that can use the same cartographic methods, language of science, understood and accepted in legal forums? What are their associated risks? —Nabil Ahmed

We can’t

wait, we simply can not be passive anymore. It is the question of free will versus determinism, of sensitivity vs. structural violence. Killliste is designed as a networked self-defense infrastructure and as a target data distribution platform. —UBERMORGEN

Human Resources management, ‘showing initiative’ and ‘problem In today’s solving’ means correctly pre-empting commands. For mental patients, ‘insight’ means surrendering to your keepers. The insightful ape or apelike human is inclined to idleness and waste, sullen silence or riotous assembly, but her or his capacity for mentored self-management still makes for a higher-yielding investment than an organism that must always be whipped to work or arrives at the right Life Choices only when subjected to electroshock. —Ines Doujak, John Barker of the Foxconn conglomerate—the Apple Mac manufacturer Terry Gou, CEO notorious for its worker suicides and relentless workrate—said: “Hon Hai [Foxconn] has a workforce of over one million worldwide, and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache”. —Ines Doujak, John Barker

Science

and law measure truth as a position on a variable scale of probability. Terms such as the “balance of probability” and “beyond a reasonable doubt” reveal the constant ticking of probability calculations.

Scientific literature simply notes the measure of uncertainty and the margin of error; but law—like politics—must render decisions, even if those decisions are based on a fuzzy forensics of probabilities. Decision, if the word is to merit its name, is to be taken in excess of calculations. It will, most often, kill the cat. —Eyal Weizman

Could

these new rules of engagement—new legal codes—assume a similarly preemptive character to the software codes and technologies that are being evolved—what I would characterize as a projective sense of the law? Might they take their lead from the spirit of the Geneva Conventions protecting the rights of non-combatants, rather than from those protocols (the Hague Conventions of 1899, 1907) that govern the use of weapons of war and are thus reactive in their formulation and event-based.

In short, a set of legal frameworks that is not determined by precedent—by what has happened in the past—but by what may arguably take place in the future. —Susan Schuppli

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At a distance,

hyper- and multispectral radiometers mounted on satellites orbiting the earth at 12,500 mph classify the surface of the earth; geophones and thumper trucks capture seismic reflections and refractions from the earth’s depths that are then processed by complex algorithms into 2d sections or 3d cubes; boreholes are drilled to sample the earth’s its composition. The underground we know is a fabrication, produced according to what Johnston—following Guattari—would call a machinic vision.24 The point is not that the underground is today more adequately represented, nor that we can see more of it, but that what we perceive cannot be disconnected from both the mechanisms we use and the ambitions we develop while using them. In other words, the constitution of the underground as a problem of thought and a frontier of capitalist expansion is immanent to the specific forms and practices of knowledge production that determine what I call here the axiomatic earth.25 —Godofredo Pereira

the raid moved to the Gard de Nord in Paris, the When migrants escaping press dubbed the Park Villemin nearby as the Parisian jungle. The term ‘la jungle’ became a modular term that linked migrants to the outdoor spaces where they camped. But there are other lives that arise in the circulation of the image of ‘la jungle’ that is separate from what it meant when it was coined by the migrants themselves. Part of what makes this image so easy to circulate is that, congealed within, are several ways of framing and controlling migration. —Ayesha Hameed a wildness, a zone of danger, the victory of the The jungle connotes viral and uncivilized. It is feral like Mowgli, the child of the commons, who Peter Linebaugh describes as standing at the threshold between the lost life of the wilderness and the civilizing gesture of enclosure. What is the razing of the jungle then but a rooting out of the virus of otherness contaminating the inside; of the alternative of commons to the striation of border control. —Ayesha Hameed my first works on this topic (“Eye/Machine” 2001), I Beginning with have called such images, which are not made to entertain or to inform, “operative images.” Images that are not simply meant to reproduce something but are instead part of the operation. This term can be traced back to Roland Barthes. In Mythologies, he writes in a theoretical afterword: “Here we must go back to the distinction between language-object and meta-language. If I am a 24 Johnston, John, “Machinic Vision”, Critical Inquiry, 26 (1): 27, 1999.

25 Axiomatics is a term that comes from logics and mathematics. An axiom is a starting point of a theory, a self-evident truth (postulate or hypothesis) that serves as the basis for the construction of a formal system, whereas axiomatics are a set of axioms that define a formal system. An axiom is a rule that is necessarily indifferent to the nature of what it refers to. What I am interested in here is this tension between an instrumental form of knowledge and the problematic limits of that same instrumentalisation, i.e. the distance between the axiom and the world, that becomes the internal limit to the axiomatic system. By using the term axiomatic I also refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of capitalism. Cf. Daniel Smith, “Axiomatics and Problematics as Two Modes of Formalisation: Deleuze’s Epistemology of Mathematics”, in Duffy, Símon, Virtual Mathematics: the Logic of Difference, Manchester 2006.

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woodcutter and I am led to name the tree, which I am felling, whatever the form of my sentence, I ‘speak the tree,’ I do not speak about it [...]. But if I am not a woodcutter, I can no longer ‘speak the tree,’ I can only speak about it, on it.” —Harun Farocki

I am

interested in the life that is embedded in the circulation of the image produced by a name like ‘la jungle’. The destruction of space—the violence of the razing that piles emblematically over the violence of incarceration and the quest for asylum— transmutes the image of the jungle into something profanated, but also animated in a monstrous condensation of person and land (that as an image is an actor). —Ayesha Hameed

In

Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, it goes as follows: “War always finds a way.” Barbara Ehrenreich understood this sentence to mean that war is unimaginably inventive when it comes to its own survival.26 Even if no human being wanted it anymore, it would still attempt to mutate into an automatic war on a deserted battlefield. In the rich countries, most people do not want war.

War is as unnecessary as the gold standard behind currency. —Harun Farocki

Aesthetics,

as the judgment of the senses, is what rearranges the field of options and their perceived likelihood and cuts through probability’s economy of calculation. The word “conviction” could thus draw a line between the legal verdict of “guilty” and the subjective sensation of constructed belief. If law and politics are based on ruptural decisions, must the practice of history follow suit? Could it rather remain faithful to the nonmutually exclusive nature of probability? Should there be two or rather several memorials to acts of destruction built side by side? If so, how does one avoid this practice falling into the hands of historical revisionists? —Eyal Weizman The slime is no coincidental excretion, not normal bodily secretion. It is a life form of its own. Perhaps Boris was right when he speculated in Bremen that the slime is older than life on earth. Perhaps it is simply waiting for the right moment for its resurrection. And perhaps P+ is the medium in which it communicates, a molecular language in which it speaks. Boris has read too much speculative fiction, but you need people who imagine away like he does in order to recognize that nature is a slimy process that blends all things and creatures in a crawling network of relations to form one nexus. —Thomas Feuerstein

26 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passion of War, New York 1997

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eccentric projection gradually reveal themselves to Teletactility and be social, liminal phenomena and susceptible to technical manipulation (here we touch on the domain of prosthetics). In the 1910s and 1920s, [Rudolf Hermann] Lotze’s reflections inspired practical (which is to say, technological and medical) research.27 Via gestalt theory, they also entered the field of computer science and now surface in computer mice, surgical robots, and drone technology.

Lotze’s more speculative ideas have left traces as well, for example, in Sigmund Freud’s description of the human being as a “prosthetic god” or, […] in Marshall McLuhan’s conception of media as extensions of the senses. This nexus might be the point of departure for a history of the theory of media and the arts in the twentieth century: both fields probe the interrelation between biologics and technologics, study forms of self and other, and seek to determine degrees of autonomy and heteronomy with regard to media environments. As a perspective on tactition, it would focus our attention on the precarious and dangerous aspects of media-based contact as well as its potential as a pathway for new relationships, especially ones that surpass the bounds of skin.

By weighing the different aspects of tactility, we might try to map the thinking about media in all its variety, a field that is closely related to the discourse on tactition also in that both emphasize the actively mediating quality of media. —Karin Harrasser

The act

of destroying fingerprints, and the image produced and circulated, recapitulates the moment of its inception. In 1858, William Herschel— the Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor—was finalizing a contract with construction worker Rajyadhar Konai to purchase some ‘ghooting’, a binding material to build light roads. When Konai was about to sign the contract, Herschel was inspired to ask Konai to make a stamp of his hand on the contract. Herschel had no thought of the actual imprint and its veracity. It was, rather, the gesture of implicating Konai’s hand and, by extension, his body into the contract. “I was only wishing to frighten Konai out of all thought of repudiating his signature hereafter.” […] This gesture of pulling a hand to a document in the building of a country road in colonial India bookends the moment of refusal and violent abject agency in the refusal of Dublin 3. In both moments, the land is encoded into the hand, and the moment of frightening Konai—the ‘native’ non insurgent—into honouring his commitment to supply materials for building the road is negated by the territorial tracks scored painfully on the hand of the migrants travelling not in the margins, but towards the metropolitan centre and refusing the paper, legal and territorial trails leading them there. —Ayesha Hameed

misreading, saying that very few bombs have any slump in A productive sales that has to be compensated for. If there is a relation between production and destruction, it is also true that it is not so much hardware that needs to be disposed of, as it is the controlling and targeting. But selling more control depends precisely on differentiating between friend and foe. The economy, at least that of the weapons manufacturer, demands war for humanitarian aims. —Harun Farocki 27 Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus: An Essay concerning Man and His Relation to the World, New York 1888.

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in concert with those who put their reputation (and much Taking action more) at risk requires the cultivation of renegade solidarity,

28

an activist politics uncovering, transforming and institutionalizing “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” into knowledge and decision-making in the public interest. Consequently, such an approach opens a field for multifaceted, transdisciplinary practices engaged in unearthing, narrating and visualizing instabilities that coagulate dissent into insurrection. Re-calibrating, re-assessing, and re-evaluating concrete but opaque material events and operations—to use both technical and financial terms that denote frequency, depth, and consequence of inquiry—reveals evidence (by constructing and establishing truth as a past for-ever present in the future) that in turn may radically re-orient critical discourse and common action. —Gerald Nestler

These forensic

speech analyses force us to redefine our fundamental democratic right to freedom of speech, a concept that must now be extended to encompass not only the words we speak, but also the sonic quality of our speech itself. The voice has long been understood as the very means by which one can secure and advocate one’s political and legal interests, but, though minute, these recent shifts in law and technology affirm that the stakes and conditions of speech have been dramatically altered. Therefore, the more radical the practices of listening at the core of legal investigations become, the more they herald a moment to redefine and reshape the political conventions of speech and sound in society. —Lawrence Abu Hamdan

There is

a multiplicity of subaltern actors that find in this tension characteristic of the underground frontier a space to insert political claims: indigenous peoples, social movements, student movements or local communities have recently taken disputes in the underground frontier as an opportunity to propose radical political transformations. More than that, they have done so by incorporating, instead of denying, techno-science and resources in their claims. […] These are projects that have in common the establishing of a new relation between resources and politics. But the reason these emerging political projects are possible, is that today techno-scientific tools of enquiry and analysis bring forth, like never before, the complex entanglements between man and nature, providing a different perspective regarding the histories and realities of resource extraction.

Of course not all politics can be made commensurate with technoscience. And yet, the more the attraction for the underground El Dorado leads to the development of technosciences, the more these tools become available for other purposes— co-determining the imaginations of alternative political possibilities. —Godofredo Pereira

28 The urgency of renegade solidarity is implied by a recent case of financial whistleblowing. See: Matt Taibbi,

“The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JP Morgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare,” in: The Rolling Stone Magazine, November 6, 2014, accessed May 24, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witness-20141106.

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The most

celebrated escapee and real Kriminalaffe was an orangoutang given the name Fu Manchu, “a late resident of Omaha Zoo” who “frequently would be found outside his exhibit when his keepers arrived in the morning.” His escape involved climbing into air vents and following them to a dry moat surrounding his enclosure, where he would unlock a door used by employees. The lock, it transpired, was picked with a piece of wire, which Fu Manchu kept hidden in his mouth during the day. It was the criminal mind, necessary in such situations at work, but the escape was necessarily limited. How to get from Omaha back to Borneo, given the logistics – money, disguise, maps and transport – that would require? Thus the Zoo’s smug pride in him – in the end it was safe. They did not, it is true, discover how he learned to pick locks, but discovered the rest by use of CCTV surveillance. It is this aspect of the story that most fits with the state-backed neoliberal narrative of inevitability. Thus, many of the London rioters of 2011 – so readily described as apes – would be caught not in the act, but in the end because of the pervasive CCTV coverage of the city. It may be that the economic inevitability of ‘the markets’ is now being challenged, but there have always been modes of refusal by apes, and by humans living by the sweat of their brow: silence, work-avoidance techniques and the dumb insolence of paying only lip service to the dictates of training. The secret of Fu Manchu’s lock-picking dies with him; the art for both species has been to keep, hidden if needs be, the space to ask the profound question, Why Are Things As They Are? —Ines Doujak, John Barker The slightest trace of matter can determine our fate. Without matter, no dreams—without dreams, no reality. The power of your mind is located in your glands and pores, not in your brain. The future is reflected in the sweat on your brow. Now, with the revolutions forgotten, it’s time to start work on fiction. But how to get a clear mind and world? Everything is distorted by the dreams of ideology. After the death of the great narratives, all that remain is concerns about health and safety. Humans believe in an Ego that is located in the brain, and hallucinate their identity. They’re frightened of being flesh, are disgusted by puss and lymphatic fluid, are ashamed of snot and excretions. We want to be mindful, noble beings, but that is nothing but smoke and mirrors. What is needed is work on the flesh. —Thomas Feuerstein

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Issue Editor: Maximilian Thoman Co-Editors: Jamie Allen Paul Boshears Bernhard Garnicnig Nina J채ger Contributing Editors: Matt Bernico Lital Khaikin

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KURATOR_INNEN CURATORS

SOCIAL GLITCH Radikale Ästhetik und die Konsequenzen extremer Ereignisse Radical Aesthetics and the Consequences of Extreme Events

SYLVIA ECKERMANN (AT) Eckermann lebt und arbeitet als Künstlerin in Wien. In ihren Arbeiten kulminieren langjährige formal-mediale künstlerische Auseinandersetzungen in kritischen Reflexionen zur Gegenwart. Sie zeigen Inszenierungen von Information in binären und physischen Umgebungen, die individuelle wie ökonomische Verstrickungen strukturieren. Ihre Installationen wurden national und international gezeigt. 2014 erhielt Eckermann den Medienkunst-Preis der Stadt Wien für ihr künstlerisches Gesamtwerk.

Eckermann is an artist committed to a discursive engagement with form and media that culminates in critical artistic reflections about our entanglement as individuals in current socio-economic situations. Eckermann works with various media including digital and physical environments, installations, videos, objects, and sculptures. Her installations were shown internationally. Eckermann is the first recipient of the City of Vienna Award for Media Art (2014).

GERALD NESTLER (AT) Nestler verbindet theoretische Recherchen mit künstlerischen Mitteln, um die Erzeugung gesellschaftlicher Realität mit Modellen, Technologien und Fiktionen der Finanzmärkte und anderer algorithmischer Praxen zu untersuchen. Neben seiner künstlerischen Tätigkeit ist er als Kurator und Autor tätig, u. a. als Herausgeber der Kunstforum International Bände 200/201 (mit Dieter Buchhart) und von Making of Finance (mit Armen Avanessian, Merve Verlag Berlin, 2015).

Er ist PhD-candidate am Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Nestler is an artist, curator and writer who combines theory and text with video, installation, performance and speech to interrogate finance-based social models, methodologies and narratives. He graduated from the Academy of fine arts Vienna (1992) and conducted artistic fieldwork as broker and trader (1994-97). His most recent publication is Making of Finance (with Armen Avanessian, Merve Berlin, 2015).

Nestler is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.

MAXIMILIAN THOMAN (AT) Thoman lebt und studiert in Innsbruck und Wien. Er ist künstlerischer Leiter des Vereins mkt – Büro für intermedialen Kommunikationstransfer und Vorstandsmitglied des spartenübergreifenden Innsbrucker Kulturvereins p.m.k – Plattform mobile Kulturinitiative. Neben diversen kuratorischen Tätigkeiten zu Ausstellungsprojekten und Vortragsreihen ist er derzeit Co-Redakteur der Issue 4.4/2015 des Online Magazins continent. (continentcontinent.cc).

Thoman lives and studies in Innsbruck and Vienna. He heads the media arts association mkt – Büro für intermedialen Kommunikationstransfer and is a member of the managing committee of p.m.k – platform mobile cultural initiatives. Beside his curatorial practise on exhibition projects and lecture series he is currently the co-editor of the issue 4.4/2015 of the online journal continent. (continentcontinent.cc).

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KO-KURATORINNEN CO-CURATORS

SOCIAL GLITCH.performance BETTINA KOGLER (AT) Kogler verfolgt die Entwicklung der Performanceszene Wiens und Österreichs und darüber hinaus im internationalen Bereich seit mehr als 15 Jahren und ist seit über 10 Jahren kuratorisch und programmierend tätig. In ihrer Arbeit verfolgt sie einen Performance-Begriff, der sich als Schirmbegriff versteht und sich aus verschiedenen Sparten wie Choreografie, Theater, Musik und bildende Kunst nährt. Ein gesellschaftspolitischer und -kritischer Auftrag von Kunst ist ihr dabei besonders wichtig.

Kogler has been following the development of the international, Austrian and Viennese performance scene for over 15 years and has engaged actively as a curator and programmer for 10 years. Conceptually, her understanding of performance is multi-disciplinary. It includes choreography, theater, music and the visual arts and emphasizes the critical role of art in society.

SOCIAL GLITCH.intervention GERALD STRAUB (AT) Straub ist Künstler, Kurator und angewandter Kulturtheoretiker. In seiner Arbeit verbindet er unterschiedliche Geographien und raumspezifisches Verhalten. Er erforscht, wie Situationen unter bestimmten soziopolitischen Konditionen zueinander im Verhältnis stehen. Dabei dienen performative Interventionen als Arbeitsmethode für die Aufarbeitung der Überschneidung von Kunst und in/formeller Wissensproduktion.

Straub is an applied cultural theorist, artist and curator.

His work interconnects spatial settings and site-specific behaviours examining how certain situations relate to one another under various socio-political conditions. Applying performative investigations, interventions and visual methods he explores the overlaps of art and in/formal knowledge production.

SOCIAL GLITCH.sound art GEORG WECKWERTH (DE/AT) Weckwerth ist ein in Wien und Berlin lebender unabhängiger Kurator und Künstler. Er ist Initiator von Festivals wie SoundArt und sonambiente und von Ausstellungen, die auf Klang fokussieren wie The Potential Meanings of Sound, Vom Klang der Kunst, The Loudspeaker, Membra Disjecta for John Cage, Listen to Your City—Listening To Art, Connecting Sound Etc. sowie Gründer und Vorstand von TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien und Künstlerischer Leiter der Reihe TONSPUR für einen öffentlichen raum mit permanenter Präsenz im MuseumsQuartier Wien und temporären Spielorten in anderen Städten, darunter Berlin, Prag, Kopenhagen und Karlsruhe.

Zuletzt realisierte er die Dauerausstellung Raum für Cage – Room for Cage beim weithin bekannten John-Cage-OrgelKunst-Projekt im deutschen Halberstadt.

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Weckwerth is a Vienna and Berlin based independent curator and artist. Initiator of festivals, such as SoundArt and sonambiente, and of exhibitions focusing on sound, including The Potential Meanings of Sound, Vom Klang der Kunst, The Loudspeaker, Membra Disjecta for John Cage, Listen to Your City—Listening To Art, Connecting Sound Etc. Founder and chairman of TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien and artistic director of the ongoing sound project TONSPUR für einen öffentlichen raum, permanently located in the public space of MuseumsQuartier Wien, Austria, and temporarily located in other cities, including Berlin, Prague, Copenhagen and Karlsruhe.

Recently he installed the permament exhibition Raum für Cage – Room for Cage at the widely known John Cage Organ Project in Halberstadt, Germany.

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN (LB/GB) Abu Hamdan kommt aus dem Feld der DIY-Musik und beschäftigt sich mit der Praxis und Politik des Hörens sowie dessen Verhältnis zu Grenzen, Menschenrechten, Zeugenaussagen und Wahrheit. Sein Werk umfasst Dokumentarfilme, Essays, audiovisuelle Installationen, Skulpturen, Fotografien, Workshops und Performances. 2015 war er u.a. commissioned artist der Armory Show, New York, und zur New Museum Triennale, NY, sowie dem Internationalen Filmfestival Rotterdam eingeladen. Einzelausstellungen (Auswahl): The Showroom, London; Casco, Utrecht; Beirut, Kairo; Kunsthalle St. Gallen und MoMa, NY.

Abu Hamdan is an artist with a background in DIY music and as such his work frequently deals with the relationship between listening and politics, borders, human rights, testimony and truth through the production of documentaries, essays, audio-visual installations, sculpture, photography, workshops and performance. In 2015 Abu Hamdan was the Armory Show commissioned artist and was also included in the New Museum Triennial and the International film festival Rotterdam. His previous solo exhibitions have been at The Showroom, London, Casco, Utrecht, Beirut in Cairo and forthcoming at Kunsthalle St Gallen and MoMa New York.

INES DOUJAK & JOHN BARKER (AT/GB) Doujak und Barker leben in London und Wien. Ausgangspunkt ihrer Zusammenarbeit seit 2010 ist ihr gemeinsames Interesse an der politischen Dimension von kulturellem Austausch. Ausstellungen (Auswahl): The Beast and the Sovereign, MACBA, Barcelona (2015); Ape Culture, HKW, Berlin (2015); Universes in Universe, Biennal São Paulo (2014); Not Dressed for Conquering, Royal College of Art, London (2013); Garden of Learning, Busan Biennale, Korea (2012). Barker beschäftigt sich seit den 1970er Jahren als Autor, Essayist und Performer intensiv mit politischer Ökonomie, geopolitischen Dynamiken und der Ausbeutung der Arbeitskraft.

Doujak ist eine feministische Künstlerin. Sie arbeitet mit unterschiedlichen Medien und erhielt u.a. zwei Forschungsstipendien des Öster. Wissenschaftsfonds: Loomshuttles / Warpaths (2010-14) erforschte die globale Geschichte von Textilien mit den ihr zugrunde liegenden Kultur-, Klassenund Geschlechterkonflikten; Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom (mit Oliver Ressler 2013-15) wurde als Ausstellung in der Sezession (Wien, 2014) und als Publikation (bei Pluto Press, London) realisiert.

Doujak and Barker live in London and Vienna, and work together through a common interest in the political dimension of cultural exchanges. Since 2010 they have collaborated on exhibitions like The Beast and the Sovereign, MACBA, Barcelona (2015); Ape Culture, HKW, Berlin (2015); Universes in Universe, Biennial São Paulo (2014); Not Dressed for Conquering, Royal College of Art, London (2013); Garden of Learning, Busan Biennale, Korea (2012). Barker is a writer, essayist and performer who, since the 1970s, has been focused on economics, geopolitical dynamics and the exploitation of labour.

Doujak is a feminist artist who uses various media. She received two research grants from the Austrian Science Fund Loomshuttles / Warpaths (2010-2014), an extensive study of textiles to investigate their global history characterized by cultural, class, and gender conflict; and Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom (together with Oliver Ressler 2013-2015) which resulted in an exhibition in the Secession, Vienna (2014) and a publication (Pluto Press, London).

EARTH SENSING ASSOCIATION / NABIL AHMED (GB) Ahmed ist ein Autor, Künstler und Forscher, der die Politiken ökologischer Gewalt insbesondere in Süd- und Südostasien untersucht. Er verfasste Textbeiträge u.a. für: Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Third Text, Volume, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Seine Arbeiten wurden an der Taipeh Biennale (2012), der Cuenca Biennale, im Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin (2014) und dem Shanghai Study Center (alle 2014) gezeigt. Er ist Mitbegründer und Direktor des Londoner Klangkunst-Kollektivs Call & Response.

Ahmed promovierte am Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, und unterrichtet an der Metropolitan University London. Die Earth Sensing Association ist ein Forschungsinstitut zur Verbreitung von Wissen über die Wechselwirkungen von Umweltveränderung, Konflikt und Kulturproduktion, das Ahmed mit The Showroom (London) initiierte.

Ahmed is a writer, artist and researcher. His work explores the politics of environmental violence mainly in South and South East Asia. He has written for the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Third Text, Volume, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, and for many other publications. More recently he has participated in the Taipei Biennale (2012), Cuenca Biennale (2014) and has exhibited at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), and Shanghai Study Centre. He is cofounder and director of Call & Response, a sound arts organization based in London. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He teaches at the School of Architecture, London Metropolitan University. Earth Sensing Association is a research organisation initiated by Ahmed in collaboration with The Showroom for the diffusion of knowledge at the intersection of environmental change, conflict and cultural production.

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SYLVIA ECKERMANN (AT) Biografien > KuratorInnen

biographies > curators

HARUN FAROCKI (DE) Farocki war ein deutscher Filmemacher, Autor, Hochschuldozent und Filmkritiker. Neben seinen Engagements als Lehrender an verschiedenen Hochschulen (u.a. Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien; University of California, Berkeley) gilt er als einer der wichtigsten deutschen Medienkünstler des 20. Jahrhunderts. Als Filmemacher realisierte er über 90 Filme. Neben zahlreichen Ausstellungen war er 2007 bei der documenta 12 (mit Deep Play) vertreten.

Harun Farocki verstarb 2014 im Alter von 70 Jahren.

Farocki became one of the most prominent and subversive artists of our times. In 1966, he was expelled from the German Cinematic and Television Academy (dffb) in Berlin for political reasons. He realized over a hundred productions for video and cinema and had numerous gallery and museum shows including documenta 12 (Deep Play). He authored and edited the influential Filmkritik magazine. His writings include Speaking about Godard (1988-89) and Serious Games.

War I Media I Art (2011). Farocki died 2014 at the age of 70.

THOMAS FEUERSTEIN (AT) Feuersteins Werke offenbaren Verknüpfungen zwischen Feuerstein is an artist and author in the fields of fine art wissenschaftlicher Faktizität und künstlerischer Fiktion. and media art. His work comprises installations, objects, Mit der von ihm entwickelten künstlerischen Methode der drawings, paintings, photographs, videos, radio plays and „konzeptuellen Narration“ verfolgt er Spuren, die von der net art under the umbrella of an artistic method he calls griechischen Philosophie über Physik und Chemie bis hin “conceptual narration,” with which he investigates the interzu Computersystemen reichen. Er hinterfragt kulturelle play between verbal and visual elements, the possibilities System- und Symbolproduktionen, hebt Gegensätze auf of algorithmic art, the latent connections between fact and und präsentiert gewohnte Stabilitäten als kontingente fiction and the interaction between art and science. hD in art Zustände mit überraschenden Wendungen. Er schloss history and philosophy from the University of Innsbruck and sein Studium an der Universität Innsbruck mit einem Dok- assignments as lecturer and visiting professor at the Unitorat in Kunstgeschichte und Philosophie ab und lehrte an versity for Applied Arts Vienna, Bern University of the Arts, der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, der Kunstuni- F+F Schule für Kunst und Mediendesign Zurich, University versität Bern, der F+F Schule für Kunst und Mediendesign of Innsbruck, Applied Science University Vorarlberg, MozarZürich, der Universität Innsbruck, der Fachhochschule teum Salzburg.

Vorarlberg und dem Mozarteum Salzburg.

FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE (GB)

SUSAN SCHUPPLI, EYAL WEIZMAN et. al

Forensic Architecture ist ein Forschungsprojekt, das am Goldsmith College London beheimatet ist. Es vereint Architekten, Künstler, Filmemacher, Aktivisten und Theoretiker bei der Entwicklung und Erstellung räumlicher Analysen für juristische und politische Foren bzw. Tribunale.

Forensic Architecture is a research project based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The project has assembled a team of architects, artists, filmmakers, activists, and theorists to undertake research that gathers and presents spatial analysis in legal and political forums.

CHRISTINA GOESTL (AT) Goestl arbeitet in den Bereichen audiovisuelle Live-Performance und digital Video, entwickelt interaktive Applikationen und besitzt als Netzpionierin ein umfassendes Dossier an Web Art. Sie operiert mit Serien, Sequenzen, Modulationen und Loops, Superpositionen, Cut-ups und elektronischen Impulsen und den Auswirkungen einer lustvollen Zweckentfremdung technologischer Hilfsmittel. Aspekte ihrer Arbeit sind Rhythmus, Dynamik, Bewegung und Temporalität, kommunikative Schnittstellen und Zeichensysteme, die sie mit Sex-Positivity und queeren Diskursen verschränkt. Sie arbeitet an einer Re-Konfiguration von Körperbildern durch radikale Unterwanderung normativer Codes. Ihre Installationen, Interventionen und Performances werden international gezeigt.

Goestl is a net pioneer who has accumulated an extensive Web Art dossier. She works in the fields of audiovisual live performance and digital video, develops interactive applications and utilizes series, sequences, modulations and loops, superpositions, cut-ups and electronic impulses as well as the effects of an inappropriate use of technological tools. The essential aspects of her artistic work are rhythm, dynamics, movement and temporality, communicative interfaces and semiotic systems, which she interlaces with sex positivity and queer discourses. The aim of her work is to reconfigure body images by a radical subversion of normative codes. Her exhibitions, installations, interventions and performances took place in many different locations around the world: on streets, in sub-cultural venues as well as in museums, galleries and on the Internet.

AUSSTELLUNG EXHIBITION

AYESHA HAMEED (CA/GB) Hameed ist Künstlerin und Autorin. Sie forscht zur Geschichte und Gegenwart von Grenzen und Migration. Zurzeit schreibt sie an einer Monografie mit dem Titel Walter Benjamin and the Black Atlantis. Sie präsentierte ihre Arbeiten u.a. an der University of Chicago; der Cambridge University; der UN-Menschenrechtskommission; der Städelschule Frankfurt; dem Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; und dem Banff Centre for the Arts. Hameed ist Joint Programme Leader für Kunst und Kunstgeschichte am Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Hameed is a writer and artist who explores historical and contemporary borders and migration. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Walter Benjamin and the Black Atlantis. She has presented her work at the University of Chicago, Cambridge University, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, the Städelschule Frankfurt, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin and the Banff Centre for the Arts. She is the Joint Programme Leader in Fine Art and History of Art and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University, London.

MATHIAS KESSLER (AT/USA) Kessler ist ein in New York lebender österreichischer Künstler. In seinen Arbeiten untersucht er die historischen und gegenwärtigen Auswirkungen der westlich-eurozentrischen Phantasie von einer natürlichen Welt. Mittels Fotografie, Installation und sozialer Skulptur untersucht er die zeitgenössische Idee von Natur und Landschaft unter Einsatz einer bildhaften Sprache. Sie ist dem Genre romantischer Landschaft ebenso wie der Expeditionsfotografie entlehnt und offenbart die komplizierten politischen sowie wirtschaftlichen Kräfte, welche die soziale und natürliche Landschaft so drastisch verändert haben.

Kessler explores the concept and history of nature within the Western context of capitalism, humanism, and representation. In his photographs, computer-generated landscapes and installations he works within the historical interface between the private living room and the public room of the natural order. Between memory and its image, authenticity and alienation, he exposes how human intervention reconstructs the natural.

MARK LOMBARDI (USA) Lombardi war ein US-amerikanischer Konzeptkünstler.

Bekanntheit erlangte er durch seine soziogrammatischen Narrative Structures – Zeichnungen, die auf zeitintensiven und penibel ausgeführten Recherchen beruhen und Politik-, Finanz- und Machtintrigen dokumentieren. Nach seinem Tod im Jahr 2000 bekundeten Organisationen wie das FBI oder internationale Antikorruptionsagenturen ihr Interesse an seinen Arbeiten und seinem Archiv.

Lombardi (1951-2000) was an American neo-conceptual artist. He became known for his sociogrammatic Narrative Structures, drawings that documented alleged political and financial frauds, which he realized with painstaking, precise and time-consuming research into the relations and associations of power brokers. After his death, international anticorruption agencies as well as the FBI expressed substantial interest in his work and his archive.

JENNIFER MATTES (DE/AT) Mattes schloss ihr Film- und Video-Studium in Stuttgart 2007 ab und studiert zurzeit Kunst und digitale Medien an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. In ihren Videoarbeiten werden Archive und Bilder dekonstruiert, um sie in einen neuen Kontext individueller Geschichtserzählung zu setzen. Die BetrachterInnen betreten eine Welt aus Fragmenten, die ursprünglich ein Ganzes bildeten, nun aber neue Verbindungen und Narrationen aufweisen, die sich im Spannungsverhältnis von Dokumentation und Fiktion bewegen. Sie bieten einen kritischen Blick auf den realen, filmischen und virtuellen Raum und dessen Schnittstellen, indem sie soziokulturelle Entwicklungen, wirtschaftliche und politische Bedingungen und die gegenwärtige Produktion von Bildern nachzeichnen.

Mattes studied arts and digital media at the academy of fine arts in Vienna. In 2007 she finished her studies in the department of film and video in Stuttgart. In her video works, archives and pictures are deconstructed to remain afterwards in a new context as basement for some individual storytelling. The viewer steps into a world of fragments that once had their own entireness and now have new connections and narratives, moving in the tension between documentary and fiction. The real, cinematic and virtual space is reviewed, but also the question of their overlapping. A search within socio-cultural developments, economic and political conditions and current production of images.

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GERALD NESTLER (AT) Biografien > KuratorInnen

biographies > curators

GODOFREDO PEREIRA (PT/GB) Pereira ist Architekt und Forscher. Er promovierte am Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. Zuvor schloss er ein M.Arch-Studium an der Bartlett School of Architecture ab, wo er heute für das Urban Design Programme die Studienfächer Geschichte und Theorie koordiniert und das Axiomatic Earth Design Studio leitet. Sein Forschungsprojekt The Underground Frontier untersucht politische und territoriale Konflikte, die durch den weltweiten Wettlauf nach unterirdischen Rohstoffen ausgelöst werden.

Pereira is an architect and researcher. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London and an M.Arch from the Bartlett School of Architecture. He is the coordinator of History and Theory at the M.Arch Urban Design program at the Bartlett, where he also leads the Axiomatic Earth design studio. His research The Underground Frontier investigates political and territorial conflicts within the planetary race for underground resources. He is the editor of the book Savage Objects.

AXEL STOCKBURGER (AT) Stockburger ist ein Künstler und Theoretiker, der sich mit den komplexen kulturellen, sozialen und politischen Auswirkungen gegenwärtiger Mediensysteme auseinandersetzt. Er studierte Visuelle Mediengestaltung an der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien. Zwischen 2000 und 2006 absolvierte er ein PhD-Studium an der London University of the Arts und war Teil der Londoner Künstlergruppe D-Fuse. Seit 2006 lebt er in Wien und arbeitet als Assistenzprofessor an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. Seine Videos und Installationen werden international gezeigt. 2014 erschien das Künstlerbuch Blockbuster im Revolver Verlag, Berlin.

Stockburger is an artist and theorist who engages with the complex cultural, social and political effects of contemporary media environments. He studied Visual Media Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and lived in London between 2000 and 2006 where he completed his PhD at the University of the Arts London. During this period he was part of the media art group D-Fuse. After moving back to Vienna in 2006 he took up the position of an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Art Vienna. His video works and installations are shown internationally. In 2014, the artist book Blockbuster was published by Revolver Publishing, Berlin.

TECHNOPOLITICS (AT) Technopolitics bezeichnet den Versuch, einen theoretischen Rahmen zu finden, der es ermöglicht, komplexe und vielschichtige historische Entwicklungen in ihrem Zusammenwirken zu verstehen. 2009 von Brian Holmes und Armin Medosch entwickelt, existiert seit 2011 die Arbeitsgruppe Technopolitics in Wien, die regelmäßige Vorträge und Diskussionsveranstaltungen organisiert. Zu ihrem Kern zählen neben Medosch: Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler, Felix Stalder, Axel Stockburger und Ina Zwerger. Gemeinsame Auftritte von Technopolitics umfassten u.a. Coded Cultures 2011 und ViennaOpen 2014.

Technopolitics describes the attempt to develop a theoretical framework that provides an understanding of complex and multilayered historic developments and their interplay.

Initially developed by Brian Holmes and Armin Medosch in 2009, the Technopolitics research group was formed in 2011 and has since organized talks and discussion events. The core group consists of Medosch, Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler, Felix Stalder, Axel Stockburger, and Ina Zwerger.

Joint performances by Technopolitics include Coded Cultures 2011 and ViennaOpen 2014 and 2015.

UBERMORGEN (USA/CH/AT) UBERMORGEN. lizvlx (AT) und Hans Bernhard (CH/USA).

UBERMORGEN wurde 1999 gegründet, in der Boomzeit des Internet. Arbeiten in den Bereichen konzeptuelle Software-Kunst, digitaler Aktionismus, Video und Installation.

Schwerpunkte auch in den Bereichen Kunst- und Institutionskritik. Biographien von beiden sind auf der Homepage zu finden, inwiefern die Angaben real sind, bleibt offen.

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UBERMORGEN. lizvlx (AT) and Hans Bernhard (CH/USA).

UBERMORGEN was founded in 1999 in the boom time of the Internet and works in the fields of conceptual software art, digital actionism, video and installation. A further emphasis is on art and institutional critique. Biographies of both artists can be found on their homepage. It remains open, however, whether the information shared is real.

KLANGINSTALLATIONEN SOUND INSTALLATIONS

VOLKMAR KLIEN (AT) Klien verbrachte seine Jugend in Wien, fasziniert vom Musikleben dieser Stadt mit seinen gloriosen Traditionen und antiquierten Ritualen. Ausgehend von diesem Hintergrund versucht er heute die Möglichkeiten von Komponieren, Musizieren und Hören weit über klassische Konzertsituationen hinaus zu erweitern. Sein Interesse an den vielschichtigen Verbindungen zwischen den verschiedenen Modi menschlicher Wahrnehmung und den Rollen, die diese in der gemeinschaftlichen Schöpfung von Wirklichkeit einnehmen, führt ihn in die unterschiedlichsten Bereiche hörbarer – und manchmal auch unhörbarer – Kunst. Er ist Professor für Komposition an der Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität in Linz.

Growing up in Vienna Volkmar Klien spent his childhood engulfed in the city’s rich musical life with all its glorious traditions and engrained rituals. Working from this background Volkmar Klien today strives to extend traditional practices of composing, producing and listening far beyond the established settings of concert music. He works in various areas of the audible and occasionally inaudible arts navigating the manifold links in-between the different modes of human perception, the spheres of presentation and the roles these play in the communal generation of meaning. He is a professor of composition at the Anton Bruckner University in Linz.

SZELY (AT) Peter Szely studierte am Institut für Elektroakustische und Elektronische Musik, Wien. Er arbeitet im Bereich Klangarchitektur und -installation, intermediale Kunst, Komposition und Radiokunst. Außerdem schafft er Klangenvironments für Theater, Konzerte, Performances sowie mediale und akustische Interventionen im öffentlichen Raum. Seit 2003 Klangarchitektur sowie Klangregie für die Reihe TONSPUR für einen öffentlichen raum, ein Projekt von TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien.

URSULA ENDLICHER (AT/USA) Endlicher beschäftigt sich seit Mitte der 1990er Jahre mit dem Internet: Sie baut Rahmen- und Bezugsysteme für Internet Art und Live-Performances, überlässt aber Echtzeitdaten die Choreographie dafür; sie extrahiert die Architekturen des Webs und benützt sie zweckentfremdet für Installationen; Endlichers Videos stellen oft Charaktere als anthropomorphen Code dar. Ihre Arbeit ist in der permanenten Sammlung des Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) zu finden, im ursula blickle videoarchiv im Belvedere (Wien) und wurde an der transmediale, der Siggraph und der ISEA gezeigt sowie im xMPL/Contemporary Art Center (Irvine), im CCA (Warschau) und in der Postmasters Gallery (New York). Sie lebt in New York und Wien.

Peter Szely studied at the Institute for Electro-acoustic and Electronic Music, Vienna. He works in the fields of soundarchitecture and -installation, intermedia art, composition, radio art, sound environments for theatre, concerts and performances, and acoustic interventions in public space. Since 2003, he has been in charge of the sound architecture and the sound direction for the series TONSPUR for a public space, a project by TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien.

PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCES Since the mid 1990s the Internet has impacted Endlicher’s practice: She builds frameworks for Internet Art works and performances, but lets real-time data be the lead for their choreographies. She extracts rule sets from the Web and repurposes them for installations. Her videos often feature characters depicting anthropomorphized code. Endlicher’s work is part of the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and the ursula blickle video archiv at the Belvedere (Vienna), and has been exhibited and performed in venues such as transmediale, Siggraph, and ISEA as well as the xMPL/Contemporary Art Center in Irivne, the CCA in Warsaw, and Postmasters Gallery in NY. She lives in New York and Vienna.

DEBORAH HAZLER (AT) Hazler ist Tänzerin und Choreografin in Wien. 2008 erhielt sie ihren MFA Dance an der Hollins University in Virginia, USA, nachdem sie 2006 das Laban Dance Centre in London mit einem BA in Dance Theatre abschloss. Seit 2010 leitet sie in Wien zusammen mit Nanina Kotlowski die freie Performanceplattform Raw Matters – Ein ungeschliffener Performance Abend. 2011 war sie danceWeb-Stipendiatin bei Impulstanz. 2013 erhielt sie ein Auslandsstipendium des BMUKK für die Teilnahme am Internationalen Forum des Theatertreffens der Berliner Festspiele.

Hazler is a dancer and choreographer who lives in Vienna.

She holds an MFA in Dance from Hollins University, Virginia, USA (2008) and a BA in Dance Theatre from the Laban Dance Centre in London, GB (2008). Since 2010 she has been running the open program platform Raw Matters – Ein ungeschliffener Performance Abend (with Nanina Kotlowski).

She held the danceWeb-scholarship of Impulstanz festival Vienna (2011) and was awarded a residency grant of the Austrian minsitry for art and culture to participate at the international forum of the Theatertreffen der Berliner Festspiele (2013).

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WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONEN WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONS

HEATH BUNTING (GB) Bunting ist bekannt für seine sozialpolitischen Interventionen, die von unerlaubten Grenzübertritten über fiktive Identitäten zu postdemokratischen Überlebenstechniken reichen. Er ist Mitbegründer der „net.art“- und „sport-art“Bewegungen. Seine Kunst gilt als authentisch, unabhängig, unkompliziert und direkt. Wegen seiner Anti-Genetik- und Border-Crossing-Arbeiten wurde er mit einem lebenslangen Einreiseverbot in die USA belegt.

Bunting is a co-founder of both net.art and sport-art movements and banned for life from entering the USA for his anti genetic and border-crossing work. His self taught and authentically independent work is uncomplicated and direct and has never been awarded a prize. He aspires to be a skilful member of the public and is currently training artists in survival techniques so they can out-live the organized crime networks during the final crisis.

PABLO CHIEREGIN (IT/AT) Chiereghin studierte in Bologna und arbeitet mit Fotografie, Objekten, Aktionismus und Performance. Ausstellungsbeteiligungen u.a.: Italienisches Kulturinstitut, Wien; 4e7artforum, Wien; Max Lust Galerie, Wien; Palazzo Strozzi; Florenz; Anzenberger Galerie, Wien; das weisse haus, Wien; Künstlerhaus Wien; Triest Biennale; Kunstverein Schattendorf; MiCamera Gallery, Mailand.

BERNHARD GARNICNIG (AT) Garnicnigs erkenntnisorientierte Arbeiten verwenden technische Medien und räumliche Konstellationen als Mittel zur Untersuchung von ästhetischen Phänomenen und ideologischen Wandlungen, welche durch die Integration von Technologien in Kunst, Natur und Gesellschaft entstehen. Er ist seit 2012 einer der Initiatoren der Bregenz Biennale, Mitherausgeber von continentcontinent.cc, dem para-akademischen Online-Journal für Denken durch Medien, und der sehr künstlerische Direktor des Palais des Beaux Arts Wien.

Chiereghin studied fine art in Bologna, Italy and works in photography, objects, actionism and performance. He has shown his work in exhibitions at the Italian Cultural Institute, Vienna; 4e7artforum, Vienna; Max Lust Gallery, Vienna; Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; Anzenberger Gallery, Vienna; das weisse haus, Vienna; Künstlerhaus Wien, the Triest Biennale; the Kunstverein Schattendorf; and MiCamera Gallery, Milan.

Garnicnig works use technical media and spatial constellations as modes of investigating aesthetic phaenomena and ideological transformations introduced by the integration of technologies in art, nature and society. He is one of the founders of the Bregenz Biennale, co-editor of continentcontinent.cc, the para-academic journal for thinking through media, and the very artistic director of the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien.

LUKAS HEISTINGER (AT) Heistinger studierte an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien und am Sandberg Institut in Amsterdam. Während seine Arbeiten konstant auf die ökonomischen und medialen Grundbedingungen ihrer Wahrnehmung verweisen, treten in den letzten Ausstellungen medienanthropologische Metanarrative in den Vordergrund. Ausstellungen (Auswahl): Dienstag Abend (The Mews Project, London, 2013), © 2013 (Mauve, Vienna), 2 REAL (Memphis, Linz, 2014).

Heistinger lives and works in Vienna and Amsterdam. He studied at the Academy of fine arts Vienna and the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam. While his works consistently reference the economic and media conditions of perception, mediaanthropological metanarratives have come to the fore in his latest exhibitions. Among other shows he presented works at Dienstag Abend, The Mews Project, London, 2013; ©2013, Mauve, Vienna; 2 REAL, Memphis, Linz, 2014.

HOELB/HOEB (AT) Seit 2000 arbeiten Barbara Hölbling und Mario Höber unter dem Namen hoelb/hoeb als Künstlerduo zusammen. In ihrer künstlerischen Arbeit konzentrieren sie sich auf interund transdisziplinäre Projekte, die das Ziel verfolgen, Kommunikationsräume zu generieren. So etwa in ihrem Projekt Close Link beim steirischen herbst (Graz), das sich mit Menschen in außergewöhnlichen Bewusstseinslagen beschäftigte. hoelb: Barbara Hoelbling, Studium Bühnengestaltung, Graz; Theater, Film- und Medienwissenschaft, Wien. hoeb: Mario Hoeber, Studium Bühnengestaltung, Graz; Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam.

Barbara Hölbling and Mario Höber have been working as an artist duo under the name of hoelb/hoeb since 2000. Focusing on inter- and transdisciplinary projects they pursue the goal of generating communication spaces, for instance Close Link at the steirischer herbst in Graz, Austria, in which they engaged with people in unusual states of consciousness. hoelb: Barbara Hoelbling studied stage design at the University of Graz and theater, film and media sciences at the University of Vienna. hoeb: Mario Hoeber studied stage design at the University of Graz and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONEN WORKSHOPS & INTERVENTIONS

ELVEDIN KLACAR (BIH/AT) Klacar studierte an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien sowie an der École supérieure des beaux-arts de Marseille. Er konstruiert Aktions-Konfrontationsräume, um mit einem reduzierten, spielerischen Zugang räumliche Gegebenheiten, soziales Verhalten, Besitzansprüche, Machtpositionen und Gesellschaftssysteme zu sezieren.

Klacar studied at the Academy of fine arts Vienna and at the École supérieure des beaux-arts de Marseille. He constructs simple and playful action-confrontation spaces in order to scrutinize spatial circumstances, social behaviour, claims to property and power as well as societal systems.

MANU LUKSCH (AT/GB) Luksch erstellt Tools und Rahmenbedingungen, um herkömmliche Auffassungen von Fortschritt zu hinterfragen.

Sie beschäftigt sich mit den intermedialen Möglichkeiten der Kunst, an der Gestaltung von Zukunftsmodellen teilzunehmen, Kritik an der Beschneidung des öffentlichen Raumes zu formulieren und den Diskurs um persönliche Datenspuren in einer vernetzten Gesellschaft zu stimulieren.

Sie gründete und leitet ambient TV.NET, einen Schmelztiegel für unabhängige, interdisziplinäre Projekte, die an der Schnittstelle von Kunst, Technologie und Gesellschaftskritik angesiedelt sind.

Luksch is a intermedia artist whose practice interrogates conceptions of progress through devising tools and frameworks and instigating processes with a strong emphasis on research and collaboration – often with groups whose experience and expertise is under-recognised. Her focus is on the effects of emerging technologies on daily life, social relations, urban space, political structures, specifically possible futures of infrastructures, thresholds and constraints of public space and the traces of data that accumulate in digital networked societies. She is founding director of ambient TV.NET, a crucible for independent, interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of art, technology and social criticism.

STEFANIE WUSCHITZ (AT) Als Künstlerin und Forscherin beschäftigt sich Wuschitz mit neuen Formen der aufkommenden DIY-Kultur, des Feminismus und des Hacktivism. MA an der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien und am NYU ITP in New York. Während eines Stipendiums für digitale Kunst in Schweden gründete sie den feministischen Hackerspace Miss Baltazar‘s Laboratory. 2014 promovierte sie an der Technischen Universität Wien.

As an artist and researcher, Wuschitz focuses on new and emerging forms of DIY culture, feminism and hacktivism.

She holds MAs from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and NYU ITP, New York and a PhD from the Vienna University of Technology. She founded the feminist hacker space Miss Baltazar‘s Laboratory during a digital arts residency in Sweden.

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ORTE / PARTNER / KOKURATOREN LOCATIONS / PARTNERS / CO-CURATORS

Ausstellung und Diskursveranstaltungen 25. September – 5. Dezember 2015 Ort: KUNSTRAUM NIEDEROESTERREICH, Herrengasse 13, 1010 Wien www.kunstraum.net Klanginstallationen, kokuratiert von Georg Weckwerth 26. September – 11. Oktober 2015 Ort: Buchhandlung Walther König im MuseumsQuartier, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien Partner: TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien im Q21, dem kreativen Schaffensraum im MuseumsQuartier Wien www.tonspur.at Performances, kokuratiert von Bettina Kogler 13., 14. und 20. November, 2015 Ort: WUK, Großer Saal, Währinger Str. 59, 1090 Wien Partner: WUK.performing.arts www.wuk.at/WUK/PERFORMANCE_THEATER_TANZ Workshops und Interventionen, kokuratiert von Gerald Straub Ort: KUNSTRAUM NIEDEROESTERREICH und öffentlicher Raum Wiens SOCIAL GLITCH issue 4.4 / 2015 continent, the para-academic online journal for thinking through media continentcontinent.cc

Exhibition and panel discussions September 25 – December 5, 2015 Location: KUNSTRAUM NIEDEROESTERREICH, Herrengasse 13, 1010 Vienna www.kunstraum.net Sound installations, co-curated by Georg Weckwerth September 26 – October 11, 2015 Location: Walther König bookshop at MuseumsQuartier, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna Partner: TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien at Q21, the creative space at MuseumsQuartier Wien www.tonspur.at Performances, co-curated by Bettina Kogler November 13, 14 and 20, 2015 Location: WUK, main hall, Währinger Str. 59, 1090 Vienna Partner: WUK.performing.arts www.wuk.at/WUK/PERFORMANCE_THEATER_TANZ Workshops and interventions, co-curated by Gerald Straub Location: KUNSTRAUM NIEDEROESTERREICH and in the public space of Vienna 134

IMPRESSUM IMPRINT

SOCIAL GLITCH Radikale Ästhetik und die Konsequenzen extremer Ereignisse Radical Aesthetics and the Consequences of Extreme Events 25 09 2015 – 05 12 2015 HerausgeberInnen und KuratorInnen Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler, Maximilian Thoman editors and curators www.theoriesinmind.net/socialglitch Produktion produced by Katalogproduktion catalogue produced by

Lektorat copy-editing

Übersetzung translation Grafische Gestaltung graphic design Druck printed by Papier paper Schrift font Auflage print run

TIM.theories in mind TIM.theories in mind und / and medien.kunst.tirol.

Produktionsbüro für intermedialen Kommunikationstransfer Else Rieger (deutsch) Matt Bernico, Paul Boshears, Lital Khaikin (English) Brian Currid (S./p.7), Gerald Nestler Sylvia Eckermann agensketterl Druckerei GmbH, Mauerbach LuxoArt Samt 150g Din 8.4 pt / 10.6 pt 500

KUNSTRAUM NIEDEROESTERREICH

Künstlerische Leiterin artistic director Geschäftsführung financial directors Organisation organization Presse public relations Technischer Aufbau set-up Adresse address

Christiane Krejs Brigitte Schlögl, Peter Weiss Katrin Deutsch, Nina Kohlbauer Edith Wildmann Birgit Knoechl, Christoph Schirmer Herrengasse 13, 1010 Wien, www.kunstraum.net

ISBN 978-3-200-04408-1 ©2015 die Herausgeber the editors © für den Text bei den AutorInnen © für die Abbildungen, wenn nicht anders angegeben: bei den KünstlerInnen © für die Abbildungen, Seiten 6-23, 26-31, 34, 36, 46, 48, 56, 58, 62, 66, 130: Eva Würdinger © für die Abbildungen, Seiten 70-84, 98, 99: Andreas Diem © für die Abbildungen, Seiten 52, 64, 86: eSeL.at © für die Abbildungen, Seite 90, 92: Michel Nahebadin © für die Abbildung, Seite 94: Lee Day © Bildrecht, Wien, 2015: Sylvia Eckermann, Thomas Feuerstein, Christina Goestl, Gerald Nestler Alle Rechte, auch die des auszugsweisen Abdrucks und der Reproduktion einer Abbildung, sind vorbehalten. Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung ist unzulässig. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Mikrovervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen sowie die Einspeicherung in und Verarbeitung durch elektronische Systeme.

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PRODUZIERT VON PRODUCED BY

IN KOOPERATION MIT IN COOPERATION WITH

medien.kunst.tirol

KOOPERATIONSPARTNER PROJECT PARTNERS

performing arts

FÖRDERGEBER PUBLIC FUNDING BODIES

DER KUNSTRAUM NIEDEROESTERREICH WIRD UNTERSTÜTZT VON IS SUPPORTED BY

DANK AN THANKS TO

Andreas Wigand und das Team der Buchhandlung Walther König im MQ Alois Bernsteiner, Kunstraum Bernsteiner Robert Tolksdorf, www.lombardinetworks.net Marian Kaiser Elisabeth Thoman Christiane Krejs und das Team des Kunstraum Niederoersterreich SPONSERED BY

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SOCIAL GLITCH Radical Aesthetics and the Consequences of Extreme Events 25 09 2015 – 05 12 2015

An exhibition project at the kunstraum NIEDEROESTERREICH, Vienna and in the public space of Vienna with projects in collaboration with TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien and WUK.performing.arts Curated by Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler and Maximilian Thoman Performances, co-curated by Bettina Kogler Sound installations, co-curated by Georg Weckwerth Workshops and public interventions, co-curated by Gerald Straub continent. 4.4 / 2015 Special issue on SOCIAL GLITCH continent, the para-academic online journal for thinking through media continentcontinent.cc

A project by

in cooperation with medien.kunst.tirol

ISBN 978-3-200-04408-1 140