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BRAINLOOP FOR VIRTUAL LIVENESS [ITA]
An interview with Janez Janaša by Marco Mancuso
Digimag, Connected Live Art
March 2007

I'm like a sniffing dog [ENG]
An interview with Nicole Blackman by Mojca Kumerdej
Delo, Kultura
September 21st 2005


RE:akt!

1. Ich Lubbe Berlin!
2. Das KAPITAL
3. C'était un rendez-vous
4. VD as VB
5. Mt Triglav on Mt Triglav
6. Synthetic Performances
7. SS-XXX | Die Frau Helga

 
 
>> Text/Interviews
 
  Fleeting Symphonies
Rodrigo Alonso
[ESP]

"Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally restless, eternally moving essence that, among the facades of buildings, endures, experiences, learns, and senses as much as individuals in the protection of their four walls. For this collective the shiny enameled store signs are as good and even better a wall decoration as a salon oil painting is for the bourgeoisie. Walls with the "defense d'afficher" are its writing desks, newspapers are its libraries, letterboxes its bronzes, benches its bedroom furniture..."
Walter Benjamin. Das Passagen-Werk.


Through the figure of the flâneur, Walter Benjamin portrayed one of the key protagonists of modernity. This reader of metropolitan signs, translator of urban experiences and resonance point of the crowd was the witness of a changing world at the dawn of industrialization and the patient teller of city development and mass growth.
As Benjamin's Baudelaire did with the Paris of the end of XIX century, Janez Janša and Mikael Lundberg face again the metropolitan landscape. But in this journey, at the beginning of XXI century, local references have burst in uncountable sensorial fragments that in their simultaneous presentation transmit the frantic rhythm of six cities at the crossroads of information flows.
Taking to the extreme the tourist gaze, the artists condense their route along those cities (Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, St Petersburg, Kaliningrad and Gdansk) in an incongruent superposition of information channels: swift sightseeing, texts dissolved in a sound mass, fragments of media, location data. The cities express themselves through their linguistic and architectural physiognomy, their monuments, their historical chronicles, their ads, their heroes, their economic structures. Big enterprises, cultural clichés and residues of a conflictive past are the indifferent and parodic symbols of old State-nations painfully resisting the pounding of globalization.
In the confrontation of local realities with the homogeneous description of information flows there is a conflict between two different scales, one human and the other planetary. The first one unfolds in a dislocation of everyday life, conveyed by partial and changing information, unfinished stories and speedy rhythms. The constancy of habits, the security of well-known places changes into an unstable reality showing the consequences of global politics, migrations and technological transformations. The planetary scale manifests in the GPS data that document the artists' movements through the cities. Its presence is also paradoxical. As location instrument, GPS data is unable to inform about the local particularities of the visited places. Instead, it appears as an intriguing target that threatens the images, adding a new menace to their precarious nature.
As Baudelaire's gaze crystallized in memorable poems, Janša and Lundberg's do in an ephemeral symphony. Maybe it is an uncomfortable format for art history, but it is the only one capable.


 


DemoKino
Virtual Biopolitical Agora


Edited by Ivana Ivković and Janez Janša, TRANSformacije series.

A textual and pictorial reader, a follow-up of Janez Janša's DemoKino - Virtual Biopolitical Agora, combining Dejan Dragosavac Ruta's redesign of the visual and textual material of the original DemoKino project with texts from Antonio Caronia, Marina Gržinic, Leonardo Kovacevic, Bojana Kunst, Tomislav Medak, Petar Milat and Aldo Milohnic providing a theoretical, artistic and social context.

Published by Maska and Aksioma
2006
 
SELECTED PROJECTS
 
DemoKino
Virtual Biopolitical Agora

Brainloop
a media performance driven by thoughts

Infocalypse Now!
initiative for the establishment of an autonomuos madiatic zone

Problemarket.com
the Problem Stock Exchange

paraSITE [ENGL] [SLO]
TEST BALLOT [ENGL] [SLO]
Examining the Faulty Machinery of Democracy

Visions of Excess
The Courtesan Tales
The project BAST
SilentCell Network