Vuk Ćosić and Žiga Turk
SOLO SHOW


Solo Exhibition

Aksioma | Project Space
Komenskega 18, Ljubljana

10 - 25 October 2012

Artist's presentation and exhibition opening:

WED 10 October 2012 at 7 pm
 
 

The new project by Vuk Ćosić is offered as a room for reflection on the lessons of the history of technology with the following emphases:
  • What is the real birthplace of ideas, such as space travel, computers, the internet?
  • What does the meeting of interest groups from politics and the corporate world, who adopt and launch such ideas, look like?
  • How is techno-optimism set in motion?
  • How does the society react to the announcements and the realisation of technological innovations (propaganda), and how does it react to the actual changes brought about by the innovations?

The exhibition will open on Wednesday 10 October at 7 PM with a (short!) introductory lecture on the unrealised gallery installation.

The author will be present at the gallery every day (except weekends) from 4 PM to 6 PM, when he will formulate a final lecture through a series of public discussions. The schedule of the discussions will be posted every day on the gallery's website at www.aksioma.org.


Author's statement:

"After three months of preparations, the original plan of the gallery installation as a thinking room has been changed because the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Sport had stopped fulfilling its contractual financial obligations towards the Aksioma Institute. As the Ministry's intervention deeply influenced the work I felt morally responsible to credit the Minister as a co-author.
Although the project was originally meant as an evaluation of the global information society, I welcome the Ministry's intervention, as it adds local aroma, without which any global thinking is bookish or too abstract." -- Vuk Ćosić


About the authors

Vuk Ćosić is an internet veteran and an internationally renowned classical author of net art. He is also the co-founder of Ljudmila, the Ljubljana laboratory for digital media, and of Nettime and Syndicate, global forums for internet theory.

He lives in Ljubljana with his wife Irena, his daughter Luna and his dog Taksi.
 

He is a frequent exhibitor (Venice Biennale; ICA, London; Beaubourg, Paris; ICC, Tokyo; Kunsthalle, Vienna; Digital Artlab, Tel Aviv; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Ars Electronica, Linz; Walker, Minneapolis; Postmasters, NYC; Friedricanum, Kassel; Neue Galerie, Graz; IAS, Seoul; Moca, Oslo, etc.) and lecturer (MIT Medialab; Beaubourg, Paris; Guggenheim, Venice; CCA, Glasgow; Thing, NYC; festivals in Hong Kong, London, Liverpool, Dessau, Montreal, Banff, Madrid, Gorica, Copenhagen, etc.; and fine arts academies and universities in Stockholm, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Troy, Dundee, Liverpool, Venice, Linz, Barcelona, etc.). He has been the subject of numerous honours theses, masters and doctoral dissertations (universities in Rome, São Paulo, Leeds, Manchester, Brussels, Trieste, etc.), media articles (NY Times, Liberation, La Repubblica, Guardian, Financial Times, Cahiers du Cinema, Artforum, Newsweek, Wired, Haaretz, ORF, CNN, BBC, etc.) and the key publications on new media (MIT Press, Thames & Hudson, Tate, Taschen, etc.).

Žiga Turk is a Professor and Chair in Construction Informatics at the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering at the University of Ljubljana. Born in 1962, he holds a B.Sc. in Civil Engineering, M.Sc. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in technical sciences.  

As a researcher he is interested in construction informatics, computer-aided design and planning, computer-integrated construction and some related subjects from the sphere of technology (Internet, www, xml) and philosophy (ontology, computer representation of the world). He also deals with modern forms of teaching (task-based and distance teaching) and transfer of knowledge (open publishing). He wrote over 150 scientific papers and worked on a number of national and international research projects. He also coordinated two major projects. He is in the editorial board of three academic journals.
In Slovenia he has been known as the founding editor of the Moj Mikro magazine (1984). He has been setting up Web servers since 1993. His most popular Internet inventions are the Virtual Shareware Library (that later evolved into shareware.com) and the Woda database tool. He is an enthusiastic blogger (http://blog.zturk.com) and twitter (@zzturk).
In the years 2007–2008 he served as the Minister of Development in the Government of the Republic of Slovenia. From November 2008 he served as the secretary general of the Reflection Group on the Future of Europe. Since February 2012 he has served as the Minister of Education, Culture, Science and Sport.


Partners of the originally planned exhibition would have been:

Apple ware: EPL d.o.o. Ljubljana
Antique TV: Museum of Computing Technology Peek & Poke, Rijeka
Photoprint: Dinamit
Joinery: Pešo
Printing and framing: Okvir
iOS programming: Žiga
Furniture: Carniola
Artistic Director: Janez Janša
Executive Producer: Marcela Okretič
Assistant Production: Sonja Grdina
Public Relations: Mojca Zupanič
Technical Supervisor: Valter Udovičić

Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2012

CONTACT
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
 

Important notice:

Due to technical reasons the opening of the exhibition Past Future Now by Vuk Ćosić at the Aksioma Project Space has been moved from Tuesday 9 to Wednesday 10 October 2012 at 7 PM. Due to substantive reasons the title and author of the exhibition have been changed as well.

 
PAST FUTURE NOW
 
Walt Disney and von Braun, seen in 1954 holding a model of his passenger ship, collaborated on a series of three educational films.
 
The new project by Vuk Ćosić is offered as a room for reflection on the lessons of the history of technology with the following emphases:
  • What is the real birthplace of ideas, such as space travel, computers, the internet?
  • What does the meeting of interest groups from politics and the corporate world, who adopt and launch such ideas, look like?
  • How is techno-optimism set in motion?
  • How does the society react to the announcements and the realisation of technological innovations (propaganda), and how does it react to the actual changes brought about by the innovations?

The exhibition space offers two ratio-active triggers, one from 1954 and one from 2012:

1.
In 1954, FBI’s informer and one of the inspirers of McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt Walt Disney established collaboration with Werner von Braun, an SS officer and the author of V1 and V2 programmes. The partnership resulted in the propaganda film for the Futureworld area of the Disneyland theme park, and at the same time it also positioned the space programme as the symbolic centre of the Cold War.

2.
In December 2012, representatives from 190 countries will meet at the International Telecommunication Union Conference in Dubai and start the process of redefining the global regulatory frame for internet governance. Regimes with long-lasting and troubling histories of violation of human rights, such as the USA, Russia and China, will determine, inter alia, the operative definition of freedom, which will then serve as the basis for the new house regulations in our digital lives.

Source: http://wcitleaks.org

PAST FUTURE NOW at Aksioma | Project Space

Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2012

Artistic Director: Janez Janša
Executive Producer: Marcela Okretič
Assistant Production: Sonja Grdina
Public Relations: Mojca Zupanič
Technical Supervisor: Valter Udovičić

The programme of Aksioma Institute is supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana

Sponsor: Datacenter d.o.o.

CONTACT
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
 
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