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. |
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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. |
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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. |
