Public Discussion on Tactical Media

Artists: Núria Güell and Jean-Baptiste Naudy (Société Réaliste)
Moderator and transcript: Ida Hiršenfelder

The discussion on tactical media took place at ARTos Foundation, Nicosia, Cyprus from 23rd to 25th May, 2014 in the frame of Cartography of transitions. A transitory Research Symposium and Meeting. The guest artists of the discussion were Jean-Baptiste Naudy from Société Réaliste cooperative and Núria Güell who both have rich artistic practice in the field of what might also be called tactical media, developing a number of tools for civil disobedience. At the beginning we agreed to follow one of the objectives of the discussion to map out the idea or transitory art as a concept and to explore versatile fields of its emergence in the context of artistic usage of tactical media.

Ida Hiršenfelder: Speaking about tactical media, I would like to know if you yourself could describe your artistic work as tactical media? Furthermore, is it a part of contemporary fine art, is it a part of media art? Can it be analogue, must it be digital?

Jean-Baptiste Naudy: Firstly of all, I do not have the slightest idea of what transitory art might be. Even the very word is extremely blurry, especially if you ask yourself a reverse question what art is not transitory. Secondly, about tactical media, I do not recognise it as a specific category of art production since every art production is mediatic i.e. uses media. Some art production may have a tactical relationship to the media that it is using, but I would not say that it is something related to new media, because I simply do not believe in the existence of media art in the first place. For me it is all part of the same field which is the field of art, which is a complex, multilayered, multi-oriented practice. The interesting thing about this field is also that it is very contradictory and antagonistic, but I would not like to categorise it as media art and look for subcategories like e.g. tactical. I would never define myself as new media or old media artist neither as tactical or non-tactical. I am just an artist and I am using media and tactics in consideration of the context.

Núria Güell: I agree with Jean-Baptiste. I normally would not use new media in my projects, only on rare occasions. Most usually I use traditional media in conjunction with people, laws, regulations, or other social normatives. But I do consider my work as a tactical process, because I usually have a very clear objective. Keeping that in mind, I design the best strategy to reach my initial goal. I do not describe myself as a new media artist or anything like that. I am also not very interested in the debate about definitions of certain types of art or anything like that.

IH: This lack of interest in categorizing particular types of art is understandable also from the point of view of the notion of transitory art as it was proposed by MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art, since it is trying to define that, which has not been defined or mapped out in the contemporary art production nor accepted by established art circles.

JBN: Actually, I am not against trying to find definitions, I am against categories. If you present the contemporary art as something archaic to the point that it is not able to integrate new practices, new approaches, or tactical usage of its own media then we have a problem. Nevertheless, this is a technical discussion about the art field. I would rather propose a completely ideological discussion about the art field. The fact is that 99% of the contemporary art production is repeating the dominant doxa, thus creating objects for the decoration of the cathedral of capitalism. In this context it does not matter whether one uses new media or old media, because this is not about categories, it is about divisions or splits or confrontations. Most of the art producers are still living in the ideological dream from the 90s, which came right after the cold war and the Fukuyama’s nonsensical notions like the end of history or the global village, which proposes that thanks to the liberal economy the American world peace and the Internet are going to make us all get along nicely. This idea, which was aimed at advancing the agenda of the West has ended in the beginning of 2000, yet a lot of artists are still imprinted by this ideology. By the end of the 90s social movements and the international organisations were contesting the status quo from Seattle to World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, etc. Fifteen years after the choice is clear. The artists have to take sides and start to employ tactical usage of their art. If one decides to take the dominant side, one needs not to use any tactics, because what one has to say is already embedded in the dominant discourse.

IH: I believe that to some extent your art practice might be understood as challenging the dominant discourse. Looking back at the history of the term, tactical media was first used for collective media interventions, guerrilla communication and radical entertainment or hacking the mass media from within. Apart from this narrow definition of tactical media in arts there are a number of other undertakings that might also fall under this term like challenging hierarchies and economic relations,, addressing geo-political inequalities, racism, sexism, nationalism, pointing out contradictions in legal system, mapping out social geographies, presenting statistical data, etc. What tactics do you use in your own art?

NG: In my work I would always work with existing laws and policies. In the initial research, I seek out the laws that are the representations of power relations of the institutions or the state. Then I take this same laws, and turn them upside down and inside out and actually play them against themselves in a sort of displaced legal application. For example, I found a law, which the banking system is using to help clients. I have made a master plan which proposed the application of the same law that regulates the money generating activity of the banks. I made a strategy in which the clients could play this law against the bank system. This is usually my methodology of work and my main goal is to subvert the status quo and especially to empower the people who would normally find themselves in submissive position in relation to the law. Initially, all my projects are realised first outside of the system of art or art institutions in the public space or wherever else. I seem to always have to have this two realities. I produce the work outside of the artworld and then I present it in the context of a gallery or museum.

JBN: Talking about tactics to challenge hierarchies, I think it depends a lot of the context. This is the problem with the theory of art because it is generalising situations that are extremely specific. The situation at the White Cube Gallery in London is not the same as the situation at the state museum in Russia. This means one cannot present the same work in the same way. For example, last February we exhibited in Budapest. The political and ideological cultural scene in Budapest is just frightening, since real-life crypto-fascist people are running this country. In this exhibition we started the show with a gay flag. I would never do this in Paris or London, because it would have no meaning, but in Budapest putting the rainbow flag as the standard of our discourse was a very powerful gesture. Another thing about hierarchies, I am also very skeptical when people proclaim that some fight is over. Like saying that the institutional critique is over. As long as institutions exist there should be also the critique of it. Same thing goes for feminism. Let me set two examples. We were invited to an European project in 2006 called “How to do things in the middle of nowhere?” The idea itself was very ideological to start with. The initiators were German based curators and from this perspective they were addressing Eastern Europe as a place in the middle of nowhere. The way we responded was not to propose a work about Eastern Europe, but we answered their question “With money!” Our project was actually a financial scam to fund exhibitions in Eastern Europe. The second example is about Documenta 12 in 2007. It was based on three topical questions: “Is modernity our antiquity?”, “What is to be done?” and “What is bare life?”. We were asked to develop a project and again we did something about money, since we believe that only a decadent bourgeois is asking oneself such leisure questions like what is to be done. We opened a bank account at a French multinational bank Société Générale. The first question we answered with a call for donations, the second question with the IBAN info, for the third answer we gave the access info to the people along with the login and password, so it became a collective bank account. We did not care what happens to the account or how the people use it, just to set the structure that allows people to do things. 24 hours after we had launched the account, it was closed by the bank server, because there were too many requests to change the password and to re-privatise the account.

IH: Interesting how you both worked on subverting the banking system. In the case of Société Réaliste the public outcome with re-privatisation was quite perverse. Núria, how would you compare it with your outcomes, given that one of the key questions about tactical media is how the actions are receiving public recognition of the wider public, not just the art crowd. How important is it for you to generate the public outside the contemporary art field or galleries and museums?

NG: At the moment, I am working on a project called Degenerated Political Art. Ethic Protocol. that is very similar to what you have just described Jean-Baptiste. It is a creation of a bank in a fiscal paradise or so called offshore tax haven. Its objective is to stimulate the people and give them tools and knowledge to create an autonomous economic system that would be completely independent from the states, European Union or the Central Bank, setting up a situation in which their interference would not be possible.

JBN: We are actually doing something similar in the Netherlands and it has to do with tax haven, banking operations and specific loans. This has a lot to do with what you Núria were saying about inverting the banking system and using it against it. We are going to use the free trade zone that is otherwise reserved for multinational corporations, using their very own legal system in order to allow ordinary people to stop paying their taxes, because only simple people are actually paying taxes. The top ten corporations in the Netherlands are not paying a single euro of tax money. They call this patriotic capitalism.

NG: Coming back to the question about tactics and still talking about our tax haven project, in a few days we going to present the project Degenerated Political Art in Barcelona. We already established a corporation in a tax haven. The founders of the bank are me and my partner Levi Orta and we used the designated artistic production budget in order to create a society in a tax haven. Taking advantage of the jurisdiction of the country where the subsidiary is based, this will allow us to evade the taxes related to any profits. We are going to send invoices to any of the museums that we are working with and from this time on, we will need not to pay any taxes at all, neither to Spanish nor EU government nor any other country. At the present time, at the Spanish stock exchange group is composed for 35 biggest corporations and all of them have their accounts in tax haven and they need not to pay any taxes. So our project is creating the same conditions, only in the context of the art world.

JBN: Just for information. Google Corporation is annually making 1 billion dollars of profit in France alone, of which it is not paying a single dollar of taxes, because it is domiciliated in Ireland. And then from Ireland the profit is transferred to Luxembourg, from there to Cayman Islands, from Cayman Islands back to Silicon Valley.

NG: Even worse, last year The Apple Company has forced the Spanish government to compensate for their losses of profits from annual budget, because they supposedly did not earn enough and the state had to give them the money.

IH: You take a very current sociopolitical problematic and make the contradictions and power relations visible. Does it also have an immediate impact in the wider public?

JBN: People are mostly aware of what banks and the corporations are doing, what art does is give them a specific flavour. This question of the audience is very 1990s problem, due to the emergence of so-called relational aesthetics. This discourse is very rotten, that is why I would not like to talk about it ideologically, but simply economically. It comes from a situation in France in the beginning of the 90s when massive state funding for culture was stopped. The main argument in the discourse was that art is too elitist and it does not reach the real people. Instead of funding art, they started to fund only socio-art projects, which means asking artists to do social work instead of social workers, but paying them less than social workers, causing also less efficiency, but making art useful. That completely displaced the work of the art and turned the artists into social animators, while pretending that this is some kind of cure for social illness. On the contrary, I think art is here to kill the ill men, to finish it not to cure it. I also think there is a no real difference between art audience and non-art audience apart from the accessibility of art. I do not like taking audience for stupid people.

NG: Responding to what Jean-Batiste has been just talking about. I agree with what has been said. I am also very much against the term responsible or conscience art. What I try with my art is to interpolate, to make an antagonist situation in the audience that feels committed to take position. The aim is to make a confrontation and force the people to take an ethical stand. The audience for me is very important. In my projects I see and meet a lot of different audiences, not only the art audience. I also received a lot of mails and correspondence from people that are not a part of the art world and they do not address the issues of art. This is extremely important for my projects. This happens in the process of naturalisation of the art projects, because they are often not talked about in the art press, but in the social press and alternative media. This allows me to arrive to different publics.

JBN: I would like to mention one example about the audience from the history of art. A Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica1 who was a member of a samba collective in a favela. He was invited to exhibit his work in fabric and textiles at the Museum of Art in Rio de Janeiro. So, he brought his fabrics into the museum along with dozens of favela inhabitants from the samba collective who were wearing the textiles. He kept it a secret until the opening of the exhibition and that was very tactful. At first, the security did not allow the people to enter the museum, but then he made them enter.

IH: Jean-Batiste, to me, your statement that it does not matter what the audience are is quite unsettling. Perhaps we should explain this in more detail. The audience may be racially or socially stigmatised, which means it cannot be possible to talk about audience in general, because a lot of people as you have mentioned do not have access to art. I would also imagine that the role of art is not simply to educate, but to make things visible. I would insist again on the question of the approach to the audience. I agree that the question could not be answered in the frame of relational aesthetics, which was justly criticised for imposing power positions of the white male and other colonial relations. The question would be, what have we learned in the past fifteen years. At the end of the day, the position of white male is also something white male should reflect. Núria, you have worked with migrants and highly unprivileged people a lot. How do you deal with your privileged position?

NG: I am very conscious of my privileges as a white European woman and I also have a lot of privileges as an artist, because I can say to the institutions quite freely that I want to do this or that. I see the institutions as someone who is able to provide the funds. When I think about the projects, I am also constantly thinking how can I use this privilege in order to subvert the conditions, the laws or to subvert the situation itself. The projects that I did with migrants, I made this situation very clear. I have this particular set of privileges as a white artist and we can do some kind of project together. It is extremely important that I am very clear with the people. What I actually do, is to instrumentalise the art. My aim is to do something concerning social relations, something other that art, but in order to achieve my goal, I need to make use of the institution of art.

IH: One of the privileges of the art is also class migration. For an artist it might be quite normal to live in a five star hotel while being completely penniless.

JBN: This is because it is not an economical privilege. Following what Núria said, it is about symbolic privilege. What is for example Oiticica’s privilege? He was a poor Brazilian gay guy, but he was allowed to enter the museum because he was an artist. And how he used the privilege is to make other people enter the privileged zone.

NG: The last project Black over White that I did in MACBA last month we did exactly this. Many people who are in contact with me following the project are not interested in art. They are interested in the issues that the work speaks about, but not in art.

JBN: Just one more thing about the audience. I strongly disagree with critics who say that our work is too complex and that people live in a TV culture and do not understand complex references. People are first of all not like that. They are reading books, which may not be academic, but they have their culture and they live in the middle of symbols and images. Karl Marx’s Kapital is a very intense and complicated book, yet it managed to fuel world social movement for the past two hundred years. And another thing about artists, they are workers just like everybody else. I am also very irritated by people who are wondering about revolutionary art, because there is a time to make art and a time to make a revolution, and when you are a revolutionary you do not make art at that moment. At the time of the revolution, like in Istanbul or Kiew, all the social roles fall.

IH: You were talking before about the idea of bringing people in the institution Jean-Batiste, which actually affirms the institution and mentioned that artists are workers just like everyone else.

NG: I do not believe that the artists are like other workers, because the artists have more responsibility from other workers. The artists have a public voice with interviews, films, texts, medias, which bring more responsibility. In my projects I am constantly thinking about how can I use this visibility in order to achieve my goal. The other thing is that in the history, the art has won an autonomy from different power structures like the church, the kings, the tradition and different powers, so I think the consequence of this is that art is now a freer space, and one can do a lot of things what others cannot, because people give other meanings to art. Some people may also think that it is less important or less serious, but actually artists can do a lot of very illegal things and do not have to face consequences. In my work for example I do very illegal things.

JBN: I agree with the difference in positions, but I am not so sure about the illegal part. If you do something very illegal and you try to justify it with art, you still go to jail. Well, come to think about it, maybe even not. William Burroughs killed his wife and said it was a performance.

NG: Yes, for sure there are things that even artists could not get away with.

JBN: Just to make it clear, with this notion of an artist as any other worker, I meant that artists have the same responsibilities regarding social issues and class divisions. The second point is that capitalism loves artists as a model of workfare. Why? An artist is able to work 22 hours per day 6 days a week all year round for 0 euros, just because it is his or her project. That is a perfect worker!

IH: So far we established that art which is tactical or uses tactical media must be grounded in the current sociopolitical atmosphere. In the continuation of the discussion I would be interested to talk about the visual output of your work. Núria, you claim that you do not use new media, but you use video, documents, analogue technical media. In this context I think you were talking about symbols in some of your works Jean-Batiste and you were addressing the question of language. So what kind of visual language do you use in order to convey your ideas? I am thinking of this in the relation to representational tactics.

JBN: When you cited my statement that art is full of symbols, I did not mean that art is symbolic, this would imply that art is a metaphor. And this is very dangerous because that is a question of inefficiency of art. Some people may dismiss it saying that it is only poetry. They fail to understand that poetry is not a metaphor, it is the reality of the language. It is the real potentiality of the language and art is the same thing. The infinite possibilities of the reconfiguration of the real. That is why freedom of art is to that extent a symbol for the freedom of anybody else. For example, Société Réaliste only uses common forms and things that are a part of our daily lives, like corporate logotypes or very basic visualisations of architectural projects. This basic forms can immediately be translate by the people and it gives them space to transform them.

I would like to say one more thing about tactics… We are talking lately a lot about boycott with our friends, about this very old topic for activists and leftists. About a year and a half ago we were for example attacked in Paris by people who accused us of taking part in a programme in Israel, saying that we are legitimising the Israeli politics. Contrary to their opinion, I think that the critique of Zionists is the strongest right in Israel and people need to talk about this things right there and then preferably with outsiders. Now, we have another question of boycott at the Manifesta 10 in the Hermitage. In this case I hold a completely opposite opinion, because Hermitage’s context is stronger than any work of art. I believe Putin is stronger than any work of art and if it would be stronger, it would not be shown there in the first place. So my problem in terms of tactics, positioning and treating the environment and superstructure of art is for example the case of Thomas Hirschhorn, who once stated he will never exhibit in Austria as long as the rightists are in power, yet at the present time I see him conducting symbolic vampirism with everything that looks revolutionary and at the same time he is posing as a critic of the boycott of Manifesta 10.

IH: This is a wonderful example, but then again, every institution is a challenge per se. For example working with MACBA is also a big challenge. Núria, how would you treat the visual language or what is your view of exhibiting for example the documents or the leftovers of the project in a museum?

NG: I try to make my language as clear as possible in order to communicate to as many people as I can. A lot of people that are not interested in the art context are interested in the work itself. The language is very plain and very clear that is way it is easy for them to enter into the work. The question of exhibiting in the museum follows this line, but I use it in a different way. In the museums, I mostly exhibit documents, but I would never consider this as an artwork. My artwork is what happens outside of the museum. Documentation is only something that has remained from the artwork, something for the museums and archives.

IH: Do you think that it is important to show the documents in order to promote the activities that were happening outside or just to justify the institutional framework in order that you can finance your activities?

NG: Both. On the first level I need the finances and I use the institutions to provide the funding, but on the second level, I am also interested in museums per se, because that gives me an opportunity to see the activities in a more reflexive way, to maybe notice something that did not happen on the in the activities on the streets but comes later. Because of this realisations I am in a way interested also with the museum context. But the work is never located in the museum.

IH: Maybe now would be the time to talk about the conditions for the production of your work. Is it self made, DIY, do you higher craftswomen and craftsmen to produce certain works or in what kind of context would you use the services of other people for realisation of the work? Do you sell your work or do you finance it with public or private funding and what is your ideological view of any of this funding sources for your art?

NG: I have a gallery that is selling my work, but actually not many people are interested in buying it though. The gallery does not support me financially. The financial support for my projects depends, sometimes I take whatever means I can find. A lot of times it would be produced by museums and institutions that invite me to produce the work and also provide the financial input. I also receive grands. For example the project Degenerated Political Art. Ethic Protocol. that I am doing in the tax haven is financed by a group of activists, because they are very interested in my proposal. Because they liked my idea, they also provided for my travel. A lot of people criticised me that it is not ethical to sell my work in the gallery, at the same time a lot of people say that the state with public money again means conforming to the policies of the state.

JBN: May I be very mean. People that have a problem with selling works in galleries are the people that cannot sell their work in galleries. Honestly, concerning the question of private and public money, I do have a problem with funding that is coming from Arab Emirates. They support museums everywhere, they are funding curators, giving hundreds of thousands of euros to make shitty projects. The financiers probably do not even see the project. However, money is nor good nor bad. When Hans Haacke put up his show in New York and attacked Cartier Foundation, which is based on a jewell company in France that was massively involved with apartheid in South Africa. The point is that Haacke found himself in the middle of the most famous museum of the world. He did not want to reject this opportunity, he rather exhibited the way how the museum wants him to exhibit, which means with the money from the apartheid. Regarding the production, we work in a completely non-studio environment. Of course, we make all the sketches and ideas, but we do not produce the objects ourselves. In a way, we are the engineers or designers of the artwork and then we address the specialists with machines and technical skills. Regarding production of the project. We never produce a project out of the blue. We are usually invited somewhere, we are given the context and financial framework and then we start to think about the work on the scale that is realistic. Our limit is that we do not pay for our own work.

IH: Can you maybe reflect on the ideology that is produced by EU and its funding? I think that we are starting to see the results of this policies that promote project and not-programme oriented work and most of all precarity. How do you work with EU policies that creates a extremely precarious situation for anyone. It usually goes along the line: all right, this year are going to finance women in technology, last year we were financing Roma crafts. Is it possible that art would subvert its own milking cow?

JBN: One of the problems with the planning of Culture 2000 or Culture 2007 for example is that they promise to give the money, but they do not give it to you. You first must have a loan of, say, half a million euros, and only after you have filed in all the reports you are in title to have this money returned. I know a lot of projects that went bankrupt, took a loan at a bank and then failed to comply to EU standards, because of stupid bureaucratic regulations. Everyone also knows that European Administration is an ideological machine. You only get financing if you comply to this ideology. The level of contradictions also depends on the amount of money. If you receive five thousand euros you are relatively free, but ask architects, when they are dealing with a project for hundred million euros. At that point, there is no freedom. But I trust artworks. If an artwork is strong it is stronger than the context, stronger than its own economy, than the audience, the art world, critics, curators, or stronger than Vladimir Putin.

NG: That is why one has to understand where the money is coming from when one is invited to exhibit at some museum or institution. Then one can think about how one wants to use this money. But one has to understand that all the institutions, some more and some less are opaque or non-transparent. And I accept any money as long as I can be sure that using this money I will be able to subvert something that has to do with institutions of power.

At the beginning the idea of a difference between the media art and contemporary fine art was somehow omitted, yet in Slovenian context, the definition of media art was very necessary to oppose the modernist power structures as well as relational aesthetics discourse from the 90s. There was a need to create a separate field for financing Internet based things, anything to do with programing, generative art, mechanics. At the end of the day, tactics and tactical thinking as a methodology may be applied in any art form, while tactical media in art production is still mostly describing practices like programing, hacking or mass media interventions. And yet again, what does this tell us about transitory art, is still a mistery.

1 Hélio Oiticica: Parangolés, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1965

by Peter Lukan

22/04/2014

Would you agree that your work exposes dichotomies deeply related to the formation of human knowledge, science and understanding in general: scientific vs. alternative explanation, normal vs. paranormal, subjective vs. objective? Do you personally favor any of these sides?

Although we have a particular interest for the term “alternative”, we don’t intend to favor any side of the dichotomies that are usually created around the major themes. Our main purpose has been to show that sometimes human knowledge can produce quite strict limits, so strict that they can even block the creation of new hypotheses and new forms of life. The question mentions “normal vs. paranormal”, well, what’s the concept of normal if not something that by exclusion necessarily produces the abnormal? So, this is the kind of mechanism we are dealing with when we indicate the limits engendered by the science… This perverse understanding, which superficial scientific views can produce, is able to imprison us inside the truths created by someone else, as if we were unable to think for ourselves.

What exactly is the immanence that your machines present to the viewer? At a first glance, the machines get their energy from the “air and ground”. In terms of scientific explanations, the germanium diode antenna gets the energy, necessary for the electric current, from the light coming from the Sun. The galena crystal, which is – like germanium – in scientific terms categorized as a semiconductor, too, gets the energy for the electric current from outside electromagnetic waves. How can we understand the term “immanent” applied in both of these cases? Can we understand it as referring to the proper characteristics of materials, in this case semiconductors, which make the working of such machines possible?

We consider that it is quite difficult to understand the world without first filtering it or interpreting it through the systems that we humans have created to measure it and scrutinize it. Scientific practices have been present for so many years that they ended up dissolved in everyday life, so, in that way, they seem to be natural and inherent to human beings. Although they seem to be outdated and insufficient to the contemporary eyes, the Metaphysics and Positivism, for example, have left deep marks in Western cultures, limiting us even more to the notion of transcendence we already had from religion. So, we think that the subject of immanence could be a breeding path to point some restrictions and also the artificiality of the conventional scientific separation between subject and object. Being more specific, the two radio receiver circuits are so simple and naked that we can perceive the material itself as an inherent ability, as if the germanium and galena were merely forces of the nature that don’t need any theory to work the way they do. Let’s say they are machines themselves that had already existed before being used that way… When we talk like that, it may sound contemptuous towards scientific research, but that is not it. Apart from the fact that the concept of transcendence and immanence are complementary and not opposite, what we wish is to question certain hierarchy of the things by reversing the idea that the world is being little by little organized by the human knowledge; consequently, this means that if we see things more horizontally – in a holarchy – we may feel more capable of building new relationships with the world and the current political systems.

Schriber’s method seems to be a digital analogon of putting two mirrors in front of each other, causing a regression ad infinitum of images to appear to the eye. From a technological point of view, one would expect with Schreiber’s method to see some pattern as a result of the TV’s cathode ray, which moves line by line, the frequency of its functioning and the sampling frequency of the camera. This pattern should probably be perpetuated because of the closed loop formed by the camera and the TV screen. Is there any “official” explanation for the images that the experiment produces?

According to Klaus Schreiber himself, this ‘videoloop feedback’ method was suggested by communicants from other dimensions during a session in which he was using audio recorders just like those used by Friedrich Jürgenson and Konstantin Raudive a few years before. At that time, there were many other researchers working simultaneously, all of them following the premise that the communication was an effect from the manipulation of electromagnetic waves by the invisible communicants, and that the electronic devices were transducers to transform such manipulation in a recognizable language. Nowadays, the theory remains the same, and it has already been contested by many people throughout the years, but one thing is undeniable, the high quality of some images and sounds received by these researchers excludes the possibility of pareidolia. It really doesn’t matter to us if there is a technical-scientific explanation accepted by the academic community or not … What matters is exactly the opposite. Firstly, because it shows how much disturbance can doubt cause when the tools we have are unable to explain something, and secondly, because it brings along the reaction of those who try to disqualify the ITC by using the mistaken understanding of the scientific method, which has been spread in our everyday lives, i.e. the idea that something does not exist unless we can prove it. Well, if such an attitude makes us aware of possible frauds, it also makes us suspicious about all that is new but unexplained, which often eliminates the chance to change things for better; it seems urgent to think more deeply about our dogmatically scientific laic values.

What about the Psychophone – does this phenomenon have an “official” explanation? If there is/would be one, what exactly does this change in the interpretation of the work/experiment? Does/would this bring us to another level of interpretation of the work in connection with human perception or just demystify it?

Yes, the explanation for the Schreiber´s method is also applicable to the Psychophone. This device, which is nothing more than a broadband radio projected to not tune separate frequencies, receives all the waves simultaneously in order to increase the possibility of interdimensional communications. Besides the principle of ITC – electromagnetic waves could be manipulated from beyond in order to get transcommunications through electronic devices instead of a human medium – Franz Seidl had in mind something very democratic that has nowadays become more common due to this “maker” culture, the “open hardware” concept. Seidl left the schematics available in a way that everyone can build their own Psychophone! So, when we decided to rebuild this experiment, we were thinking about something which could offer multiple “IO ports” and connections to raise new questions about the world we live in, because what we really want is to encourage a fresh discussion. Cognitive traps are to be avoided and it is so easy to get caught in them without noticing, that’s why we care very much about the chosen subject.

Having in mind that your works are some kind of experimental set-ups, would you say that your exhibition aims predominantly at opening epistemological problems by questioning what kind of explanations scientific explanations really are, how they function and what are their limits?

Bingo! But please don’t tell this to anybody … Otherwise, it would be similar to somebody going out of the cinema and loudly telling the end of the film to everyone standing in line for the next session (laughs). Well, this is a good example for those cognitive traps we were talking about, movies are much more complex than words. We can imagine that by knowing the end of the story many people would just give up the session, even though they would be lacking the other layers of the movie, right?! Maybe we are often acting just like consumers of a taxonomic system that organizes the world for us and, because this is so comfortable, we get lazy about questioning this system … So, the opportunity to produce an atmosphere that invites people to seek their own hypothesis is something really valuable!

Are there any aesthetical or ethical features present in your works/experiments? Do you understand human-produced explanations as merely epistemological artefacts or do (should) they have also aesthetical and ethical dimensions?

We think of these things as complementary layers; ethic and aesthetical dimensions will probably mix into epistemological artefacts engendering human explanations. For example, from our perspective, we’ve been following a certain “philosophy of freedom” – from Espinosa, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Negri and Hardt, among others – an abstraction that could make us more confident to start recombining ideas as a strategy to find transitory new universes … Nothing much beside some new combinations, it’s true. But the feeling while doing this is so much better than being normalized that, what we now want is just to invite people to participate in this exercise of freedom, and we are confident that they can do more than us!

by Dunja Kukovec

Each living form in the present space-time multi-verse deserves a better condition. It is time to turn words into action, as Audre Lorde would simply put it: being quiet about things that matter completely dismisses the potential for minimal change, and above all doesn’t make you happier. Speak out loud about all that makes sense in your head and heart, before some extravagant space dissonance makes us all just a distanced echo of what we could be.

HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN?
When trying to describe art with one and only truth about it, we could say art is something honest. It can be whatever, it can even present violence or a lie, but in contrast to many other human activities or needs, art can be seen, felt, experienced or understood only when the very moment is honest. In my opinion, your art practice has sincere pragmatic implications, which are not only honest and senseful, but result in concrete changes of one’s life. How did actually all begin? How do you manage the relation between art and real life?

From my point of view, there is no difference between art and life, this is why it is really difficult for me to reflect upon this dichotomy. Art is a way of being in the world; it is a 24-7 job (even when we dream, make love, share our bed or listen to conversations in a bar; these are also actions and circumstances that are part of it). In my case, I work with myself as a medium. I work with reality and people so I can say that in the end, my work is embedded in personal relations that conform the collaborations of each project I do. Personal relations can never be categorized as art or not real life. Human relations, even if they are a consequence of your artistic collaborations, traverse your being, your relation with the world, your wishes, and somehow orchestrate your future because they are there and they have already been interwoven. The development of these relationships depends on multiple variables that one cannot control. For me, each project opens a door to something that is not possible to calculate. There is an intrinsic risk of decontrol in your personal life and unpredictability has to be assumed as its fundamental characteristic. I believe that this has to do with the will to give space to reality to express itself and not fall into idealisms that, although utopist, in my case do not help in the understanding of the world we live in, and also to generate critical thinking necessary to relate myself to it.
The bank expropriators I have been working with and some of the prisoners with whom I have collaborated are people that are really important in my circle of relations and for the cosmovision that guides me.

REAL WORLD VS. ART WORLD and ART WORLD CRITIQUE
As we all know and as we all agree, we live in a shitty world. It is so natural someone can do something better than the other and vice versa. We never think of this diversity as an opportunity for sharing, but always as a power position. So the leading positions are basically positive as long as they are based on emphatic responsibility and honest self-reflection. But since in our world all leading positions are primary power positions per se, subordinated to bizarre fear of never having enough (as if leaders are Pharaohs and all mostly needless material wealth could be used after death), all leaders’ actions and speeches present a continuous manipulation of moral standpoints as well as natural resources. This governing principle, disguised as democratic capitalism, is completely unsustainable and devastating for basic happiness or simple contentment of all living beings and even of the leaders themselves.
Do you consider your art as something that has real political potential or more as particular solidarity actions? Do you find art context to be an empowering tool for what you would like to do or achieve? How does art world accept your practice, have you ever been limited by it?

I do not understand them as solidarity acts. I come from a catholic family who worked the land for the bourgeoisie landowners in exchange for vegetables, milk, and some meat. My grandmother prayed a lot and I have a phobia with all that relates to Christian charity because it does not empower but victimizes and perpetuates the differences and the established power relationships. I prefer mutual support and collective intelligence to solidarity as a principle from which one can try to generate critical thinking.
I believe the autonomy that art has achieved – with the aim not to be instrumentalized by the factual powers like the monarchy, the church or the politicians – can be instrumentalized for our own objectives that go beyond art. We can use this space of permissibility to carry out actions that outside of the art context can be considered outlawed by the laws of the powerful. This is what I mean when I say we should use art as an umbrella (of protection). I see this art context as potentially powerful. I do not see it as a tool for empowerment but as a space of freedom, disposable to be used for political ends. Either we want it or not, the artists have certain privileges, they work with institutions that have lots of power at the level of political relations and this has to be taken into account. My preoccupation has to do with how to use theses privileges to reinvent what is common and deconstruct the status quo even if it is at a micro political level.

Until now, the art world has accepted my art practice. In Spain, my work has been censured twice, but it all depends on specific people and their wishes, their fears and their decisions, and there always appears another person with the necessary strength to expose what previously had been censored. And if this person does not appear, we exhibit ourselves in self-organized spaces.

WHAT DRAWS YOUR ATTENTION?
In this world, creativity is what we like seeing most at work, it is a way to manage necessary routine. In the common art world, there are two types of art that enable us to feel or be felt and make us think, rarely act. One is deconstructing the form and function of the object (or image) and the other is about deconstructing beliefs that are forming society in order to envision a habitat that makes sense for everyone.

We can trace these two basic principles throughout the entire history of art, sometimes there are decades of object/image art and sometimes centuries of idea art. Maybe cave drawings weren’t only documents of hunting life, those images might present ideas of how it could be or should be. Early Christian art banned the formal expertise of Hellenistic artists and with metaphors, symbols and other sublime tools early Christian artists used sketch-like drawing to communicate the seemingly superior idea of the one and only god that is above others.

In my opinion, your politically and socially engaged art practice presents the continuum of the art practice of the 90s. The difference between the conceptual art practice of the 60s and the 70s and socially critical art practice of the 90s was that conceptual art still related to the object in the denying process, aiming at avoiding ownership and material market value, while the so-called postmodern art of the 90s used a total relief from object or form to bring ahead the political potential of the art practice and discourse. The feminist paradigm, known as personal, is a political stand, functioning as a common communication code between artists, issues and the public. The art of the 90s used the history of modern art works to show the relativity of the irrelevant form (contrary to the precisely fixed relevant form) in order to enable a direct and overwhelming critique of the society.

How do you understand the history of politically or socially engaged art practice? Who or what is your inspiration? If anyone or anything? What was emotionally and socially the most valuable discovery you have found through your art practice? How do you choose the themes or subjects you work on?

I understand the history of political art as a reflection of the social, political and economical context in which this practices are inserted. Although nowadays I do not have time to study artistic practices, the research on critical theory, philosophy, anthropology or economy also have priority.
I was educated in Cuba, at the cathedra of art conducted by Tania Brugera, and both conversations, with Tania and with my fellow researchers, are indispensable to understand my current practice. Further than that, I do not feel inspired but infuriated. It is rage that drives me to create. To develop projects is my personal way I found to deal with conflicts that puzzle me in relation to the common and/or collective. The subjects I work on are produced by my personal situation in relation to political circumstances, they piss me off and this feeling is the start of the project. The most effective way I found to deal with these conflicts at a personal level is by developing the projects I do. As you have said before, this world is bullshit. It is understandable that there are people for whom this world becomes unbearable; art for me is the linking process between life and this crack, a potential possibility for transformation.

WHERE IS THE PROBLEM?
Today, after almost 20 years gone, the critique is far from enough. Socially engaged and politically relevant art is either brutally diagnosing central issues, which are too obvious to be thought of, or is pointing out clear and common sense solutions based on continuum, not on innovation.
In your art practice and in relationships/collaborations with various people, do you, too, observe that even though solutions for less bizarre and more just organization of individual and common lives are completely obvious, people tend to mess up the knowledge of what with the knowledge of how to. As I already wrote a while ago, on a personal level we all know what is to be done, but it seems like no one knows how to implement this conscious knowledge on a global scale. Why are the solutions actually so easy to be implemented and nothing happens? How can art help or what can be done within the art context?

In Spain, the welfare state is being dismantled through the law, and it is the law that allows the creation of a punitive state by radicalizing the penal code, like a classist legal measure of the powerful against the ones that can put under pressure their privileges. As we know, the biggest crimes are possible if they are under the umbrella of legality, and include a disciplinary apparatus of government employees ready to apply the law without thinking. The banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt names it. Thus, the responsibility is diluted in a power system that becomes concrete through laws (that allow evictions, privatize, even kill, as nowadays the immigration laws are doing).

The social contract is a philosophical and political concept that establishes the bases of engagement of an individual within the society. And again, it is through law and morals with their mechanisms of implementation that this supposed social contract is imposed on us. It is an imposed contract that, because of its imposition, becomes an exercise of submission, of obligation towards the sovereign.

However, what makes us human is our responsibility. And even if there may be consequences, we all have the possibility, with no need to have a permit, to refuse to obey those laws that shake our consciousnesses, our bodies and our dignity. This is what it’s all about; responsibilities, to be auto responsible. For me, this is civil disobedience, an act of auto responsibility, of not delegating.

As we all know, only slaves obey, all the others consent. To disobey is to think, it is not to give legitimacy. From a young age, we are thought to obey an authority. They are really perverse; they tell us that to surrender is our only possible option. We are educated to be submissive, we are not thought to think, as thinking is not an established way for us to see what surrounds us but a mode of dissent. I think this is crucial for understanding the passive, fearful and conformist attitude of most of us. I think that the solution is to work for the base and start by reformulating education.

And I think that context art can be a good tool as it operates from the institutions of power, so any proposal that places itself outside of the white cube has implicitly certain legitimacy. In addition, the context art also offers us visibility, to have a public voice, for example through exhibitions, interviews, conferences, articles, etc. I believe this visibility is another characteristic that can help us to promote critical thinking, interplead people so they have to position themselves, even if it’s through refusal.

THE FUTURE
We used to think art is beyond reality, that it is a kind of utopist or distopist virtual image. How come today art practice – like yours – makes so much more sense and it is so much more applicable to our global human needs than real life politics. How come actual politics regarding the world bank, corporations and national parliaments are based entirely on deception and on a misleading image of reality? In your opinion, what is the most important thing to do now and in the future? What are your fears, considerations, and wishes to work on in the future?

Already in the 1930s, Henry Ford said that it was good that the majority of Americans didn’t know how banks function in reality, because if they did, a revolution would explode before tomorrow morning. With the objective of not losing their privileges, the powerful have a team of specialists, whose task is deforming reality through the discourse. This is the reason for the monopoly of the ubiquitous mass media, etc.

In my point of view, the most important thing is to understand clearly that a tyrant is only a tyrant if he has subjects; and this depends on us! We have much more power than we think, and it is essential to know that to be able to act. In the current situation and in the near future, I believe it to be fundamental to break the social contract imposed by the State, the EU and the ECB (European Central Bank), and interweave it with our communities and collectively construct our own institutions.
After the global mobilizations that have taken place during the last years, it looks like we all agree that 1% of the world’s population takes the political, social and economical decisions that affect the other 99% (it is worth mentioning that too many people inside this 99% are complicit with that 1%, a similar situation ended in Auschwitz). In relation to the above, I have been thinking about how to work with that 1%. I believe it would be easier to be able to question that 1% than the other 99%.

an interview with Markus Jeschaunig
by Nika Grabar

On October 6th 2012, the artist Markus Jeschaunig travelled along a line from Graz to Maribor with an airship and filmed a high-resolution portrait of the 56 km long landscape area between the two capitals of culture. The publication “Line Projects / Linienprojekte” documents Jeschaunig’s cartographic work from “ISTANBUL on LINE” (2007) and “Urban Tomography” (2010) to the “Line-Flight Graz-Maribor” (2012). Text contributions by Aysen Ciravoglu, Werner Fenz, Erwin Fiala, Elisabeth Fiedler, Joost Meuwissen, Wolfgang Oeggl and Dieter Spath illuminate the phenomenon of a “line” as an instrument of space exploration and make cross-references between “mapping” and “acting” in Jeschaunig’s artistic practice. The interview took place at MoTA Point on June 5th before the book presentation.

The layout of your book is somewhat unconventional, it is “cut” in half: the cover is literally cut, inside the texts turn and bilingually run along the line, the pictures cut across different places, different views are juxtaposed on the same page. There is theory and projects. The book is an object, something that makes us think twice about what and how we are reading, seeing, thinking. It is a contemplation piece. Was the book about mapping your own practice after the Line Projects?

I worked on the book with Anja Jeschaunig, my sister, and Margit Steidl. They are both graphic designers and made a great team. My goal was not to produce a publication with simply presenting a series of photos and possibly adding a video. I wanted the atmosphere of the projects to be felt in the book. Even though the projects were already finished, I wanted to see once more how these three-dimensional, spherical projects come to a two-dimensional media. I was interested in what they would look like in one piece. We developed a different kind of layout and cutting for each project. The cut part in the book is like “urban tomography” — the monitors (represented by the pictures) are “standing” on the Earth represented by a still taken from the video of the Graz-Maribor flight on the inside of the book cover. In this sense, it is abstract to some extent, but that is the nature of the exhibition itself.

We can talk about the line and the cut. Was it clear at the beginning of your projects that one was going to become the other?

At first, there was the line as a feature, as a form to put over a map. Of course there is structure everywhere around us, but in nature far from the city there are no straight lines. If people found something geometrical in nature in the past, they called it a “witches’ circle”, for example – in German we say “Hexenkreis”, if stones are lying in a circle. It had to be something magical. There are lines, but they are not straight.

My fascination with lines began with the City-joker project “line walk”, where two young architects went through the houses in Graz. They moved through the city exactly on the line. I, on the other hand, did a lot of exploring of the city in the sense of flâneur, in the sense of the Situationist International’s dérive.

When I was in Istanbul during my Erasmus year, I kept seeing the city in new ways time after time. The city felt incomprehensible because of its large size. You can drive in every direction, and after one hill there comes the next one and then the next valley, filled with houses, and so on. It is vast, completely out of scale, compared to Middle European cities. Take Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Graz, etc., for example — they have an end. With Istanbul, there is no end. The city is a huge agglomeration, a metropolitan region around the Marmara Sea. There is no real city border, and I decided to explore this place by walking through its organism.
For me, it was something different, something I have never done before. I had visited several large cities in America and Europe, but walking through this city was slow enough to create an intense perception. It seemed like a strange big soup of houses with no end. The line set out on the map had a dimension, a width. It did not mean I would go through the city on a precise line; it was a magnetic direction to see Istanbul “from behind” and discover an unknown way. It was, in a way, about confronting a line on the map with the real city structure in the street, combining the top-down and the bottom-up perspective.

At first there was the line, but walking through the city was experienced as a cut?

Yes, that is the point. Now, after investigating the line, the cut has become more important. It is a method of cutting something into pieces and reading the inside of it. At this point I think in cycles, I call myself an “Agent in the biosphere”. For me, the biosphere has become a level beyond the line, beyond geometrical structures, patterns or mapping. It is something atmospheric, and this is the world I am confronting. The line is gone, it has found an end. The cut was the way to go beyond the line, to start thinking about spheres.

The references to your work according to the text by Elizabeth Fiedler are Andy Warhol’s films Empire or Sleep, the work of Edward Ruscha and his project Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the Land Art movement and the work of Richard Long or Michael Heizer in particular. She also points out the relation to friction as a mark in the process of indentation in the sense of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze as they describe the phenomenon in A Thousand Plateaus. How have these contexts influenced your work and in what way are the ideas interesting for you today?

I talked to Elisabeth about what inspired me for the project. The names you mentioned considerably influenced me for the Urban Tomography project. They are the basis for my diploma work — a series of references before I developed my idea of “urban tomography” — the idea of cutting, slicing the city. I find the process is close to the idea of computed tomography (CT scan), of scanning a body. Seeing the city as a body that is sliced by urban tomographers in form of videos is the closest comparison I can think of.

But in your work you also deal with landscape.

Yes, this is why I refer to the Land Art movement. I am still fascinated by the Double Negative. It is one of my favourite works, it influenced me a lot. I get excited just thinking about it. It is nothing, a few cubic meters of soil put in a different place at the same area. It is closer to a cut. It is about putting away instead of adding something. I think the consumer culture we live in is always adding. I find the idea of taking away more interesting than adding things.

I feel this in your work, it is very immaterial.

The cover of the book is a cut. The line is non-existent, it is imaginary, but it is real and at the same time it makes a place. The cut is about perforating the cover, the paper. It is not even taking anything away, it is merely pushing the microscopic pieces of paper aside. This principle expressed in fabrication is consistent with the content inside the book.

What about Ruscha’s Sunset?

Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip interests me because he was doing something different from what was happening in the 70s art world — it was not painting or sculpturing. For this project, he drove along the Sunset Strip, photographed it and made a portrayal, which was already different the same moment he took it while passing by. Maybe a poster was taken off, buildings were demolished the next week or new ones were constructed. He made a city portrait, which did not exist anymore the day after.

Cities are constantly changing; they are in a perpetual flow of transformation (friction). Ruscha captured one street and published it in a book. At first, you think it is a “boring” book with numerous photographs that fold inside. However, I find it a big step in terms of conceptual art. It fascinated me. In Graz, I wanted to do a documentation of a place in a certain kind of way. I shot 22 videos at 11 points along a 10 km line. I filmed grass, trees, walls of houses where nothing happened. In the end, the people said: “How great!” A video of a wall alone, where you see a frame of the window in the distance of 1,5 m is quite boring to watch for 10 minutes. But in context with other scenes captured in the same second makes this one picture interesting. I was wondering what made people like this piece. The picture itself has no artistic value; the value lies in the idea, in the combination of scenes and the concept behind it.

Guattari and Deleuze, on the other hand, must bring a different strategy to the table?

What fascinated me about Guattari and Deleuze’s philosophy was the theory when humans came to the planet, took action, and changed it. One could say that a cow is also taking something from nature and it is also giving something back — shitting. Afterwards, some trees start to grow, because the seeds are getting energy. It is an interdependent, overlapping, synergetic system. Today, the human race has reached the point when we take away much more than the Earth can regenerate. If we continue to live this way, we will soon need 1,5 planets in terms of resources. Depending on the country, of course, some countries would already need five. I do not wish to talk about the Ecological Footprints, but it is about the interaction with the planet we inhabit, about the system.
Guattari and Deleuze wrote about the untouched natural space and the moment when the scratching started. They talk about “smooth and striated”, but not in the sense of form. If you drive the boat through the sea, the sea is a smooth space, the boat drives through it and creates strives. Also, the desert is a smooth space, not only in a formal, architectural sense, but also in a cultural one. According to Raimund Abraham, an Austrian architect that immigrated to the USA and lived there for his entire life, processing the earth with a plough was the first act of architecture.
There was an interesting exhibition in Munich, entitled The End of Land Art in the 70s. There is no more land art today. Am I 30 years too late? I think this is the material we have to work with, the biosphere. The future is not looking at cities, because the resources we need for our city life come from the land. If we continue taking more and more, the batteries will empty one day and then we will have to question our actions, look closely at what we were doing. I believe this time is coming very soon. It is a matter of how do we change things then, or how could we change them even before?

In this sense, it is important that your work is recognized in the context of art in public space. Elizabeth Fiedler suggests reading your projects as sculptures. As an architect, I would like to go one step further and link your work to architecture. I understand your projects as inverted objects of architecture. You gather experience in space according to a plan you set up, and then you reassemble traces of this experience in a new medium – be it a map, a spatial installation, a video, a book. You reconstruct places through your experience of time in it. When does the moment of friction come?

I used the word friction in a very old text of mine. It is important because with it I somehow found my way, and for this reason I decided to publish the text in the book unchanged.
The moment when one thing is confronted with another thing interests me. Let’s take lines for example. There is a house in a certain location. Long time ago, there was no house, but maybe there was a field where they grew vegetables. Maybe there was a structure of pathways leading to the fields and these fields were sized in the way that a donkey or a horse could pull the plough. It was an organic agricultural organism with rules. Even in the past it had to be economic. There was/is a situation of ownership. The city grew on top of these patterns. Road structures we have today are still following the inscriptions from the past. Every sidewalk is a process of discussion. A decision has to be made in order for the sidewalk to be built precisely in this location, even though there is a certain unsharpness about it. In the end, there is a discussion process that is the result of friction. The result is a discussion that means work, fight.
The process of transformation can also be found in nature. One cloud is colder than the other, causing rain, which is also a result of friction. The “event” of rain is a form of friction, but one cannot hear the dialogue. Friction is a result of dialogue between people or things. For me, friction is an overarching theme, a word for a transformation process, or system processes in general. In German we say “Reibung”, you may associate it with body parts touching, even sex. It is a word I like to put into urban context.

In your projects, you play with scale. In the scale of the map you situate the (time)line – you determine your orientation/direction, how you are going to move through space, how long it is going to take you, how you are going to occupy it. This is also the scale of urbanism. The gesture of a line reminds one of the avenues in Paris or Rome for example. Pope Sixtus V demolished buildings to construct new avenues and a new symbolic map was created upon the existing fabric by connecting institutions. Today, our experience of space has radically changed with the new media. Is the scale of your projects in this way infinite for you? How do you determine the beginning and the end of the “line”?

It was never my plan to do “Line Projects.” In the beginning, I wanted to experience Istanbul by walking, and I found out that the line was non-existent. We were “on line” for three days. The line was more or less about setting a direction, so we did not get lost. It made sense conceptually, but if you are “on line”, you do not feel the line at all. You have to go, talk to people, smell, see the weather situation – everything is influencing you. It was like the flâneur, it felt like a linear dérive. You have the feeling of doing a dérive in a relaxed way, you have the map, but you get out of the rush, out of the intense city experience. For me, it was fascinating. The line is the most direct, sharp tool, but at the same time when you follow it, you get lost, because you would never experience it as a line in reality. It is an imaginary form, imposed on something chaotic, the city.
In Istanbul, we decided we wanted to cross this organism of the city, and if wanted to cross it, we had to start in Bursa and end in Edirne, which would take us three weeks. For this reason we decided to start at the Ataturk Airport. In the European sense, the airport is outside the city. We started walking for 10 km from there, and knew it could be done in a few days. Afterwards I came to Graz, which is 10 km wide across the Dom (the main church). Right in the central position, the Künstlerhaus, where we set up the exhibition with Elizabeth Fiedler, is located. In a way, I saw it as an inverted concept to Istanbul. Graz was presented on a scale of 1:20 in the exhibition space. A visitor could experience a 10 km belt of the city in one space. The length of the line was a given, determined by the political city border of the city of Graz. There is no real border of the city there; there is just a political decision, a line, a friction.
Afterwards, I was asked to do a project for a regional festival in Styria, to develop an idea between Graz and Maribor in 2012. Since I was dealing with lines, and I did not want to do the same thing again, I decided to go through the air, a new from of movement. Walking in the first project, filming a 10 km way in the second, while the third was about flying over the territory, going up in the air. The dimension, the line was placed between the cities of Graz and Maribor, which are located 56 km from one another. I was thinking about the project — it was about capturing the Earth’s surface. I am not interested in capturing more precise images than NASA or Google, this is their job. I only want to focus on an excerpt. Maybe it would be nice to do urban tomography all over the world, including rivers or the sea, having millions of pictures that look the same, but this is not my goal.

In the third Line Project, the line becomes negotiated against the atmosphere and the video against Google Maps. The experience of proximity and distance is felt in the video, there is a sense of familiarity. What new perspectives did the project open?

At the beginning of the project, I had an idea of connecting the cities in a direct way. I have not talked about this publically, but my family’s origins come from Slovenia. My grandparents came from Goče, from a German-speaking minority. During WWII, the family was scattered around the world and my grandparents came to Styria. I liked the idea of going back to Slovenia, because I think there is not enough dialogue. Slovenian people speak German, but most Styrian people do not speak Slovenian, even if they live directly at the border. I experienced this myself.
When I went into the air, it was an amazing experience to fly and look down. The main message of the project is to show that I am interested in planet Earth. It does not matter where I would carry it out. For me, Maribor 2012 and its framework were a good way to find funding. I wanted to show that I am looking at the planet and producing new pictures of it, new ideas about it, so we can develop new needed strategies. Oil, coal and energy are running out, everything our society is based upon in terms of resources is running out, so we have to get new ideas. I went up in the air and was fascinated. Filming was just an add-on to document the experience, but in principle, I was thinking about connecting the cities by looking at the countryside. The “portrait”, on the other hand, was the way to go down vertically and do a dérive in the air. It is like walking in the air, it is smooth.

Peaceful.

Peaceful indeed. For a long time I searched for a plane and tried to determine how low it is possible to fly with a plane to be still able to see the birds. It was a challenge to be slow enough, so that they would not get scared, or not being too loud, so that people would not look up. I wanted to capture life as it is. The airship is silent and slow enough that people do not see or hear it.

You have mentioned dérive several times. It is a term Debord referred to at the 1966 Situationist International’s conference, when he noted that the strategies nurtured by the SI group – that is dérive and unitary urbanism – should be understood as a fight against utopian architecture, the Venice Biennale happenings and the GRAV group. You, on the other hand, work quite well with the context of institutions. There is the context of cultural capitals Graz and Maribor, you are crossing the border. I find your work peaceful and disruptive at the same time, I sense an ironic distance. How do you use the term dérive?

I am a referent to the dérive and feeding the system at the same time, yes. I think I should mention one more project at this point. I made a raw oil installation in 2012, called Barrel You! In order to make it, I had to find crude oil, petroleum in its original state when it comes out of the Earth. I had to look for this material in an oil storage company. In a way I had to ask: “Please give me some oil, I am doing a critical work against oil.” How do you do that? It is a difficult situation. In general, people are open to art, and the first reaction was positive. Since an artist was asking them for 35 l of oil, they donated it, but asked me not to use their name. I find such moments interesting, because these frameworks are the powerful influences that drive the development of ecology, humans and environment right now. It is about the things that are out of order. We are not in balance at all and I find it important to work with these forces, to confront with this culture.
At the same time I find it ridiculous to label Istanbul, for example, as the cultural centre of Europe of 2010. Istanbul has been the cultural capital of Europe since 3000 years ago. So why does it need the title in 2010? Is it all about the Expos? I know the instruments — the marketing and the production of an image of a country, etc. — it is all a part of the economy, I am OK with doing things in the same framework, I do not fear it. I do not find it as something horrible. I really wanted to produce a dialogue between Graz and Maribor. When I was asked to do something in the space between them, I wanted to link the two places filming the space in between.

There is not only a well-constructed principle about your work, there is also a distinct aesthetic coming out of your projects. If I read between all possible lines, I would say the minimalist didactic visuals are there not to attract attention, but to bring out the construction of the project, of the lines. Is there, however, a certain “politics of aesthetics” beyond this point if you pose the idea next to the fact that the book came after the flight between the two European Capitals of Culture?

There is a system, the planet Earth and something that we call the “universe”. Our lifestyle has lost balance with the environment; the consumer culture in its current state is facing a dead end. We need to think over our environmental practices generally. For me, working with the contemporary language of the system is important, as well as addressing ideas towards a post-oil world. Just like Debord and the Situationists used different technics of aesthetics (collage, mapping, etc.) as a strategy of protest and change. In my works, I try to reach a certain point of composition, where the content becomes focused and directs into the space. Like Friedrich Kiesler said, “The artist tries to express the unknown with the known”.

Perhaps it would not be fair to say that the following discussion – taking place during Sonica Festival 2013 at the end of Karina Smigla-Bobinski’s artistic residence at MoTA, Museum of Transitory Art in Ljubljana – is an interview. It would be far more accurate to call it a transcription of storytelling by the artist herself. Most important and most decisive for her artistic processes, narratives and contents, mediums and techniques, as I came to understand, is her overwhelming passion for art which is taking her to places she has never imagined, always embracing new experiences and manifestations of beauty, revealing paradoxes of society with artistic language with the gaze of a child and the brain of a mathematician.
You are an artist with a long and versatile career. I find it quite interesting that you started using video and making video installations despite the fact that these technologies were largely unavailable in Poland in the 80s. The artists who, at the time, thought about video processes were mostly using film in a videastic manner. How did you start?

When I was in elementary school, my father had a double 8 mm Russian film camera, and making films fascinated him very much. At that time, it has really never occurred to me that one day I will be an artist working with this kind of medium. Nevertheless, this was an extremely important experience. The double 8 mm camera tape had a really peculiar characteristic. After shooting for a few minutes, the tape needed to be turned around in a dark room in order for the images to be recorded on the flip side of the tape. So my father actually used a scarf to cover the film, and flipped it. What I still find very curious is that he was not making family portraits or films of people, but taking long and quite abstract footages of cars and time passing by.

Do you still have the tapes? Did you ever exhibit them?

Yes, I still have the tapes. I never exhibited them, but I might do this, one day. It is not yet the right moment. And, you know, I also have his camera that he had given to me when I was still only painting.

Until when did you only paint?

Until the middle of my studies in Munich, actually. It was strange how I came to art. When I was little, I was mostly good in natural sciences in physics and mathematics, but when a teacher showed us a Malevich painting, something moved in me. Much later, when I was already at the academy in Munich, I set myself on a research about painting. I asked myself a question: What exactly is painting? Painting is colour and form. I examined both of them, and the world of colours really fascinated me. And hence I started exploring the qualities of light and space. This discovery also brought me to light installations and to video.

Are you still connected to the Polish art circles?

I am starting to establish the communication once again, now. After over ten years of living abroad in Munich, I was back to Poland after I had been invited to install an exhibition in Krakow.

In the past few years, I saw a number of installations like “Morning Star”, “Cone”, “Ada” in the context of media art exhibitions. Before them, you were making light installations, a lot of video installations, and also some intense work on theatre scenography. Are you still making theatre or are you completely dedicated to media art now?

After working in the theatre for a number of years I was doubtful whether I can still make art by myself in my studio. This mood overwhelmed me for several reasons. The theatre piece was very important, informative, and we got to travel with it all around the world. Each time the performance ended, we would get an enthusiastic applause and appraisal, people saying how beautiful it was. But once the piece is done, after the first premier and a few reprisals, you yourself as an artist do not have to do anything creative anymore. You start to enjoy the applause and start to feel far too comfortable with the rewarding situation. This triggered an alarm in me. I thought I have to keep my focus on the work and specifically on the work alone. At a certain point in 2008, I decided to quit the theatre collaboration in order to develop my own artistic language. Soon after, I was invited to make an installation in Olympiapark in Munich, which I called “Island“, a light installation in a public space. This park was built on the ruins from the Second World War. When the debris of the war was cleaned from the city, they piled it at its edge and formed artificial hills, which had concealed all the horror with neat and artificial slopes.

Like a repressed traumatic memory.

I was wondering what would have happened if I was to cut this hill at its foot, place it on the water and make water reflect what is hidden inside. I installed hill-like shaped islands in the middle of a large pond seemingly floating on the water. I covered them with grass and they looked very natural to a casual observer. No one had thought that this was an art piece during the day, but during the night one could see a reflection of sleeping naked women in the water. For the piece, I only used a large diapositiva on each of the islands and plexi glass that was placed at the bottom of the floating islands. This was not a projection on the water, because it would not be physically possible. It was a reflection and thus gave an optical illusion that the women were deep in the water.

Conceptually, it also makes a lot of sense to reflect the historical memory and not to project it.

Yes, but also the idea of a video itself. In any of my installations, a video was never used just as a moving image. When the body of a dancer or the surface of the water was moving, I would prefer a still frame to a moving image. In the case of “Islands”, I only used a single dia image and then let the water became a generator of movement and produce the other 23 frames. The water made the sleeping body look like it was breathing.

Very often, you also address hidden political or social agenda in your work, and at the same time your installations come off as formally very clean, also monumental in a way. You also often work with large scale installations. What are the reasons behind your decision to produce monumental and formal and seemingly formalistic works, and how does this answer the social questions that you are addressing? In “Ada” you also used scientific and neurological explanations.

It all depends on what I want to communicate to people. I search for a form that is very present, which people can comprehend, feel immediately, and I think there is a better way to communicate. I believe that when you have a very strong emotion, you need to have something very subtle to mediate it. Or even better, you cannot say anything about the light without the shadow. In the aesthetic sense, this comes out as something clean. That is how I work with the installations. Another example would be mysticism. I know that in our society there is a lot of interest in getting in contact with spirituality, but a lot of people make a huge mistake when they start overemphasise it, and they become esoteric, they fail to recognize the importance of the material world. I like to speak about polarities.

Another very intriguing layer of your work is your approach to new technologies. You often produce a piece, which would not be possible without computers and laboratories, but you do not directly use computers. In fact, you even cal “Ada” an analogue interactive installation. You used a similar principle in “Morning Star”, in which you built a rhizomatic structure with arrows. There was no new technologies, only a new vision of the physical.

I want to address people’s fear about the digital. I dislike the paranoid approach to the digital world that suggests that it takes our reality away from us, and that we become less alive when using it and somehow lost in the virtual space. Come on! A century ago with film and photography a lot of people were saying that that will be the end of painting, the end of culture. Why are we afraid of new technologies? The question is not technology itself, but how we use it. One thing is for sure, it is very wrong to be afraid of it. I wanted to take fear out of people, and prove that understanding the digital is simply exploring my understanding of the world.

It is interesting that many artists worked with virtual reality at the beginning of 2000s, but now no one talks about virtual reality and real reality anymore because we constantly live it, these two things are not separated anymore.

The idea of fractals by Benoit Mandelbrot was first a mathematical question. If we can make a shape, can it be endless? Yes. It is not such a complex procedure. You have a line, you cut it in half in the middle, you cut it again in half, and again and again, and the story never ends. You get deeper and deeper. It seems absurd, but it is the beginning of the virtual. You may only imagine this shape existing in our head, it does not happen in the physical reality, but it tells everything about the way we see the world now.

It is interesting how, through history of art, and also through your own artistic history, we can observe a transition from abstract art to infinite art. Basically, virtuality is the possibility to think in the infinitum in the same sense we may think of the universe as an endless expansion until we cannot think about it anymore, even though it still continues. The way you play with the notion of virtuality in your latest interactive video installation “Simulacra” is very interesting. You place a body into a compressed space where the body itself ceases to exist. You find many times a very technical solution, and yet it is crucial for the content of the work.

For me, the technical solutions are never only formal. You have to understand that when I was a small child, everything was alive for me: the chair, the stairs, my puppet. They were not dead. When I started to use mechanical and technical objects in my work, I approached them in the same way I approach living matter. That is why it was so important for me to learn about the research of Masakazu Aono, the creator of the first nano-switch, and about the Argentine neurologist Dante Chialvo, who demonstrated that, in the nanoscale, it does not matter if something seems to be living or not. When I use technical things, I like to use them in a very clear way. I need to use a simple language, because I talk about a complex world. If I was to use a very complex language for complex things, we would get lost very quickly in this problem. I use a visual language that people can instinctively work with, and they should also feel touched. And I try to prevent people from becoming afraid of technology.

In “Simulacra”, the effect of the polarised screen was very magical, or as you say, I felt touched and emotionally addressed by it. Prior to looking through the magnifying glass with the polarised screen I never thought about the physical characteristics of an LCD screen or that this polarised screen is the only one enabling the picture to be visible. The stark white empty surface of the LCD without the polarised screen, and the image that was visible only through the lens, was a new discovery for me, and I’m always thrilled to learn something new, but in a sense, it was much more important for me, it was about what it actually made me see once I got over the pure fascination. The person in the cube in the video seemed to be in a very claustrophobic place, a very enclosed space, like it would be reaching out of the box and wanting to become physical. In this sense, it was very emotional to see this digital person trapped in the digital world and wanting to get out. What this piece also tells me is that the observer finds himself or herself in an opposite position. We want to become digital and limitless. I see a lot of people willingly post their intimate stories online through social networks. I think this can be very beautiful, not just an act of an exhibitionist. We are trapped in the physical space and we love to be online, on a smartphone, scrolling through something far less limited than our physical existence. We love to be in the digital space. Contrary to what some technophobes say, it does not trap us.

The way I try to do my art is to mediate it directly, so that the audience does not need knowledge, does not need to read a long text in order to understand what is happening there. I believe art does not need to be only for intellectuals, but for everybody. I want them to feel immediately addressed. But then, it depends on the person watching, what they are thinking about, what they have read, or know, or how interested they are to find out. I do not want to push people, they can decide on their own how far and how deep they want to explore what is in front of them. But I do think about all these layers, this is why I make the installation in a way that it allows discovery of deeper layers of meanings. One of the key ideas behind “Simulacra” was also the fact that today, a lot of creativity or fantasy happens on the surface. In this way, connected to the screen, we are already in the matrix. What I wanted to do is to cut this illusion away … like a Red Pill from „Matrix“. Saying, no, that what reaches your eyes and what you see are only different optical light pulses. The process is happening in your brain, it is and organic, analogue mental cinema. The claustrophobic figure trapped inside the screen in “Simulacra” is telling us a story of how it already exists in our heads. Hitchcock, one of the best filmmakers, worked on this notion of virtuality by showing a shadow, so that the viewer would produce the story and the fear in his or her head. The biggest fear comes from the unknown, from something that has not been yet lived. You cannot show the feared one, you have to stimulate people to produce the fear by themselves … It’s mental cinema. What I did removed the fantasy from the surface and placed it into the minds. Virtual is what happens in the people’s heads.

Interview with Jan Vormann

by Neja Tomšič

Process
»Dispatchwork was first initiated in 2007, and it has changed its faces a lot since then. For example, it has taken this new form of a workshop, and it has also adopted the concept of a self-organized guerrilla kind of action, when people all over the world do the project without me being present and send me their photos, which I then publish on the dispachement.info website.
There is also a forum, which is slowly working with people who sign up to create their events or announce them. The last event took place in Mexico, for example. So this is the new side of the project, which I did not plan and which was not its initial idea.
Initially, Dispatchwork grew as a response to the architectual style of the city Bocchignano, Italy, where regular bricks were used to build the houses. So basically, the integrity of the structure was more important than the design. They would not just demolish the entire house if they did not have the fitting bricks, which reminded me of children’s building structures, where they have a limited amount of bricks, and they rather use the same shape than the same colour.

Transferring meaning
Afterwards, I was invited to Tel Aviv, where walls have a very different meaning because of the separation and they hold a strong political connotation. In Berlin, people were invited to join the project for the first time. We were working on a wall that was destroyed by the shootings during the Second World War, so the project got a completely political component in that case.
Now, I try to choose special places, but since there are different layers of work, I do not mind repairing whatever wall is hidden in a dark corner where nobody ever goes.

Randomness / Surprise
What I really like with this project is the moment of surprise. I am also influenced by graffiti, where nothing really matters, as long as you put something on the wall, so it is an “I was here” kind of statement. This layer is present in my work too, so when I go to a boring city (a city where nothing really happens), I still find a wall to leave my sign on.
So I am oscillating between the more important walls that I might chose just to point something out, and then I also point it out on my webpage in order to explain the background of the structure. But sometimes my choice could also be a regular wall of a regular house.

Crossing barriers and looking for common languages
Right now, what I am focused on, as a sculptor, is the use of comprehensible artistic imagery. I have travelled throughout the world a little bit, and I have found many similarities. It has always been my wish, my vision, to find out if nationality and personal identity could actually work without culture. I wanted to explore if people need nationality, if perhaps language is the only barrier between them, and not culture, in the way that people all over the world approach objects in a similar way.
For example, I work with plastic construction bricks that are widely known all over the world, in many industrialized countries, with soap bubbles, which are also quite well-known all over the world, with plain dice, which I use because it is a recognisable object, and also with the idea of a simple object being a carrier of symbolic value, which lures people into much deeper reflections. It is a matter of time. Let us take the Soap-bubble Life Extension Machine for example. First, there is the soap bubble as an internationally recognised object of fragility, the ephemeral existence of objects, maybe even of animals, living things. This Soap-bubble Life Extension Machine conserves the soap bubble forever, changing this image and reflecting upon things, such as medicine and processes of modern technology for extension of life (for example).

Permanence : temporariness
We live in a world where everything changes all the time. Our bodies, for instance, are constantly in a transitory state. We take nutrition and discharge unnecessary things; we are constantly losing our skin, reproducing the skin and blood, etc.
In my recent I have worked with moments of temporariness a lot in my recent works. I either try to make the time stop by preventing soap bubbles from bursting, or making the dice stop rolling, or I try to make something break down on purpose by using different machines. Maybe is also related to the art market, thinking about what you can sell, how much can a collector collect from a broken machine, etc.
I try to work with the fact that the world is very impermanent (constantly changing) and also very relative in time, for example those moments that seems to last forever or other ones that seem very short.
The project is also a test on how a neighborhood accepts or reacts to the intervention. In some neighbourhoods, people take care of it, so it stays there for a long time, in others, they take the toys because they need them. In public space everything is a fair game. So it depends.. I have however never glued anything down.
To me, permanence is not really important. It doesn´t matter how many people I reach with a patch. And there is the other side of the project – documentation and photography, where it will be captured for ever.
I also like the idea of playing with expectations and deceit. People see the patch in their own city on the internet and when they come to the venue, it´s no longer there.

Can you tell us something about your professional background?

Well, my professional background comes from fields that are very different from what I am doing now. I have background in music and in fine arts, and I started my art school as a painter. I could only draw, and during those years I kind of had the opportunity to look at what I liked, and I started experimenting with different media, and yeah, it kind of developed more into this interdisciplinary attitude where I started to become really interested in sound, because it connects us to a space, and it gives us the feeling of being in a place, which I found very interesting.

How did you find out about ArtScience and how did you start working on three-dimensional and not two-dimensional space?

I became aware of it for the first time when I had a group of drawings, and the way I placed them into space really influenced the meaning of the whole piece. The drawings became one work, you make connections between one work and another and it kind of makes a story. I also discovered that space became part of the work as well. And after this, I was started to move more towards site-specific works, where I kind of transform the space with very simple, yet very effective means.

Could you give us an example?

An example would be my work for my Bachelor in Fine Arts: I had a room with three windows, and I made these three big black triangles that kind of seemed to invade the room, it seemed like an implosion that came into the room, and on the floor, I had a grid of elastics in the form of a structure of a crystal, and at the same time there was sound playing continuously and, yes, in a way, I transformed the space. Also, it makes the viewers not really know how to behave in a space, and it kind of challenges them too.

How would you describe ArtScience?

The funny thing is that I never chose to do ArtScience. I think it was because of the works I became interested in, the ones I saw during festivals in Holland, they really played with your perception, and you know, how you perceive space and time with sound and image, that combination. Then I kind of realised what kind of works I like and I wanted to make those works too.

What are you working on here at MoTA residency?
I am currently developing some prototypes for my new work that are a continuation of the last piece I made, the one I presented here at Sonica 2012. It was called “Repetition at my distance” and it was a field of sixteen lightwires with motors, sound and light. And now, I want to develop these techniques to a greater extent, but with different materials and with different methods of constructing light, sound and movement.

For example, what kind of prototypes?
It started with an image of a white swarm floating in a dark space. It was made out of very tiny particles, and they created both geometrical and organic form, and that is what I am trying to make tangible. And with these prototypes I would like to create entities that I would like to duplicate, and these entities should be very simple, but they should also be able to express many different things.

How is it connected to your previous work?

The method of constructing the piece is actually the second part; the first part is the making-of part, it’s like building a new instrument. The second part consists of thinking about what I can do with what I had already made, so it’s more like the development in time. For the part of the composition, I got inspired by the complex swarm behaviour, like the things you can see in nature: , the big flock of birds flying in the sky or a big group of fish in the sea, but this behaviour is also used a lot in the virtual world, movies and video games, and this is the behaviour that I would like to make tangible in my installations. And I am not necessarily interested in how it is made, I need to learn about that too, but for me, the experience of the behaviour is more important, as well as the fact of making something that is different from this behaviour, something more than it originally is and that it speaks more to the imagination of the perceiver.

Is what you are working on a total installation? What does it mean?
Nowadays, every installation art, every art can be called an installation when it’s a collection of several pieces put together. For me, the definition of the total installation is that it transforms the whole space, which means that also the architectural space is transformed together with the work. And that these two works kind of intersect with each other.

How is your work here site-specific?
It may not be as site-specific as my works before, but sometimes it really depends, the space really influences how you see the work. For example, the dimensions of my last work, the installation “Repetition at my distance”, are three by three by three, but it doesn’t mean it has to be in a space with the same dimensions; this work needs a lot of space around it or else it transforms the whole space.

Which educational spaces do you use, do you often go to residencies?
This is actually my first residency. I graduated not so long ago, like a year ago. But I really like the environment where you work and really focus on one thing, a very inspiring environment with people from different fields. Working in the same field like other artists is really nice, you can learn from each other. You don’t have much of this in school. In school, the only thing you have are people making things around you.

What other spaces do you use for your development as an artist?
We have in the Hague a few places where we go that are specialised in art, and I think they are important.

Only for artists or also for a broader public?
I don’t know if a broader public goes there as well, but if they did, it would be good, I hope more people go there. It is meant especially for artists, curators and researchers, those are really nice places to go.

You have a blog for your audience. Who is your audience?
At first, it was meant more for myself, to make connections with what I’m working on, what things inspire me. But then I also figured that it would be nice if the audience sees what I’m doing. The fact is that when I start to work, I have no idea how it will turn out to be, it can be something completely different than the first image. I keep a record of the process. For me, it’s the first time to really document the process. I hope to reach a broader audience; what I do in my works is not so complicated to understand. It is not so conceptual as most of the contemporary art. It speaks much more to the direct experience of the perceiver. In the way I am working, I see it more as experiencing music.

Interview with Azahara Cerezo
by Barbara Tomšič

This is an overview of her  recent project Long May it Wave with which she was involved in the TRIBE research residency in Ljubljana in December 2013. We talk about different aspects of the usage and the representation of flags in public space with a special focus on Ljubljana, where she did her field research. We speak from the viewpoint of representers of power, of them who declare the position of each flag on a certain building. We would like to point out that the project is still in progress.

As I understand, your project is designed to be done globally. Correct me, please, if I’m wrong – its research approach is aimed for field work in any city of the world from your (authors’ – researchers’) point of view. And as I have read on your webpage, you have also done some investigation in the city where you live, in Spain? So which cities do you plan to investigate in the future development of the project?

The project started when I was living in Madrid in 2012, where I felt that there was not only an excess of flags, but of symbols in general. I started mapping all flags and making a route through them, also timing myself from flag to flag. The project consists of some field work, which is really important, but there are no formulas. I do not think that a project that works in one place will necessarily work in another one. If you try to approach public space or specific dynamics or urban forms, you have to pay attention to the difference. I am approaching other ways of exploring cartographies now, not necessarily linked to flags, but to symbols and new technologies in a broad way.

Flags – be it local, national or European – are your top research interest. Do you consider them – besides their relation to the political, historical and economical dimension – also in relation to (active) citizenship, i.e. to an individual or to the community?

I am mainly interested in flags linked to political powers, as they are raw material for political action. As I see it, we cannot understand this without dealing with the economical, social and historical dimension. However, flags are obviously related to the individual and the community too, especially if we take into account that a flag requires a certain social nexus and shared information, which does not mean that it has the same significance. As a tool for identification, it implies a certain type of communication, therefore a code. But citizens do not use only the official flags, there are many flags displayed in protest and they are clearly a way to communicate something to others, even if they are considered “unregulated” flags. Flags of this kind are ephemeral and are not subject to design rules. During demonstrations, there are many examples of “unregulated” flags; protesters carry their own flags that try to speak for a group or fit in with the idea of the whole event, their variety is potentially infinite.

The fact is that the emergence of flags does not have a long history (only about 200 years). According to this fact, how – if so – do you understand their relation to citizenship?

In my opinion, flags are mainly symbols that intend to speak in the name of a group. This implies a process of negotiation, but also of appropriation and domination. It also means that, politically, they are used to homogenize citizens and (nationalist) processes. This is especially true for the national or regional flags, the ones more linked to a territory. It is easier to put citizens together under an emblem of a flag than pay attention to details and differences.

Referring to the last question, how do you perceive the relation between flags – as one of the constituent symbols of national identity – and the individual or collective and his/hers or their identity (citizenship, sense of origin and belonging, national emotions, patriotism)?

Any national identity comes from a process linked to certain interests. In fact, flags as symbols of national identity were born mainly between the 19th and 20th century, which means that they arose along with the middle class. Then, Old Regime forms were replaced by a new liberal and capitalist order that goes hand in hand with the emergence of the middle class. As Rosa Luxemburg stated, a nation as a homogeneous sociopolitical entity does not exist, there is more than one social sphere and the struggles for national interests are usually promoted by the strata of the bourgeoisie. This is, as far as I have realized, slightly different in transitory – or post-transitory – countries such as Slovenia because of its role in Eastern Europe. I am especially interested in how nationalism conforms itself through symbols and its relation to the virtual and physical public space.

Concerning your research residency in Ljubljana in December 2013 in the frame of the TRIBE project, which were the main points of your field observations?

At the beginning, I had a very clear idea about the project, but this changed due to the residency in Ljubljana and what I experienced there. My main observations deal with flags, buildings and architecture, as well as the influence of a Soviet past on these fields. I also wanted to explore the use of flags, their use in the public space and how they connect with urban forms and planning of the city. I am always interested in conflict contexts, which is why I decided to refer to some of the demonstrations and its protests as part of the project.

As I see, one of them is also the Stock Exchange building, perhaps one of the most turbulent and detracted symbols of economic power. How do you understand its public representation, considering the fact that it was the centre of first mass demonstrations against neoliberal economy that quickly spread throughout Europe and USA at the end of 2011? Keep in mind the fact that the protesters endured the outdoors for almost four months in the winter time.

The squares or streets nearby Stock Exchange buildings have certainly been one of the main scenarios of recent protests. They represent the idea of supranational organisms that are not subject to democratic control and are the true decision makers.
A public space – although some of them are not public anymore, and in many cases not even in a legal way – is always a space of representation, where power relations converge and where you can see the limits and the links between exclusion and inclusion. The Agora of Athens, for instance, which was given as an example of open participation, excluded women and foreigners. In this case, Stock Exchange buildings have become a symbol. It is the same with Parliaments, Universities and main urban squares, as they are spaces where people come to meet and be visible, apart from being hotspots in the city, which implies that they are sites of power. Staying outdoors in front of Stock Exchange buildings has been a common movement in London, New York and also Ljubljana, amongst others. I am also interested in how people organized, mainly through social media, but also how they decided for a form of protest that was always used: the body. This relation between the physical and virtual sphere (a connected body) in conflict contexts – understanding Europe as a place of economic conflicts – is very interesting within my working lines.

Do you consider that the public representation of the Stock Exchange building also addresses the collective citizenship?

It addresses collectives of citizens that represent themselves against capitalism in front of a symbolic building. This space is where citizens’ rights can be exercised as a medium to gain access to the citizenship. There is also an interesting component of transitoriness in this public representation, which I try to revisit by means of the project.

If we conclude with the recent European Elections in May 2014, could you give me your opinion as to the negative impression and decline in the attendance in the elections – what is the real power of flags as symbols of national/European identity?

The European Union was built first with an economic purpose, but without thinking through all the identities, differences or having a shared political project. As Foret states in “Symbolic dimensions of EU legimitization”, the traumatic effects of the introduction/intrusion of the EU flag have been sometimes underestimated and they have caused a shock to the experience and structures of identification of the people. Eurobarometer reports showed in 2007 that only 54 % of Europeans said that they identify with the flag. European flags are mainly displayed in public buildings or sometimes hotels and tourist spots, and they are usually not considered as an identity-refuge. In my opinion, there is a trend towards abstraction in European symbols to facilitate somehow the idea of Europeanism without making reference to cultural diversity and differences.

Do you agree with Konzen’s thesis about the public space regulation? Do you see flags as de facto one of its tools?

Indeed, flags contribute to the order and regulation of a place. There are many symbols, banners, signals that guide and tell us about different aspects of the city. If we disrupt this, we also alter our surroundings. A drift can be a way of doing it, as it is an unproductive action that can call into question the logic of urban forms and rhythms. Urbanism also deals with this order. Through this discipline, flows and ways can be changed throughout the city. For example, the renovation of the banks of the Ljubljanica river have received the 2012 European Prize for Urban Public Space. This contributes to the way we regulate public space, in this case, for example, how people meet and how the space is used.

Your project involves a wide range of topics. Amongst them: power, identity, citizenship, history, public/private, individual/collective, norms & laws, regulation & freedom, space/time, just to list a few. Since Slovenia is one of the transitory (or post-transitory, depends on the researchers’ point of view) countries amongst the countries of the former Soviet bloc, what comes to your mind if you consider the role of the flag as a political symbol? Could you make a relation to the situation in your country, too?

In this case, Slovenia is a young state and, due to its particular history, the national flag is very recent and possibly not distinctive enough. It was introduced in 1991, even though we can search and find older origins. Its colours, white, blue and red, apart from being revolutionary colours, are usually shared among countries of the former Soviet bloc. The country itself is often confused with Slovakia, which uses the same colours, or even with the Baltic countries. Politicians like Bush or Berlusconi have referred to the Slovenian President as “Slovak” in public acts by mistake. Spain is also a young democratic country and, especially in further countries, it is confused with a Latin American country. The previous flag, which is now banned, was introduced when Franco ruled. We have another unofficial but legal flag, which is the Republican flag. Unlike Slovenia, there are some strong independentist movements: the Basque Country and Catalonia, mainly. Spanish, Basque and Catalan nationalist movements use the flag often and they display it not only in public buildings, but in hotels, houses and during demonstrations, as well as other places and situations.

Let’s return again to your residency stay in Ljubljana. How would you describe your experience?

I would have needed more time to achieve a truly contextual work, although I have done a lot of research to get to that point. In general, the thing that I like the most about residencies is the chance to do some work in response or relation to a certain context. In Belfast, the situation was very different, as there are still several conflict points and many urban forms, codes and symbols that can be read in a political way. While I was developing the project, I found out that Ljubljana is challenging in another form. Because of its past and its situation as part of the European Union (the country has been in the spotlight of a bailout several times), I found interesting facts and elements in the city to do the project. As an artist, I consider that residencies are an essential part of building a solid career, but I admit that not all artists fit in with this idea of context and stages.

Please, briefly describe your fieldwork and methodology in your research work in Ljubljana.

I try to combine field work and research, and my strategies are usually linked to the repetition of processes and the rewriting of forms and uses. I often – almost always – use the drift to approach the city where I am doing a residency or a project. I like the idea of a false position, of being outside and inside the context, as Paul Ardenne states in “Contextual art”. I tried to approach tourist dynamics, I took guided tours and visited tourist destinations, but I do not like to homogenize this subject. There are several tourist dynamics and layers; my exploration, even if it addresses symbols, tourism and the city, aims to be a way to raise questions about surroundings, planning and the use of urban forms.

Would you like to define your project also in relation to contemporary art, especially transitory art?

Long May it Wave deals with transitory art, at least as I understand this idea. It is a project that approaches and is aware of its temporary component and this is the main element of the work. It also approaches contingency and changes of a city and revisits past events and facts, which contributes to the rhythm of transitoriness.

Which of your project ideas do in your opinion fit in best with the definition of transitory?

The core of the project, which is the approach to the urban space taking flags as reference, has in itself a notion of transitoriness. Urban space and its elements are changing gradually and modify the forms and uses of the city. The project also proposes an itinerary, a possible way to raise questions about Ljubljana that also implies the idea of transitoriness. I like the idea of the project as a transit, since it proposes to move around the city and discover other possible forms to relate to and narrate surroundings, planning, tourism and temporary elements. Besides, Slovenia – and Ljubljana – is an in-between territory. For many tourists and visitors, it is a point to stop as they go to Austria or further in the Eastern Europe. I believe that this idea fits in with the definition of transitoriness, too.

We have listed only a few topics from your recent work. What are your plans for the future?

I keep working on the virtual and physical public space and contexts, too. I would like to get more residencies and stages abroad but the financial situation of Spain does not make it always easy.

Thank you for your collaboration, Azahara, and good luck!

My name is Anne Laforet and I’m a teacher, researcher and writer. Sometimes, I’m an artist, too. I work alone or collaboratively in a number of different situations/contexts, mostly in Europe.

2. You mostly work as a researcher and lecturer. What are the main topics of your professional interest?

I’m interested in art practices, mostly digital, free software, the preservation & documentation of artworks, pedagogy…

3. When we talk about the question of digital art conservation, we come across the problem of distribution. How would you explain this relation?

Preserving digital art makes sense only if there are people to experience it, in one way or another. Access to what is preserved is as central as the conservation itself, and accessibility is therefore related to the distribution and dissemination of artworks. Preservation involves a series of deliberate actions upon an artwork, and it is generally done with a certain purpose in mind, a situation in which the work would be made accessible (through an exhibition, a website, a collection…).

4. Speaking of digital art, the first association to me is “indefinite”. Do you consider digital art as indefinite, too?

Perhaps I wouldn’t choose the word “indefinite”, but digital art is about being in flux, having mutability, variability in itself. In part, this is what makes preservation such an elaborate enterprise, because artworks are complex digital objects, and it also makes digital art so exciting, as we don’t know how artists’ practices will develop.

5. Your PhD thesis is titled The preservation of net art in museums. Strategies at work., published in 2011. How do the questions you are opening in the frame of digital art – production and especially conservation – relate to your current research work?

The attention towards digital art preservation informs my current work in different ways, from a focus on sustainable digital practices and tools, to delay planned obsolescence for instance, in my teachings and writings, to thinking about what could be an undocumentable, unpreservable artwork.

6. You have been involved in TRIBE project in September 2013 when you participated in the research residency at MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art in Ljubljana. Please describe briefly the research work you have done there.

At MoTA, I started a research project on Anarchronism, a portmanteau word composed by anachronism and anarchy, where I’m looking at artworks that have both analog and digital components, and are trying to confuse the viewer, making her or him unable, for instance, to “date” the artwork. There, I read, looked online and at the artworks that were shown in Ljubljana at that moment.

7. Speaking about AnarChronism, what are its main aims and objectives?

$ echo anarchie | sed ‘s/i/ronism/i’
$ echo anachronisme | sed ‘s/a/ar/2′
I got a bit lost in my research, perhaps something predictable when looking for chaos in artworks and feeling confused by not being confused enough. I took some turns that were dead-ends (at least for now), and all I have is bits and pieces of information, from notes to lines of code. The vernacular (and not retro) practice of using the terminal instead of my laptop has brought me a new concept to deal with in that research, the antonym to anarchronisme: it’s “arnachronisme” (I got it while typing this line of code in my terminal, try it, it’s fun! – $ echo anachronisme | sed ‘s/a/ar/i’ ). “Arnachronisme” sadly cannot be understood easily in English, only in French, but it is an effective word. “Arnaquer” in French means “to rip off”, and it could be used to describe something that deals with the retro, not the vernacular: the retro element is just an effect, not something deep and felt, as opposed to something that is truly vernacular, truly alive. A lot of artworks, and more generally cultural products, clearly have to do with “arnachronisme”!

8. How would you describe the relation between digital and analog, focusing on the question of the conservation of digital art?

Both analog and digital media have positive and negative aspects when it comes to preservation. Is therefore an anarchronistic artwork particularly difficult to preserve?

It could be one element of its definition, perhaps I could have started with that, it might have taken me away from some dead-ends

9. Do you see any similarities/discrepancies between net art and transitory art?

Net art and transitory art are both variable practices that rely on flux in one way or another.

10. Could you please summarize the connection between AnarChronism and transitory art in the frame of the TRIBE project?

Transitory is one of the key words that could describe anarchronism, with other words like confusion, compression, creolization, hybridation, entanglement, breach, heterochrony, precarity, asynchrony, matter, planned obsolescence…

11. We have stopped just briefly on your fruitful research path. What would you like to say to conclude this interview?
Would you perhaps like to refer to some future projects?

I’d like to carry on looking at anarchronism as I’m still figuring out what it is, and how it can inform our understanding of contemporary art practices.

Thank you for your collaboration!