New Materialisms (Station 1)
18. 7. 21 h . Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič: Cosmosapiens and the TerRatop . prezentacija
23. 7. 22 h . Armin Medosch: What is history? Homage to Praxis, Praxis group and Korčula Summer School . theoretical performance, peripatetic symposion
The exhibition presents audiovisual installation Voyager/ non-human agent by Slovenian artistic duet Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič. At the opening the artists will perform an informance (information performance).
The exhibition also presents the digitized archive of Praxis journal, which can be copied by the visitors to their USB sticks and external memory discs.
Two separate presentations will take place in English: on July 18 at 9 pm Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič will hold a presentation under the title Cosmosapiens and the TerRatope, while on July 23 Armin Medosch will take us for a walk in a form of peripatetic theoretical performance.
Curator of the exhibition Darko Fritz.
New Materialisms (Station 1) is the first in the series of the three-year program carried out in cooperation of grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art from Korčula, HICA (Highlands Institute for Contemporary Art) from Scotland and Technopolitics, association for development of new discourses in art and science from Vienna.
Project New Materialisms explores the nature of auto-poietic (self-organized) neotworks, whereby HICA's and grey) (area dialogues with partners' organizations, spaces and artists will be extending across Europe through 2016 and 2017.
New Materialisms reflects on the historically divergent art practices and related discourses of Concrete Art and Conceptual Art, especially as identified through the 1960s, as Modern and Postmodern, and as understood through the prism of today's post-media approaches in fine arts, and the post-digital condition of contemporary life (where the digital realm is interwoven through all aspects of society). Accordingly, New Materialisms also forms a dialogue between significant artists from this earlier period, who may be seen to be first exploring the territory, and current practitioners, now operating within a post-media context. Thus New Materialisms presents a mirroring of “organismic” states, ultimately proposing aesthetic experience as a significant mechanism in the processes of formation of the physical world.
About the exhibited works and presentations
Installation Voyager/ non-human agent uses algorithm and data collected from the instruments from the spacecraft Voyager, which since 1977 has been travelling across the universe. Existing space programs focus mainly on understanding the farthest of our surroundings and on developing technological solutions, but tend to overlook the importance of implementing artistic development practices and methodologies in the form of a basic question: What is it like to be a human in space?
Voyager/ Non-human Agent project investigates the possible art forms in outer space, a composite of art and science, and the processes of science culturalization.
Exhibition New Materialisms (Station 1) also presents interdisciplinary works based on the legacy of Korčula Summer School and Praxis Journal.
Praxis (digitized) is a collection containing the (digitized) issues of Yugoslav, international, special and pocket editions of Praxis journal. It also contains the journal Problemi and a smaller number of monographs that provide context for the understanding of the work and historic significance of the Praxis journal. Praxis (digitized) is a part of the project Public Library, accessible at http://praxis.memoryoftheworld.org.
Public library is a project initiated by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, aimed at lobbying for the institution od public library and everybody's right to access knowledge as its fundamental principle. Public library dwells on the possibility of building distributed infrastructure for accessing digitized knowledge, constructed by amateur librarians. Within the Public Library project, the collection Praxis (digitized) was created by Ante Lešaja and Tomislav Medak.
The collective of critical thinkers around the journal developed a singular trajectory of humanist Marxist and socialist analysis in the context of non-aligned Yugoslavia. Together with the affiliated Korčula summer school the journal functioned as a hub for the exchange of critical perspectives between the East and the West in the years 1963-1974. In the proceedings of the summer school and the journal participated many prominent figures of the period, a.o. Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre, Karel Kosik, Jürgen Habermas, Lucien Goldmann.
Besides the archive Praxis (digitized), the work by Armin Medosch, Austrian artist, theoretician and lecturer, also relies on Korčula Summer School and Praxis journal legacy.
Armin Medosch will carry out the theoretical performance, peripatetic symposion titled What is History? Hommage to Praxis journal, Praxis group and Korčula Summer School that reflects on the mutuality of interrelations among these phenomena. Through series of site specific performative lectures, Armin Medosch will be exploring various notions of materialism(s), historical, dialectical and new. Medosch's performative lecture is an improvised free speech, putting forward the question: “What is History?”.
The topic of the second Korčula Summer School gathering, “What is History?” will also be Armin's topic. To speak freely means to get back to the origins of philosophy, to the form of friendly conversation. There will be no script and there should also be no recording going on. One core topic will be Praxis’ specific understanding of reflection theory, according art and culture semi-autonomy in relation to the productive apparatus. Medosch will seek to place Praxis in this respect in a context with Western Marxism and its art theories, including Adorno, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Williams, Jameson and others.
Presenting Praxis legacy in manifold forms is also a part of the project History of Contemporaneity, conceptualized and carried out by the informal platform kor::net (Korčula Network), and which includes historiographic research and mapping of highly relevant artistic and cultural practices that marked the promotion of contemporary trends on the island of Korčula in the 20th Ct. (More at: http://korculanetwork.info/kornet/pages/praxis)
In the frame of the presentation titled Cosmosapiens and the TerRatope Špela Petrič will talk about the influences of the post-(bio)technological interregnum on the developmental challenges of artwork about/with/from living systems. She will discuss issues of authenticity, interfaces and paradigm contestations in connection to her practice and interdisciplinary art-sci collaborations. Miha Turšič, artist, designer and KSEVT (Cultural Centre for European Space Technologies) director will present the ongoing mission of incorporating arts and humanities as constitutional human practices into space exploration programs. For this talk, he will focus on space architecture, non-human habitability and post-gravity art.
About authors
Špela Petrič, BSc, MA, PhD, is a Slovenian new media artist and scientific researcher currently based in Amsterdam, NL. Her artistic practice combines natural sciences, new media and performance. While working towards an egalitarian and critical discourse between the professional and public spheres, she tries to envision artistic experiments that produce questions relevant to anthropology, psychology, and philosophy and investigate the artistic discourse of terRabiology.
Selected projects and collaborations: Naval Gazing (installation, 2014), Plant Sex Consultancy (co-authors Pei-Ying Lin, Dimitris Stamatis, Jasmina Weiss), Voyager/140AU (installation, co-author Miha Turšič, 2013), Solar Displacement (installation, 2013), Humalga: Towards the Human Spore (art-research project, co-author Robertina Šebjanič 2012-).
Miha Turšič (1975) graduated industrial design studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1998. In a period from 1995 to 2005 he was involved into worldwide product and brand development. Since 2004 has been actively involved in space culturalization, designing zero-gravity dwellings and postgravity art in collaboration with Dunja Zupančič, Dragan Živadinov and Yuri Gagarin Cosmonauts Training Centre in Russia. In his career he co-founded several institutions in field of research, development and art. Currently he is a director of KSEVT (Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies) and is being focused on developing a Cultural Space Program.
Selected projects and collaborations: 50-year theatre project Noordung:: 1995-2045, Zvyozdny Gorodok, April 2005 and Vitanje, April 2015; Construction of the KSEVT building, 2009–2012; Herman Potočnik Noordung: 100 Monumental Influences exhibition, September 2012; Voyager/ dr. Mavretič exhibition, October 2013; the first public presentation of the original Voyager PLS instrument, October 2013; Voyager/140AU, 2013 - ; Out of the Cradle conferences, Vitanje, November 2013, St. Petersburg, October 2014; Supre:architecture - presentation of Slovenia at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, June 2014; Space sight, Vitanje, 2015
Voyager/Non-Human Agent Authors: Špela Petrič in Miha Turšič / Collaborators: Maja Murnik, Slavko Glamočanin, Miha Tomšič, Patrik Ritosa / Production: KSEVT / Co-production: Kapelica Gallery / Partner: M.I.T. Kavli Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA / Support: Ministry of Culture Republic of Slovenia.
Armin Medosch, PhD, MA, is Professor of Theory and History of Art and Media at the Faculty of Media and Communications at Singidunum University, Belgrade. He is an artist, curator and author working in art and media art theory and network culture. His work as curator includes exhibitions such as: Waves (Riga, 2006; Dortmund, 2008); and Fields (Riga Culture Capital 2014). He is initiator of the Technopolitics working group in Vienna and initiator and maintainer of the cooperative web-space thenextlayer.org. His book under the tentative title “New Tendencies – Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution” is expected to be published by MIT Press in early 2016.
Public library: Praxis (digitized), created by Ante Lešaja and Tomislav Medak.
Public library is a project initiated by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, aimed at lobbying for the institution od public library and right to access knowledge as its fundamental principle. Public library dwells on the possibility of building distributed infrastructure for accessing digitized knowledge, constructed by amateur librarians. More at: http://www.memoryoftheworld.org
Public Library was initiated in 2012 upon the invitation of Kiberpipa to curate their biannual HAIP festival in Ljubljana. Since this initial outing, Public Library continued to be developed and presented a.o. in the exhibitions “Dear Art” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana, “Really Useful Knowledge” in the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid and “Public Library” in the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, in hackathons at Impakt festival in Utrecht, in Post-Digital Publishing workshop at Transmediale in Berlin, in Archive/Anarchive/Public Library workshop at Kuda.org in Novi Sad, in the residencies at Constant in Bruxelles, Calafou in Barcelona, MayDay Rooms in London and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Public Library exhibition and conference in Zagreb is organized in May of 2015 together with the curatorial collective What, how and for whom/WHW and Multimedia Institute.
