Moderator: Luka Zagoričnik (SI)

Guests: Julien Bayle (FR), Martin Reiche (DE), Janez Križaj (SI), Matt Spendlove – Spatial (UK)

Druga godba and ArtistTalk

We’re happy to announce this year’s collaboration with Druga godba festival in Ljubljana and our ArtistTalk project. Druga Godba’s supporting programme of talks and round tables will be available through ArtistTalk:

Thursday, 26. 5.

18.00, Ziferblat

Roundtable: Music of the Diaspora

Decelerator Helmet

Decelerator Helmet is an artistic project that offers an experimental approach to an essential subject of our globalized world. The technical reproducible senses are consigned to an apparatus which allows the user a perception of the world in slow motion. The float of time as apparently invariant constant is broken and subjected under the user’s control. The idea to decouple the personal perception from the natural timing enables the user to become aware of his own time.

In the inside of the helmet the Video-signal of a camera is processed by a small computer. The slowed down images are displayed right before the user’s eyes via a Head-Mounted Display and simultaneously shown at a monitor on the outside. In three different modes the lapse of time can be influenced through a remote control:

In the auto-mode time is slowed down automatically and re-accelerated after a defined interval. The press-mode allows the specific deceleration of time and in the scroll-mode the user can completely control the speed of the elapsing of time.

The idea to decouple the personal perception from the natural timing enables the user to become aware of his own relationship to time. The helmet works as a reflection-bubble to think about the flow of time in general and the relation between sensory perception, environment and corporality in particular.

The technique of the Decelerator extends the awareness of time and transforms the concept of present in a constructed, artificial state. On a different level the helmet dramatically visualizes how slowing down under all circumstances causes a loss of actuality and as idea is inconsistent with its environment. It raises the general question how technology will shape our senses in the future, how this shift to a personalized perception could change our view of the world and eventually will lead to an detachment of our global convention of reality.

The term prosthetics indicates an addition or extension. The word “prosthetics” was included in medical terminology in the 16th Century. Three centuries later, Marshall McLuhan wrote in his seminal book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man first published in 1964: Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus. McLuhan also argued that ‘any medium whatever is an extension, a projection in space or in time, of our various senses. He postulated that while earlier technologies extended one part of the body (for instance the wheel extending the foot), the new electronic technologies extended the whole nervous system.

In an increasingly technologically mediated world the issue of what constitutes a prosthetics becomes crucial. It is important to note the evolving trans-disciplinary role of the artist in the design process and techniques, the process of innovation, scientific visualization and the process of developing and disseminating a prosthetic. The question remains: If designers, scientists and engineers are limited by a focus on restoring function, how can those who rely on prostheses benefit from advances in artificial intelligence, materials science, nanotechnology and other emerging discoveries? Rapidly emerging engineering technology and advanced materials have revolutionized prosthetics developments over the last decades. The most advanced apparatus can respond to instructions from the central nervous system, therefore these neural controlled devices are anticipated to forecast the future progress of prosthetics.

The presentation will briefly examine some of the issues related to prosthetics, such as history, material developments, ethical concerns, biological and evolutionary aspects, sports related issues and approaches by artists.

Methodology: The analytical view of biological art works as boundary objects is not inconsequential. For it requires an attempt at categorizing them not just as artistic but also as scientific objects, which involves seeking the meaning they elicit in both of these cultures (Jones and Galison, 1998). I focus my attention on their understanding as scientific objects. Historically these have been seen by philosophers and sociologists of science either as “discoveries, unexplored territory waiting to be mapped” by realists or as “inventions, forged in specific historical contexts and molded by local circumstances” by constructivists (Daston, 2000,p.3-4). As boundary objects biological artworks will have to convey new knowledge to science, to impart innovative ways of understanding the scientific landscape. As a consequence one accepts that they expand the horizons of science, that they induce a change – science becomes mutated and accordingly art emerges as a mutagenic force. The proposed task, of viewing artworks as boundary objects, is an exciting challenge and offers a fertile ground for imaginative explorations.

The author’s artistic practice evolves around the notions of a human, technology, and human relation to her environment and the world when both human and the environment are artificially modified. In this paper the author investigates specifically the relationship between a human and her environment through presenting three recent art works: A Unit, Evidence and Appendix. These three works share similar notions on human as an organism compiled of complex network of connections, and reference Gregory Bateson’s argument that organism + environment is the unit of survival (Bateson 1978 [1969]). However, in the described example cases the situation is intervened by artificially constructed and modified components.

The author proposes that these kinds of speculative approaches that are allowed in art & design, and which offer us new potential scenarios about the future, also help us collectively share, evaluate and construct the desired futures.

From the roots of DIY Culture, to the core of contemporary History, from Myth and Storytelling to pure. Facts, somewhere between a found objects sculpture and a Network Art experiment, Maiitsoh questions the man-machine relationship in an historical, sociological and artistic way, offering the public and users a challenging, playful, aesthetical and multimedia experience. The corpus of interviews includes one hour or more long interviews with Noam Chomsky, Fons Elders, William Gibson and Jeremy Narby, to name a few. Furthermore the Maiitsoh project works at some levels as a meta-meme, specifically in it’s particular design and ways of being exhibited that makes it an icon of the open-source culture, a statement about contemporary History and Computer History and a mindset proposal for trans-civilizational cultural production and preservation.

Adopting a syncretic approach, the perspective of my artistic and more global Research is based on a traditional Aikido sword exercise called Happo-giri , or “to cut in eight directions”. This shape got in my point of view a symbolical connection with the Buddhist wheel or Dharmachakra. I extend my perspective to contemporary practices, and in a more trans-disciplinary perspective the aims of the research is to analyse and theorize the implication (at environmental and various other level) of any industrialization and globalization of traditional and therefore “ultra local” linked practices or “habits”, and their impacts on the mental and natural environment at a planetary scale. With a focus on particular cases studies inside and outside of my personal body of work and research protocols, I will develop in this paper my personal perspectives on bi-cognitivism, ultra-locality and a contemporary look at Craftsmanship (traditional & modern) as an educational , cognitive and knowledge enhancing tool suitable for a sustainable future.