hi my name is Ricardo chiantos I'm artistic director of North Wind platform and Festival in Berlin together with Wayne Ashley artistic director of the future perfect studio in New York and Dennis Simeon of multimedia artist I initiated a project that should deal with the digitalization and the Performing Arts then we made an application we received the money and February 24th came we realized that we have to reshape the whole project we cannot go on just pretending to reflect on the Performing Arts many of the artists that you're gonna see today of the speakers of the scientists are in Excel many are dealing with the topic of Exile of identity of migration or finding a new home of leaving home we dedicate this project to all the people are fighting for the rights from Ukraine up to Belarus up to Iran and we wish you all a good conference I would like to mention uh that uh we have several panels each day and when then we have small breaks I'm also going to announce them and uh now I'm talking more to uh the speakers I will try to control the time and uh sometimes somehow alert you that uh your time maybe is up but I think uh it's gonna be smooth okay what we have uh for today now for today we have uh three exciting panels um the first one is named uh histories of avant-garde and contemporary descriptive Technologies um what uh we should uh think and what we should uh think and Associate avant-garde with is that this term has two meanings the first one is connected uh with art movements which uh were happening in the beginning of the 20th century so almost a hundred years ago and that is the first meaning called the avant-garde the second meaning is almost every brand new innovation in art and uh in this case digital art Virtual Worlds nfts and all what we're going to talk about here is also an avant-garde yet our speakers gonna um touch upon this topic from both sides and uh it's just going to be magnificent building uh the moderator of our third panel is uh left manavich he's an innovator influencer and writer his research interests uh digital Humanities media art media Theory and art history and I'm going to mention that the day after tomorrow he will also be with us but not like a moderator but in all the panelists so you you better wait uh also until arthritis stay with us all these three days among speakers in the first panel we have uh Joshua citarella who is new york-based artist and researcher and as he writes about himself in his website he researches political uh subcultures and for today you're going to give a talk about online the medical culture you know these funny pictures with cats and not only cats but I prefer cats mostly uh yeah uh he will talk about how these funny pictures are refer to the anti-art of dadaism which was one of the avant-garde art movements and how it how these memes can be the soil for new ideologies and new radical ideas wishes and how they can mirror their interests of the youth the second uh speaker of our first panel is our Synergy lab artist writer and political activist in his art he tries to investigate and question the legacy of the Soviet Union Soviet Union physiology and Russian costumes which is actually a combination a cluster of a lot of um cultural philosophical and artistic programs and beliefs which uh can summarize somehow to the ideas of overcoming mortality he will talk about digitalization uh of everything in the sake of management because she somehow finds the connections uh with some mathematical theories which were back in the beginning of the 20th century the third speaker of that first panel is Vigor craft uh he's an interdisciplinary artist and he is going to also talk about the computerization but uh more from the point of view what abilities it gives to us how it creates newborns of communication um and how the velocity the speed of it almost ever increasing uh inflation amount that was what we haven't personally the second panel is called Intervention resistance digital art and activism how unpredictable but wow I am looking forward to this panel uh because it would be a discussion among artists who use Technologies to resist politically and touch upon some very itchy and painful issues for uh our modern day uh the moderator would be Alan Feldman a cultural Anthropologist who studies ethnography of balance body and senses among speakers we're going to have chipmunk merch and Louisa cornet Chico is an artist who creates magnificent robotics cultures and works with new made installations while Luis is an independent curator she also works with media art and interdisciplinary practices they will brief us about public interventions which help the viewer question the concept of the Border the second speaker um going to be Elena Gomez she started com she started both computer science and kubernetics and a new media so she combines in her even background both techno Technologies and uh Fine Arts um she's interested in Virtual life a combination of organic and inorganic forms and in short talk he uh sorry she uh is gonna investigate uh the forms of communication in VR especially in VR chat and she'll talk from the prism of female artists from the post-soviet country the trial society and I believe this will be something incredible our third speaker for the second panel is uh she's an artist writer and a feminist activist she studies female sexuality in connection with Pope resilience and Colonial practices she also uh is a person from with the post Soviet background and nowadays she is accurate in Germany and she'll talk us how she navigates uh through these uneasy types of conflicts in Warfare and how she tries to represent uh painters and artists from uh like both sides and Etc and the last panel for today but not the least is digital nomadism and virtual production uh I think we all know what digital nomadism is digital numbers can work from almost every location in the world or we need is the laptop an internet and maybe a cell phone uh whether maybe this digital nomadism a sign of some very crucial and scary changes maybe it's just more connected with um with Christ then with welfare well probably we're gonna note uh from our panelists the moderator is Anna schwetz she is also going to give a talk but tomorrow around for today she's a moderator she's an art historian curator and a contemporary art lecturer and indicator um we have uh for we have a pair of speakers um in this panel the first pair now if you're gonna add Nikita shocker uh Anna is a creature producer and she works with numeric exhibitions and international projects uh while Nikita shulkov is an artist who works with VR and in AR and they both gonna talk about a representation of queer identity in uh Digital Life digital sphere and Etc uh the second panelist uh for our last panel today is a film and we are director uh now he's based in Georgia and he is almost in the middle in the center of Russian immigrant Society uh his speech would be dedicated to a organization of concerts and performances in VR uh with uh while working with an international team and the last but not the least speaker for today uh is team roofers led by Sam and Andy rolfest uh they specialize on special performance and experimental motion capture then path in digital art how they pay this from pandemic economical and political crisis that was what we have for today I think uh now the moderator can uh speak instead of meet you later given the intents in Rapid growth of immersive and blockchain Technologies artificial intelligence and increasing proliferation of digital culture is it actually useful to talk about with Technologies and practices and Legacies of historical on guard so this is where if you show you know panel description and I will get out of the way in a few seconds but let me literally take two minutes and add a few sentences of my own um it's easy to see that the development of so-called Modern Art and avant-garde in particular in 1910s and 1920s was closely connected to introduction immediate new technologies for example the French impressionist painters who basically started right the whole idea of Modern Art by organizing our own exhibitions were also the first ones to use two paints right painting from a tube which revirtualized Arts Visual language so you will you know the paint tools were invented by an American around 1840 so only this generation of artists would first want to use it a bit later Mickey avant-garde institutions such as such as Russian Bauhaus sorry I'm sorry such as Russia huchimasu and uh German Bauhaus we're very much focused on developing new visual spatial graphic and topographic languages from a new modern society based new technologists and the New Media at the time were Photography in particular very lightweight you know and easy to use cameras somewhat similar to contemporary mobile phones film so we have artists who are trying to make experimental abstract films already in the middle of 1910s uh you know Motors metals and so on uh in fact there is a kind of famous letter written by kriya who was also teaching Bauhaus to kaginsky they were both painters in the mistleto clear complaints of maholinas right who was one of the most technologically focused avant-garde artists and professors about house and clear said there is a constant talk of Motors mobiles light light projectors and those of us who are committed to painting to subtlety to poetry have a hard time and I think you can substitute this by any names and new technologies and some of us like myself would also complain um I also want to say let's velocity and I will say is a moderator but this idea of digital art or digital cultures when you're on guard is definitely not a new one uh you know I don't know who was the first one to propose it but in my own work I published an article in 1999 so 23 years ago called avant-garde software in the legal developed his ideas in my book language of the media uh so already this idea was present at least 23 years ago and as new technologists New Media Ai blockchain and so on appear in the scene right this question remains anyway that's all I have to say so let me briefly introduce the first panelist which is eurocraft so you go craft was born in Saint Petersburg in 1986 he lives and he works in Tokyo began in Berlin his interdisciplinary practice is informed by media Theory computer science critical design philosophy and art he is truly Global avant-gard this because he was educated in relational School New Moscow academic Academy Awards Vienna Central Saint Martins and London Tokyo giday and against local Institute in Moscow she's nominee of various prices including Lumen Innovation Kandinsky the humanism to the lower rate of multiple grants and Residences residences residences such as ntaa award and S Plus t plus art and in 2017 he was included in the new East 100 list of Eastern European people in projects shaping our world today by cardboard journals welcome Igor and I hope my panelists will do my best to stick to a time we greet which is around 50 minutes so we'll have some time at my end perhaps ask each other a couple of questions and definitely answer a question through audience thank you Igor um thank you Lev and hello hello everyone um I hope you can hear me okay um we didn't do much of a sound check but it seems it seems okay so um thank you so much for this introduction Lev um I guess as a practitioner in the first place I will start with showing my practice really um so to do so I have prepared a few slides that I'm just gonna share with you in a minute I'm going to show you a film a trailer to the film that I have been working to document this process everything so let's let's give it a try in December 2011 the newcolor.net was launched it is a website of an American company ACI specialized in the field of applied chemistry and based in Pennsylvania can you hear the sound site the company announces that starting from now are common concepts of color have become outdated due to their breakthrough invention of a previously undiscovered color that doesn't have anything in common with all the colors and shades that we know of here we are the life of Lehigh University taking a peek at the new color as you can just see already just from the even though it's still in the flask the camera is just not able to register this thing at all I'm gonna do a little test so we can take off the cap and uh pour it up you'll see what what I'm talking about and the thing about this stuff is that the camera is just not able to register the the non-rgb values at all here won't you come out let me see I'll tell you do you ever hear this this stuff it looks fantastic it's just like it's like nothing else that I've ever seen before it's just not registering at all the company claims that their team of leading expert chemists created a structure that reflects visible light waves with the unique vibrational frequencies however there's a big challenge with the applications in digital media it is because the displays of modern devices and the image sensors of digital cameras are yet incapable of displaying and reproducing the Magna Chrome due to their additive color model RGB this is the only reason why the color isn't being shown on the site I wanted to be created with us we want people to investigate his potential defining what sort of psychological impact it has we want to see it develop its own resonance and connotation history which is going to begin starting from now our common concepts of color have become outdated we have discovered a brand new color a color that doesn't have anything in common with all the colors that we're used to we have presented it to several people across the world and asked them to give their first impressions something you need to experience I mean a new color who would have thought this is beyond what I anticipated and it's thankful and it's beautiful what do you say when you've been introduced to something that you've never seen before this this is a color that's outside what we're what the human eye is used to seeing and and all I know is that from now on the Art and Design world and visual World in general is going to be completely revolutionized [Music] please forgive me I'm going to skip ahead here just just in order to respect the time and and you know and a little bit of other things that I wanted to talk about uh but basically you know like in this in this little um trailer um it ends and the film also ends with with the fact that you know this company has actually never existed but it but at the same time it became uh an incredible uh phenomena on the internet uh the amount of uh um emails I've started receiving on this on this fictional companies mailbox was absolutely uh incredible to me at the time uh I would receive emails from institutions and research centers from journalists and investors all of them inquiring about uh the new color and uh and how is it that it can be potentially uh seen or how is it going to be applied and you know involved in various projects such as this uh funny email uh that that you can see on the right hand side here uh which is which is from A lady called Ankita from from me from uh from the research lab based in Cambridge and which is inquiring to have a an interview call with me uh or a funny email like this one on the left hand side when uh I'm going I'm going to read it out loud when will this new color be online to see is it a green color is it true that Chris Anderson a professional basketball player has a tattoo of this color um um a few more so so I'd later published the book with this emails and have been showing this work as a film and and this kind of installation as as it had been seen in the first slides that I was showing um I'm going to skip skip a few more things and actually jump into um you know perhaps a little bit more actual things um so another work uh that I wanted to talk about today is called the URL Stone and and this is the work that was made in 2015 and I think uh if I was to do this work now it would have probably been a very different work in which uh in which I would use blockchain Technologies but I'm going to go I'm going to get to the blockchain Technologies in a bit uh with the more recent work uh but this this work the URL Stone the idea of this work was to make um so it began with me uh you know trying to uh trying to make this investigation about the longevity of media carriers and juxtaposing one against the other uh and taking uh you know perhaps one of the most um uh ancient ways of preserving knowledge such as this Roman plaque in which I crave the link uh engraved the link uh the link itself that had been engraved in the stone sort of leads to the uh Wikipedia uh listed the file of this very various image file of this very Stone but stored in the Wikimedia server and Wikimedia server is is a server where uh where all of the sort of Wikipedia comments is called is a project a side project by Wikipedia in which all the imagery and video data used to illustrate all the articles on Wikipedia Sports so the whole idea and the whole point of doing this was to uh thank you left was to uh was to really uh to kind of to juxtapose the uh you know a very old way of preserving knowledge against the you know at the time perhaps a very uh um sort of common and a very modern one to see which of the media carriers uh survived longer and uh okay given that I only have five times five minutes left as level signaling for me I'm going to really try and Skip ahead and talk about the very very new things and things that have been reactionary since since you know since our panel is such a reactionary one uh in a way I'm going to also kind of focus on this conversation so uh in March this year I had a solo show scheduled with my gallery in Berlin um and you know and as as we all remember uh vividly I guess um when the war broke out uh in late February I mean I don't like to say that the war broke out really in fact we have the word the word the word has been going on for years right uh but when this kind of official claim was made you know and this kind of full-scale invasion began uh you know my you know I obviously you know all my plans for this show uh were scrapped immediately I didn't feel like doing anything that was that was not related especially in a city like Berlin you know one which has uh was such a uh you know such a so many of this kind of very thick political layers and narratives to to the city itself and to its history so um so I've so I've began really um doing this kind of almost improvised rushed work in which uh which turned out into into a series of I think quite funny uh uh you know Hardware software and apps activism experiments and this is the one this is one of this works uh it's called decentralized embargo and the idea of this work was uh to um so it began with me uh looking into you know into what what was the kind of the major point of the conversation in Germany related to war especially in Berlin was the fact that you know Germany is heavily dependent on Russian gas as an infrastructural necessity and um having lived in Austria for long enough I knew quite well that you know that that the electricity Market uh in Central Europe uh Works in funny ways where you uh well to me as a Russian person it seems a very funny way um where you sign up a contract with a company that provides you with the electricity um and there are companies on the market that actually provide electricity by burning Russian gas so what they do is they they buy enormous amount of gas uh they they burn it in their facilities so the process of burning it spins the turbine which which you know eventually you know creates the electricity that is then supplied to to you know to the to the customers of the company so what we did is uh we set up this uh incredibly uh Advanced custom build server rig which is technically you know on the level of supercomputer because it has four uh higher stands Nvidia gpus and it was it is all liquid codes with this custom system that we have built and uh so yeah and so and so basically so it began with me I'm going to skip to some slides to uh to kind of to narrativize it better but but what I did is I asked the gallery um to you know to cancel the contract with their existing supplier and to begin the new contract with the company that is called Energy button Gutenberg it's a German company which is well known for for for buying Russian gas and being one of the largest uh sub companies of sort of clients of of Gus from Germania which is a sub-company to assist the company to to gaspro um uh and uh you know yeah which you can see on the left hand side here of this picture so we set up this machine there and and and again basically the mining process so we started mining ethereum cryptocurrency but process uh an incredibly um you know a process which is incredibly heavy on the electricity consumption uh by which ethereum tokens are being generated which can be then sold at the market price um and so uh and here on the right hand side of the screen you can see a screenshot of a tweets uh which is an official tweet uh by the government of Ukraine in which they uh in which they uh list their uh Bitcoin ethereum and and have a usdt addresses for cryptocurrency donations so what we did essentially is we just set up this machine to mine the ethereum by consuming and by you know by using electricity which is essentially being produced by burning Russian guests inside Germany uh to then immediately send all of the gains all of the crypto mining gains to the official address of of the government of Ukraine um by which sort of creating this uh you know this this twist and this uh you know distorted uh feedback loop of this kind of perverse economy in which you know on one hand Germany supports Ukraine with with with with heavy arms but at the same time continues to buy to buy gas which which obviously you know creates a lot of hypocrisy in the conversation in the public discourse around um and maybe very quickly um I'm just going to show a few more slides of one other piece that was made as part of this show which really is much more of an activist piece perhaps than uh than what I would usually do as an artist and here we have teamed up with the team of blockchain devs uh developers who who are actually doing a lot of interesting work within the ethereum foundation uh with which I have been working for the past cooperating for the past six years um and so with a group of people we started elaborating on the idea which I had um which kind of which was born through a series of conversations that we had with people at billing heads back in 2018 when um when I think it was 2018 when they received golden Mika at arsenicronica we had this idea of like you know we talk so much about you know you know validation of facts and um and you know this kind of things of Open Source investigation and houses that we can you know combat fake news and misinformation and you know this kind of conversation is especially relevant today given that we see how you know efficient you know this misinformation and propaganda techniques are [Music] um especially those used you know by by Russia but not only by Russia and we also see this kind of rays of uh telegram groups or telegram channels in which uh which have become this weird zones of gray reporting which are sort of news outlets but not really and they don't really hold any legal obligations to uh to to to to whatever they're reporting as compared to official media channels um and so the idea was to build this blockchain camera which would record the metadata of any uh any recorded material directly into the blockchain at the time of recording uh and then and it would also um take the the actual file uh of this uh of whatever image of image of footage file and um split into tiny chunks of data tiny chunks so like I'm talking like four kilobits chunks of data that would be stored in uh something that is called decentralized something that is called today decentralized storage so one of one of the famous examples of the centralized storage projects is file coin but perhaps a little more interesting one is is the one called swarm um which which has been born as part of the ethereum foundation Network so we worked with we partnered with these people in swarm and with other software developers to kind of look into how is it that we can actually do it you know if we have a camera that is connected to the internet uh nothing technically stops us from you know from building this very kind of you know building the software in a very simple way or maybe on a sophisticated way as well because there is you know different levels to complexity as to how good you can actually do it and how good can you actually make this data um to be accessible for for potential future open source investigation uh and here is uh we can see this close-up picture in which in which uh in which we see a camera that is built on the Raspberry Pi which is an open source uh uh a mini computer platform uh with with another open source Sony sensor attached to it uh to which we have this kind of series of lenses attached uh that can be technically uh used in such setup but it can also be an app which we have built and the project is called hashtags um uh and and really this is something that kind of we continue uh to be working on uh and building in conversation with uh people like uh forensic architecture uh and also a collective curatorial Collective and Berlin called tactical Tech um yeah left signaled me that I'm uh massively over time already so um so I thank you very much for for your time and I'm just going to provide the stage to the next speaker thank you uh thank you so much Igor and I'm sorry but I have to be in the position of some kind of Soviet sensor because like stifling with avant-garde artist and you are one of my favorite one of my mates you know that you are one of my most favorite artists working today and definitely one but two people working on technology so I wish I can listen to you for the next two hours but we have to move on um so I will introduce arseni July from next speaker and actually see also a couple of extra words of my own because I'm extremely interested in what he's going to say um sarcini was born in 1984 in Baroque news Russia and it's now based to Venus this project examine the legacy of avant-garde meteorology and Museum in the philosophy of Russian cosmism using the exhibition as a medium his Works have been shown at numerous prestigious venues including when Rubino Liverpool Leon Manifesto 13 and Yolanda trinale Center pompido Palos de toccio in Contemporary Art he also publishes articles in places like eflux and moscard magazine if he's also related Rheumatology I'm on guard physiology published by eflux University of Minnesota present 2015. and before I give him you know the microphone I want to say that normally we don't think of a museum as particularly about God plays and when we think about historical avant-garde let's say from impressionism to I don't know to conceptual art of 1960s when I can paint you see if you want Monero we don't think about Museum as a part of it and yet it was not many of you know but the first Museum of Modern Art and first means of contemporary Vanguard art was not Moma which opened in Europe 1999 but the Museum of pictorial or pintri culture which omput and Moscow in 1918 which was run by artists who who is who of Russians right Russian Jewish Ukrainian avant-garde Kandinsky you know my name is starting and so on and this artist came up with a completely new idea for Museum and in fact used new ideas of Contemporary Art is also a way to organize installations to this Museum not based necessarily history but based on a kind of visual contrast using principles of Modern Art if this is just one of many examples and I think maybe nobody has researched it as much as arseni so I welcome him to our stage thank you love for your introduction and thank you to organizers for having me here and to the audience I have one technical question shall I use my screen for my presentation and I'm going to speak today about digitalization as a means for mastering of time it is not uh talk about musicology but it's talk about Valerian muravio's project on mastering of time and Technical uh getting technical uh Resurrection and as soon as [Music] associated with cosmium with Russian customers this is my first public speech since the war in Ukraine has started uh I guess it's important to give very very short introduction to uh to the topic of Russian customizing because everything that is related to Russia Today is under suspicious and this is very understandable and I just want to say we have a series which is principally against War and Auntie uh anti-nationalistic Theory so the very term on Russian customisma appeared in 1970 as a kind of um umbrella tour for set of series um that appeared had appeared before the proletarian Revolution and um it was for the first time mentioned in philosophical encyclopedia in the footnote section uh dedicated to Vladimir bernardsky and Famous philosopher thinker and geologist and um and the logic of Soviet system of knowledge Soviet philosophy uh did not give any opportunity for other way of thinking nevertheless cosmism in some aspects quite close to Marxism and some important figures even bernaski himself of course uh used to work in Soviet Union and did a lot of things for development of knowledge there but in order to Mark the the place of birth and make strict definition between Soviet uh right uh philosophical ideas and something else which is uh related to the context but historically appeared earlier this word uh in the term uh appeared so it has nothing to do with the nationalism etc etc but it kind of product of all the context and then what is even more important the the the the main idea of cosmism is origin um uh immortality and immortality that would be really mortality and not mystical not uh speculative but real immortality by means of Technology and um uh then reaching technologies that would lead to a full resurrection and returning of all creatures that passed away in our world uh with a further resettlement of them in outer space as soon as possibly our planet is not enough for such a full-scale uh project and of course War um is uh the main medium for Destruction the main medium for this and of course it's uh it's one of the main uh enemy for uh cosmic's theoreticians and um uh farther so-called puzzle frosting children wrote many articles dedicated to possible redistribution of army budgets towards research and technologies that would lead to prolongation of life and to healing and Resurrection etc etc so I guess it's quite clear and we should keep this in mind speaking about is this particular things in relation to Russian customer the Russian context today um but I would like to speak about William muradioff who is um relatively unknown figure philosopher uh publicist and representative of um scientific branch of cosmism that I used to work in the late 19th century in the first quarter quarter of 20th century and um in a nutshell uh his main idea was to um use a contemporary for him technology or finding at least theoretical possibilities for real resurrection and he found it um with the help of assets Matrix Theory by your counter and [Music] bergson philosophy so uh I just mentioned this very shortly and then returned to his idea in the end um suggests uh full-scale digitalization of the world because our world in its Essence uh is based on uh digits on numbers and this is these numbers could be accumulated in different types of systems different types of sets and when you have the full number of sets you may uh a reconstruct different uh uh different moments in development in development of one or another system um this sounds uh for me close quite close to what we have in case of a possible speculation about digital immortality perhaps some of us know that today we have even apps for our phones that collect data traces of our life in order to build um after our death digital copy of um uh our digital activity and at least in this way in today is the kind of boat we may already think about digital immortality um but uh yeah I will return to this later and now I want to connect and connect more obvious ideas not only with the cosmism with cosmism uh the connection I guess it's uh clear uh but um I'd like to connect it with a second part of our topic uh which is avant-garde historical avant-garde and try to contextualize his ideas in things that possibly more understandable and more known in uh English-speaking world so last decade of his life muravio spent in central Institute of Labor run by Gustav and here we have a beautiful schema by Gustav cleats uh Clues his famous uh avant-garde artist and this camera describes principles for the scientific organization of Labor um and this we have some um I'm sorry some um some paragraphs on the on the activity of the Institute and the cover by Alexander augustev if you'd like you my read and I just shortly describe it in in shorter so Augustine was uh proletarian a poet very good very Innovative um but as many his colleagues uh among product called I will speak about this uh later in relation to baghdanov and arvato so private cool it was a part of historical avant-garde but let's say more democratic and based on um full uh rejection of previous Heritage or bruja's classes etc etc but as many colleagues of him after after the proletarian Revolution Gustaf decided uh to abandon classical institutional territory of Art and start doing something something particular something more related to real life production and in some senses The Institute of um labor was his main artistic project so what was the the idea the idea was in optimization of Labor actions that um a human body a human mind and condition of Labor should be fully automized and finally we may get a sort of set of cybers with the bodies as machines that can work together and liberate through this uh optimization through this optimization liberate proletaria so this is a uh in in a few words uh the idea but what was important for me that he was clear in in and typically in this transformation that institutional territory of art is not enough that we must transcend the borders between art and live art and the production and in this in this movement he of course was quite close to uh General impulse of cosmism and general impulse of marxists like for instance Barry sarvato who was as well part of a private good movement and worked together with essenstein and did a lot of very interesting things but here uh I'd like to mention his name because of productivism and the productivist movement uh that was movement of artists and constructivists uh who didn't want as I said themselves with art anymore but considering themselves as a kind of Engineers and the main idea was that art should be absorbed into into uh production and um as soon as I don't have enough time I will go further to the figure of baghdanov I need 20 minutes 22 of Maximum um no arseni you can't have 20 in two minutes because we panel eight ends in eight minutes and Joshua needs to have his 50 minutes and we discussed that I'm very sorry so that you don't have yeah you only have four minutes I'm sorry okay okay so back then I was just to explain the logic there but then what the figure that stands behind behind the the the goals the whole project of private good and in some senses uh uh gastric project as well because he was a the rotation of tectonics theory that was a kind of brought cybernetics based on the ideas of uh organizational management theory that finally should lead to a full unification of world and kind of Ideal organizational structure and in my opinion what moravio did he radicalized the ideas of baghdanov arvatov and Gustav he decided not only concentrate on the gesture of optimization of labor but do some sort of authorization of this optimization and consider each action in the world each uh event in the world is a kind of a fight against uh Carl's fight against uh entropy and and finally with uh at least in theory finally uh when we fully described and collect all the data and describe them in digits we will have the situation like in chemistry when we may repeat one or another action of course this is quite deterministic Theory and we understand that there is no set of sets that there is no Matrix of Matrix but um I guess we are moving towards uh uh this direction and this is very interesting and finally I just show you two pictures from uh my uh with the Collex project and the name of Institute for mastering of time it calls the piment and um we try to do some sort of speculative uh uh history of future art that based on this type of sets this type of Matrix but not um Optical as we have a narrow networks and Transformers but on conceptual gestures yeah so that's it thank you for um okay I think you're seeing it and I'm I'm I will apologize for rest of my life for cutting this short but that's the time we have and uh we didn't get the museum but I'm sure everybody is going to rush and read your articles because the stuff is just fascinating so Josh I also apologize I'm going to introduce every briefly so you'll have extra one minute to talk uh so I'm not going to be able to hold on buyer so Joshua sitarella is a new york-based artists and researcher uh like our previous speakers you know he exhibited in all kinds of wonderful places he has also taught at the school Visual Arts in New York and Rhode Island School of Design and served as advisor to Carnegie Mellon University and Tufts University his work is included in the collections of strategic Museum in Netherlands wood Museum of Art and U.S in other places
welcome Joshua you have a stage hi thanks everyone thank you Lev for that introduction I will be conscious of our time this evening uh so I'm just going to dive right into the presentation I'll share my screen in a moment here uh thanks to Wayne thanks to Anna for the intro at the top I'll introduce myself very briefly Joshua zarella I'm an artist and internet culture researcher I spent uh 10 years showing in galleries museums in the last few years I've taken an anthropological turn where I'm researching social media politicization gen Z memetic subcultures and beginning roughly let's say eight uh 2018 where I published the first book since then I've written two books on the topic I have a podcast that publishes multiple times uh a month I twitch stream every week I'm also the director of do not research which is an Arts organization based in New York but also very much online and we publish essays artworks videos internet culture research and all sorts of things so I'm going to share my screen here and then we'll start our presentation okay and that seems to be coming through all right this piece that we're looking at here is a self-portrait this is some of the work that I used to do I still conduct my art practice in conjunction with everything else but a little bit of a foundation so you can understand me as an artist and the particular type of perspective that I have on these topics this is a 12-foot Tableau constructed in Photoshop it's eight feet tall a life-size micro apartment of someone in a dystopian live work future that forecasts many of the worlds that some of these uh prepper libertarian anarcho-capitalist memetic subcultures like to speculate about the following piece here is based off of the group that we'll look at in a moment as I introduce the book but you see here in anticipation of climate collapse uh is someone who has been prepping inside of his Tesla which is hermetically sealed in a this is a real feature in the car actually it's called bioweapon defense mode where if you go through the smart panel you can turn on a HEPA filter HEPA which is built by a military subcontractor and like many things in this space it began kind of as a memetic exaggeration it was a very easy to propagate story and then in 2015 it was tested and you can no exaggeration literally survive a military-grade bio Weapon by staying inside of your car spooky but uh very real immensely detailed scenes based on the stories that these uh gen Z memetic subcultures like to tell to each other some degree is real some degrees fiction and and our job is to tease apart the two this is the second book that I wrote on the topic you may recognize this meme as the political Compass we have a spectrum of left to right authoritarian to libertarian uh rather simple diagram but we'll talk a bit more about this later in the presentation this book in particular is called 20 interviews and I think this is really some of the only material that's been published as a first-hand primary source I'm in this book I'm speaking to gen z mean posters between the ages of 15 to 20. uh this was this project happened about two years later so the median age of these subcultures has drifted upwards about two years more so in 2018 when I published the first book you would find people among the ages of uh 12 and 13 was not uncommon to to be posting in this space and so across this book there's 20 very lengthy interviews asking people to describe the world that they expect to unfold within their young lifetimes you know when they're about maybe the age of some of us on this panel what do they expect the world society government politics climate to be like and you have all sorts of perspectives from the ideological spectrum of ultra leftism paleoconservatism a narco primitivism which we'll talk about a bit later transhumanism which is uh maybe in relation to the Russian Cosmos that we just heard about uh pan constitutional monarchism really all over a very wide Overton window this is a screenshot from the first book actually and I want to show this just as a demonstration of the types of accounts that are participating in this discourse immensely immensely detailed uh need a political ideology as a form of Niche personal branding um and really people staking out contrarian positions that sometimes are very fascinating and sometimes are totally ridiculous and and made up but uh yeah quite uh quite in depth and and really wide Overton window in this space foreign I'm just going to read out a few of these to demonstrate how Niche these things actually get as an intro to this subculture we're about to talk about but you begin with a relatively popular well-known uh political affiliations such as Bernie Sanders or the green party or Jeremy corbyn and then they become increasingly Niche we see fully automated luxury communism mutualism trotskyism and then towards the bottom there's things that you may or may not have heard about such as facadism and John zerzan who is the intellectual Godfather of inarco primitivism which becomes very influential in this space Peaks around 2018. so this is the book this is the final version that was published in 2021 the first one came out in 2018 which was uh really only circulated to artists but then an anonymous meme poster got a hold of the book scanned it put it on Discord and my life in practice changed significantly ever since as all the people in the book then uh had literally annotated around the book to give their feedback about in my defense I got things I think very accurate but just people are uh salty about having their memes uh printed and and they want to give their version of the story but since then I conducted lengthy interviews with a lot of the people involved published books with them done numerous collaborations brought people for a panel at the new Museum uh we flew in some uh gen Z meme posters which I still maintain relationships with and uh yeah in general my I think depiction of the space is broadly agreed upon by most the people who are in it yeah I think as the last note that I'll say here is that uh being for most of my career the youngest person in the room trying to explain uh how social media and networked uh Communications and and whatnot are going to transform the world uh in this particular instance I'm now 35 years old I'm not sure if I'm mid-career but I'm no longer emerging and uh being in communication with these uh young meme posters is is quite a uh upends a lot of your assumptions so keep in mind their AHS compared to us and um I'll give a brief intro to the community so in this book in 2018 there's uh it plots The Arc of radicalization for people who are broadly interested in left-wing politics uh all sorts of different affiliations but I'm going to read a brief excerpt from the book here that I think encapsulates a lot of the ideology that becomes present at the time and in this search what I found were vibrant and surprisingly active communities of the post left anti-civilization eco-anarchist group scattered across various chat servers their style is witty and Cutthroat radically inclusive Multicultural lgbtq pro-diversity posting 24 hours a day at the speed of 4chan quote race class gender is a social construct and we must do away with all of it they reject traditional strategies of collective bargaining Target excuse me bargaining and Coalition building anything other than dismantling civilization is only a temporary stop gap which by Design cannot hold back the brutal efficiency of capitalist acceleration my time studying the space seems to indicate and correspond with a broader trend of young ideologues and activists losing faith with the goals of the old left better jobs higher wages equality or generally any meaningful Improvement to their material well-being our failure to present a compelling vision of the future is currently losing a younger generation to nihilism for the second year in a row life expectancy in the United States has dropped cue the post left it has to get worse before it gets worse so this is an ultra pessimistic demographic of gen Z meme posters uh mostly concerned with imminent climate collapse as the thing that uh eviscerates previous political assumptions from the earlier Generations so to give a bit more of a rigorous definition of what they think rather than a a meme version of it I'll just say here that in a traditional Marxist sense we would say that alienation arises with industrial capitalism from wage labor in the commodity form the post left as that subculture identified itself at the time they would argue that alienation begins even earlier with agrarian societies and labor specialization they're going to argue that our inability to be self-sufficient has alienated us from our own nature our environment and essentially domesticated the human being these are our very Anarchist politics that reach that reject industrial society their ideal formation of human civilization uh sorry I should say Society rather than civilization just to abide by their terminology what they prefer is a band of nomadic hunter-gatherers living off the Natural Abundance of the land they frequently talk about imminent ecological disaster and the necessity for degrowth so taken in context I think these are important things to remember the age group of the people uh who are are posting here and um yeah to take that into account for uh why they feel so alienated in the field of Technology so I'm going to condense my my argument here to I think three core claims that emerging mimetic subcultures are something between a folk art and possibly a new avant-garde and I think in general we've seen the avant-garde has disappeared from capital a art and this corresponds to a larger political history of the 20th century that is complex but I think important to consider in this context so number one is I think very simple is that there's a shared aesthetic vocabulary there's a unified set of signs and characters shared across political divisions actually so to say that these are left-wing or right-wing movements it's actually the competition for what those symbols mean in the public consensus that incentivizes different groups to try and engage in semiotic or memetic Warfare to associate this particular symbol with this particular group so a fantastic example of this the classic is that Pepe synonymous with 4chan and far-right politics then later appears in the Hong Kong protests as an anti-authoritarian symbol so my claim would be that I think this at least forms a tradition of image making uh perhaps it's some type of an artistic movement but the shared aesthetic vocabulary I think is is essential to considering this new emergent movement on social media the second is I think that a very simple definition of the avant-garde but it's uh important to return to these first principles every now and then is that they press against the barriers of the medium or the technology itself there's an intentional intentional overuse of the tools that then forces you to look at all other works in that medium in a different way so while Instagram may appear to be advertising and influencers and brunch and this type of like brand building meme culture looks like this and it's a hideous and they're they're deep fried and they're very rough and they um yeah they force you to break the diegetic space of advertising that exists simultaneous in this in this news feed rather straightforward but important uh to emphasize the the Strategic overuse of the tool cranking up the the contrast and things like this uh the third which is I think essential um is that Meme culture has become a space for radical politics and this is contrast to a period of relative institutional rigidity particularly in the united in the United States and radical memes really pick up during the time of the online culture wars as art institutions drift away from uh transgression and and towards a relative upkeep of the status quo in the case of the um uh the United States there's a kind of populist drift to the right and to the left and we saw Legacy Media and institutions stake out a position in a very untenable brittle Center that seemed to be breaking apart so what you see crop up in meme cultures is something we call ideologies which is an internet slang term we use to describe this somewhat arbitrary pairing of prefixes and suffixes to generate complex ideological labels and some of the things you have here like libertarian monarchism individualist transhumanist and Narco capitalism them islamo National National bolshevism Catholic transhumanist distributism all sorts of Niche ideologies retrofitted his personal branding that uh crop up in these peculiar corners of the internet this is part of an ongoing series that I think there's maybe uh four four sets of this now up to 32 Flags but there are an infinite infinite number of these um yeah so so to underline this point uh we're seeing a flourishing of um the ideologies appear on the internet while cultural institutions have drifted back to aligning themselves with a center consensus that seems to be increasingly unpopular so uh the the question that I um I want to pose I think and maybe I I have a bit more but I want to leave time for our discussions and uh and panels uh afterwards but um yeah if cultural institutions have become relatively more conservative have we seen uh maybe a contemporary version of this avant-garde drift to extra institutional spaces which would be the platforms and then what is our responsibility as aesthetic experts as people who want to canonize contextualize and understand these spaces better uh yeah what what is our um obligation and what should we be studying writing about and and Etc but I think to be conscious of the time maybe I'll allow our moderator to come back and uh I'm happy to jump in with some other stuff later on if that's uh that's convenient yeah Joshua thank you so much it's fascinating so I think sadly I think we have to end in about 15 seconds right Anna or do we have a few minutes yes um so actually I'm not sure that we have time so we need to like finish this yeah yeah which I'm saying okay so we have to finish okay so um you know I personally is going to spend time you know reading some of your Publications or wonderful presenters and what I got out of today panel is that I'm not sure digital art is avant-garde but we have a sniff figure of artists and researcher right artists who use art as they can research practice doing research publishing books and uh doing work which is as serious right as academic researchers but having all resources of Art and this is also maybe not completely new but it becomes stronger and I think all the three people here are amazing amazing fascinating deep profound representatives of this new artists research technology political issues let's say avant-garde and sadly we have to add you know many more conferences but we live in the age of Internet so you can definitely reach right online to each to a particular artists and asking questions directly and thank you guys so much again thank you thanks everybody also thank you thanks to everyone uh right now I'm trying to understand do we have any questions from our listeners but uh before I will get the answer I'd like to mention to our listeners visitors that uh we're gonna help the next panel which is named intervention resistance digital art and activism it is going to be after a short break which gonna last 15 minutes so don't uh get offline stay with us just mute if you wanna some silence and if you quit just use the same link to enter the conference again um oh yeah uh I got the information that we have 10 minutes for questions if we have any but I'm not sure which questions do we have and and no does anyone know foreign I haven't seen any uh questions on YouTube but maybe we can use maybe we can use uh you know this if we have like five or seven minutes maybe you know uh you know people because you know everybody had so much more to say maybe some some if any of our presenters you know want you know want to add something I think it will be fair it will be fair I think yeah so uh Igor Joshua arseni if you kind of want to you know if you want to add something or maybe ask each other questions I already talked too much so I will shut up so I was told we do have like seven minutes I I could Advance a question to the panel maybe helps to spark things but I found in uh and preparing for this lecture I was trying to condense to like three very tight points and the fourth thing that I found myself uh thinking about which is a bit more abstract is that um there seems to be a sense of the avant-garde that is beyond just the tools themselves and uh technological experimentation and what have you but there's an implication that um these artists are are preoccupied or or desire to advance a specific vision of society that there's maybe it's not explicitly political but it's utopian or it's it's a new type of um imaginary for the future society that seems to be a core uh portion of it so I wonder um maybe if that Sparks anything for people if that feels like uh too loose of a suggestion but um yeah being concerned with this future particularly in a moment given um the climate scenario uh we are right for a return of the avantar card and now we agree we can't show you we can show you uh we have uh already took two questions you don't want something to you okay we can't we can't show you for some reason I'm sorry okay well we're trying okay we could take the first question here that's uh just if I'll read it for the chat I think this is for me so I'm gonna jump on to it uh is the nihilism pre-existing or maybe spawned in social media because of the extreme focus on predominantly negative emotion as fuel and is this leaking into the real world so I think this is referring to um uh you know optimizing social media for continued use on the platform and that uh Spurs a lot of sensation and outrage and divisive ideas and uh yeah yeah um so that tends politics in a certain way where people get into flame Wars and and what have you um I I think there's a certain portion of that but that is uh broadly I think everyone's experience is a little bit negative we're exhausted in the news cycle um but I think in in relation to um the the younger demographic I'm inclined to be sympathetic that they have this very negative outlook and I'm not sure that it behooves us to to um to to backpedal or to sugarcoat some of the political or climate realities that they're going to be facing in say 20 years or 40 years time because uh in some cases the the worth calibrations are are not totally inaccurate you know we don't have to be uh doomsayers about it but it is important to confront it's a serious matter um yeah and I would say that uh this is essentially the purpose of media in general that narratives that are not represented in mainstream institutions then uh crop up as alternative Publications periodicals newsletters for uh political dissidents and so on and so forth and this is a necessary part of producing the discourse that if there's a consensus lacking amongst the experts then people move to extra institutional spaces to uh to propagate different narratives foreign I
2022-12-07