Workshop 2
Hybrid Pop-Up Streaming Studio: THE VOID 🤳🎬🌀🕳
Join us in THE VOID workshop with media experts Tommaso Campagna & Jordi Viader Guerrero and use a pop-up streaming studio as an opportunity to reflect on and present your own work as a form of tactical media.
In the workshop we will:
1️⃣ Learn tech behind THE VOID format
2️⃣ Use the pop-up studio to host a live event with peers
📅 8 November 2024, 10 AM–4 PM
🏛️ Mostovna, Solkan
The workshop is free of charge! Registration required. 👇
Workshop 1
FIRST WORKSHOP ALREADY IN OCTOBER!! 👀💻
Beyond the 69th Call of Duty sequel, there’s a world of unique games – from ancient classics and queer culture to homemade creations and games even your mom would enjoy!
Join us in Controllers, the practical game making and design workshop led by media artist and game designer Brin Žvan, where we will explore the history of games and the basics of creating your own games using tools like Downpour and Bitsy.
📅 7, 9, 21 and 25 October 2024, 2–5 PM
🏛️ School of Arts, University of Nova Gorica
The workshop is free of charge and open to all gaming enthusiasts and beginners!
Registration required. 👇
Launching today
Launching today! 🚀
The new podcast series The Future Behind Us conceived and hosted by curator, art critic and blogger Régine Debatty will ask 10 established contemporary artists to talk to us about the technological, ethical and legal challenges they have encountered in developing their projects. With them we will explore and understand how the meaning of their works has changed over the last 5, 10 or even 20 years.
In this adventure, we will discover the works, research, reflections (and even confessions) of Trevor Paglen, Nora Al-Badri, UBERMORGEN, Jill Magid, Paolo Pedercini from Molleindustria, Evan Roth, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Sanela Jahić, Pinar Yoldas and Maja Smrekar.
The episodes drop every Friday until 8 November! BUCKLE UP!
DJ final form
dj final form’s set is designed to add some sonic flavour to the interactive lecture Intensity and the Conditions of Expression, featuring immersive soundscapes that take inspiration from various corners of the digital underground and a blend of post-internet aesthetics at the intersection of experimental and ambient electronic music.
Brace yourselves!
Brace yourselves!
PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay, the 25th edition of the international festival of contemporary art practices Pixxelpoint is coming.
✨ Explore the site and SAVE THE DATES ✨
The #core of the festival is from 7 to 9 November 2024. On those days we will all be there, artists and organisers alike. The exhibition however runs until 17 November, so you have no excuses!
The warm-up activities start as early as 6 September with the first of 10 episodes of the podcast series The Future Behind Us conceived and hosted by the one ando only Régine Debatty, which will keep you company until the festival opens.
Here, in the NEWS section of the site, we will keep you informed of all the news, progress, implementations and possible changes in the programme. So bookmark it and stay tuned for more!
The PXXP•XXV team 🙌
Intensity and the Conditions of Expression
This joint lecture attempts to show the relationship between culture and cultural expressions, and the way in which this relationship can be understood in an increasingly concrete and generative way.
Each cultural expression depends, among other things, on the given conditions of expression, which contain various relations to the totality of all possible expressions so conditioned. The history of this totality is, therefore, the history of the conditions themselves. This lecture examines recent changes in the conditions of expression and explores what these changes reveal about culture in the age of the information and computational revolution. In so far as intensities are tied to expressions, retroactively or otherwise, such a method of tracking changes in the conditions of expressivity can help us understand the way in which cultural production is intensified today. As conditions become more concrete, we can also use them as lenses to map intensities.
This interactive lecture gives examples to directly demonstrate how this method works.
Part 1: Intensity
With: Maks Valenčič
The first part of the lecture deals with cultural production as intensive production in the Deleuzian sense. The fact that the reading of internet content is increasingly taking place at the meta-level (Caroline Busta) shows that any cultural expression can be further decyphered and that it’s this kind of deciphering that gives insight into not only the nature of the content and where it’s situated (Patricia Reed), but into its intensity as well.
In the age of social media, cultural production increasingly autonomously (or automatically) discovers and produces a wide variety of intensities, thus revealing patterns that can be recorded on the meta-level. Each pattern is a compression of intensities, and we gain insight into the intensities by looking at the ways in which they are (re)co(r)ded or systematised. By “reading” cultural expressions at the meta-level, we can infer the capacities of cultural production and understand the nature of intensities that the current level of cultural production is able to record and produce. The intensive production of culture thus becomes open to further inspection and intensification.
Interlude
With: dj final form
Part 2: Expressivity
With: Jan Kostanjevec
The second part of the lecture relates abstraction with freedom of (possibile) thought, expression and engineering by way of examples from voting and auction theory. To get to the idea of expressivity as such, the lecture makes use of lessons from computability theory. This then leads to the idea of a more general duality between classification and generation of expressions, and to questions about the expressive capacities of classification systems and the models of conceptualities themselves – classical systems such as lists, libraries, elements of art history and so on; probabilistic classification systems such as spam filters or prisoner and social media user models; and lastly the idea of vector embedding used in LLMs.
This perspective enables the exploration of failure modes of specific classification systems; the question whether the limits of expressive capacity limit intensities as such; and what can be learned from the progression of expressiveness about the progression of actual expressions. And as expressivity itself becomes subject to engineering (at least by the time of the onset of LLMs) we might expect it to become a medium of expression itself.
Eroding Boundaries: Temporal and Spatial Decay in a World Beyond Repair
This two-part programme delves into the transformative potential of spatial augmentation and temporal decay. Part panel discussions and part news broadcast, the programme traverses the intertwined landscapes of economic speculation, infrastructural shifts and the fluidity of media time. Along the way, new narratives emerge, challenging and reshaping our understanding of technological progress and control. As artists dismantle and reconstruct new worlds, the decay of the present moment diffracts into the future, illuminating new temporalities and spaces of being, as we accelerate into the void.
Part 1: Space
With: Room69, OMSK Social Club, Vid Koprivšek
Erratic investments and waves of divestment shape the possibilities available to millions, carving out the boundaries of our lived realities. In this temporal-spatial fold of the metaverse, the aspirational reshaping of cyber worlds can profoundly influence our material realities.
This panel explores the potential of spatial and architectural augmentation across both physical and digital realms, focusing on techno-social infrastructures as bridges between the tangible and the speculative. If infrastructure is ideology made durable, then transforming it through hybrid spatial interventions offers us a glimpse into alternative infrastructural imaginaries, rather than mourning the loss of control. The panel engages with these unfolding narratives in real time, examining digital artefacts from the future, transmuted from their past to our present through glitching portals.
Interlude
With: msn gf
Part 2: Time
With: Alberto Harres, Dorijan Šiško, Mario Santamaría
As media artefacts shape our perceptions of time, they unravel it into stretches, citations and reversals, challenging conventional notions of production and decay. Decay, far from mere degradation, becomes a force of creation, resisting the grasp of predictive, extractivist logics. It disrupts the linear march of progress, subverting traditional ideas of innovation.
The discussion examines the interplay between technological decay and media time. Embracing decay as a fundamental aspect of our media existence, the panel explores the potential of technological decay and transformation, navigating the space between what has passed and what is yet to come. Together, we open pathways to alternative temporal currents, ushering in new flows of being and time.
THE VOID
Hybrid Pop-Up Streaming Studio
In this workshop, media researchers Tommaso Campagna and Jordi Viader Guerrero invite participants to use a pop-up streaming studio as an opportunity to reflect on and present their own work as a form of tactical media. Participants tackle questions like: How does your media production have social and material effects in the world? How can your online media production be an occasion to create offline encounters and, vice versa, to produce new ways of inhabiting a stagnating online media landscape? The first part of the workshop introduces participants to THE VOID format and aspects relating to its technical setup. In the second part, the pop-up studio becomes the stage for a live peer-hosted event in which participants discuss their own practice in relation to the concept of tactical media.
Controllers
A Game Making & Design Workshop
Somewhere beyond the 69th Call of Duty sequel lies a world of interesting games: games that have been played since dice were invented, games about queer culture, games that we make for friends as gifts, and games that your mom would play. In this workshop, led by media artist and game designer Brin Žvan, these are the kinds of games we are thinking of. The first day delves into the folk history of games, showing how minor changes to their mechanics can change their contexts and the ways we see them, and we create a board game. On the next day, we use the tool Downpour to create small exploration-based games, play with basic interactions and help us think of games in terms of their most essential units. Finally, on the third and fourth days we focus on Bitsy, a simple game-making tool which, despite its limitations, allows us to expand these boundaries while learning the basics of logic programming.
The results of this workshop are featured in the exhibition at the School of Arts, University of Nova Gorica.
msn gf
msn gf is a DJ and producer from Ljubljana and member of the DJ collectives Ustanova and Nimaš Izbire, who despite a light-hearted approach to genres remains loyal to the bitter-sweet drama of long-forgotten pop ballads spiced up with sharp contemporary production. One of the most unique local electronic music producers of the new generation, msn gf draws on both the current club trends as well as the rich legacy of Slovene pop released in the last 30 years. In live sets, where her skills as a producer really shine through, she opts for a hyperemotional blend of original and local songs on the verge of either becoming popular or falling into obscurity.
Zevin
Zevin is a hyper-talented Slovene singer, visual artist, DIY master and innovative TikToker, considered one of the most unique representatives of contemporary pop in the Balkans. Ever since her first single “Kroz Okean” reverberated throughout the region, she has gradually shaped her own vision of witty and insightful pop, oriented towards the future. She and producer Dvided21, who provides the hard-hitting tracks, create in synergy and find inspiration in various trendy aesthetics (trap, house, hyperpop). Zevin’s unconventional hits, built around modern timbres and autotuned vocals, are accompanied by exceptionally witty texts in Serbo-Croatian, steeped in humour and self-irony.
Zvèn
Zvèn is a music enthusiast, DJ, record collector and member of the Cosmic Sex collective, who in the last few years has established himself as one of the most promising representatives of the young generation of Slovene DJs. His selections branch out into various genres in search of common ground between old and new aesthetics, building bridges between psychedelia and euphoria. In addition to club music, he is also passionate about the regional musical heritage, especially ex-Yu and East European jazz, folk and rock. His dynamic sets are based on a colourful selection of dance music, from the instrumental masterpieces of yesterday to the club bangers of tomorrow.
Jimmy Barka Experience
The members of Ljubljana’s proficient trio, DJs Bakto and Borka and drummer Marjan Stanić, are all veterans of the local scene who for decades have been digging through the rich legacy of soul, funk, rock, jazz, blues, folk, African psychedelia and Greek nostalgia, as well as ex-Yu and Brazilian popular music. Their artistic expression is rooted in hip hop culture and based on the manipulation and recontextualisation of various samples, which they glue together using record players into exciting “collage compositions”, underpinned by Stanić’s breakneck rhythms. In addition to famous songs from their discography, the core of their concert repertoire is the recent album Jusqu’ici tout va bien (rx:tx, 2024), an intercontinental dance treat that takes us from the beaches of Brazil, mangroves of the Caribbean and banks of the Mississippi to the coasts of North Africa, Greek islands and the mountains of the Balkans.
Neophyte – an Industrial Opera of Plants and Pioneers
Neophyte – an Industrial Opera of Plants and Pioneers is a multimedia installation by Lex Rütten & Jana Kerima Stolzer. The protagonists are wild plants, settled around former industrial places, that convey their migratory history through songs, developing a narrative about environments in a constant flux of growth and decay.
In degraded ecosystems, mainly plants not native to the region, called neophytes, can be found. As the pioneers who built the mines and factories on undeveloped land, now the plants, fungi, mosses and lichens are travelling and reclaiming new, often inhospitable places, displacing the native species along the way due to their robustness.
The multimedia opera allows these hardy botanical pioneers to take centre stage and tell their story of advancement, invasion and colonisation, but also of their future potential for the renaturalisation of these industrial wastelands.
Swarm Entry
The responsive installation Swarm Entry by Vid Koprivšek connects the exhibition space and the simulation environment into an expanded interactive site stretching out between the virtual and the physical.
The networked logic of the setup entangles plastic objects with de-centred screens, between which a swarm of biomorph virtual agents is moving. The simulation of collective motion, which stems from the context of special effects and video games, animates the sculptural interfaces, and the installation also features a real-time responsive component that translates the conditions in the physical space into what happens in the simulated environment – which in turn affects the movement in the exhibition space. Swarm Entry thereby creates a situation where sculptures and technological objects intervene performatively into each other’s logic and unity. Situated at the intersection of the physical and the digital environment, it bypasses the established interfaces in art and videogames, as interaction becomes collective, emergent and part of a continuous process of becoming and disintegrating.
Visions from The Fall
Mario Santamaria’s project Visions from The Fall explores the fungibility and substance of territories and bodies in a performative entanglement of virtual and physical space.
The video documents a digital avatar during an impossible fall from one of the most distant galaxies ever observed. Viewing the avatar’s billions-of-years-long fall through the virtual space of the Voxels metaverse, we see only abstract patterns, as the glitchy moving image faces us and its technological substrate with the limit of representation.
In the gallery space, the installation physically reproduces the perimeters of a virtual plot of land for sale at its actual coordinates in the Next Earth metaverse, indicating the vectorial regime underlying both lands. Physically doubling a space that – while virtual – is closely and materially entangled with the existing world is completed with a liquid cooling system, hinting at the invisible decentralised infrastructures that executed the cyber poetic endeavour.
The presentation of the project was supported by a grant from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).
T(( ))mb
T(( ))mb by OMSK Social Club is a decentralised and non-hierarchical entity for embodied research of how language shapes the world we know and inhabit. Its speculative explorations take place in the form of Real Game Play (RGP) – an immersive process that blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality through collective worlding.
The T(( ))mb RGP scenario is based on Project Cassandra (2017–2020), an actual task force funded by the German Ministry of Defence to research literature as a predictive technology and a medium for early crisis detection, which has since been discontinued. In 2023, T(( ))mb departed from this actuality to performatively intersect the productive feedback loops between language and reality.The installation leads visitors along a winding path of asemic inscriptions and artefacts that recount the events that took place, their setting and characters. Its final immersive outpost further entangles reality and fiction through filmic storytelling of T(( ))mb’s linguistic developments, nurturing new, yet uncharted, territories.
T(( ))mb – commissioned by Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna 2023
A Fungus Among Us
In the project A Fungus Among Us, Maja Bojanić uses fiction to explore the foundations of the institution of art. The installation allows us to listen in on a lecture on “post-restoration”, a notion taught within the university program of Advanced Post-Conservation Studies in 2224. It builds upon alternative heritage policies stemming from the discovery of The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Volume Two in the DobraVaga Gallery in 2016, and its subsequent erasure in 2023.
The seminar resonates through a part of the supposedly closed-off piping system once connecting all repositories of art. If we listen carefully, we can hear the museums referred to as Departments of Gathering Decay and follow the legacy of a site where the pioneering explorations by the Institute for Mold Preservation once took place and which is now carefully protected and overgrown by mold. The piping leaks a future in which objects serve as supports for living agents and exhaustive restoration is seen as detrimental since decay became vital for deep-rooted preservation.
Tensor Edge Recon
Matej Mihevc’s project Tensor Edge Recon explores the potentials of hyper-streamlined divergent cultural feedback cycles to unleash emergent modes of production released from existing material and semantic substrate. The video game is set in the fallout of a yet unexplained event in which a renegade AI has empowered the processes of cultural production to manipulate physical matter. In its wake, only curious artefacts scattered throughout once-active hotspots of self-organising cultural production remain.
The players take on the role of a researcher who ventures into these zones to scavenge and document the individual artefacts with a specialised interface in a futile attempt at understanding their genesis. The installation extends this lore with select replicas of fictional items used by the game’s protagonist. The material remnants adorned with asemic writing, peculiar schematics and patterns further unfold the foreign logic of the autonomous cultural production that once roamed the terrain.
The Core
The Core by Dorijan Šiško is a video game in which players navigate through an abstract labyrinth that articulates various notions relating to the visual imaginaries of the future. The players enter the game through a speculative interface resembling a crystal ball, with which they try to steer their way to the looming core of the maze. The path presents the players with crossroads that lead to different accelerationist routes towards divergent visions of potential worlds to come.
Grappling the uncertainty of what lies ahead, players must make choices that determine the course of their journey as alternative paths emerge to create new trajectories to futurity predicated on past decisions. When, and if, the players finally reach the core, the idea of a pursued future becomes demystified, unveiled as a mere representation awaiting the conclusion of an imaginary journey.
Chora
With her project Chora, artist Gaia Radić opens a new chapter in the body of virtual worlds that perform as perceptual narratives. Emerging from an undifferentiated possibility, they materialise in contact with physical spaces and are enacted through the bodies that pass through them.
In the installation, the viewer becomes a host for the narrative developing in the virtual space. As an autonomous agent, the work bends the exhibition space, encapsulating the viewer at once inside and outside of its expanse in a timeless vacuum. The viewer’s perceptual organs are used as a channel for the space to look back on itself and take its form. As soon as self-formulation begins, eventual decay follows. The process again and again concludes in transformation, as the portal closes and reopens with the arrival of a new body.
lost to the digital ether
In lost to the digital ether, the collective room69 squats the fluid cyberspace to explore archiving as a process of loss and cooperative speculation that stretches across multiple worlds.
Using the infrastructure of Google Maps as the setting of a virtual repository of their work, the collective designed a liminal space for collecting and exhibiting artworks. In the heterochronic realm, these can be perpetually reinvented, forgotten or rediscovered unwittingly by online entities anywhere in the world.
The ever-expanding misty terrain of the digital archive materialises in the gallery as a hybrid installation. Bypassing the institutional and formal limitations of the white cube while leaning into its openness for fiction, lost to the digital ether uses the exhibition space as a temporary physical anchor and entry point into its history and development, blurring the lines between construction and excavation.
Arche-Scriptures
In Arche-Scriptures, artist Alberto Harres uses locally sourced clay to materially reconfigure particular locations. The site-specific installation presents a fictional excavation site where an automated machine deciphers intricate markings on an anachronistic digital storage medium. The inscribed ceramic tablet acts as a speculative gateway into the temporal branching of the site, actualised through machine interpretation. The perpetual acts of decoding activate the ancestro-futuristic artefact as a time-travelling and reality-producing protocol for unearthing new yet inexistent grounds.