About

Beside Switzerland’s museum collections, there are major public art collections that are little known and hardly noticed by the general public. This includes the collection of Swiss Post, which goes back to the federal ordinance for the elevation and promotion of Swiss art, which has existed for approximately 100 years. Swiss Post in cooperation with Swiss museums is using this longstanding forwarding tradition as an occasion for giving insight into their comprehensive collecting activity. The Art Museum Graubünden is showing a selection of the Post’s works and presenting them in dialogue with the museum’s collection and with key loans. In doing so the focus is not only on the Post’s commitment to art but also on crucial notions concerning communication in a world that has become exceedingly fragile.

How is reality shaped by data? How can the act of purposely creating data provide agency within data-driven systems? Does the act of purposely creating data open a space for action in a data-driven society where opting out is no longer an option? Where in such a data-driven society is the space for our intervention in the world?

For the 15th edition of Aksioma’s Tactics & Practice programme, !Mediengruppe Bitnik are guest curating the programme «(Un)real Data – Real Effects». The programme explores how the ambiguous quality of data can be used as a tool to influence real world outcomes. It will be centred around three exhibitions, a publication, a conference and a series of podcasts, talks and workshops,taking place from February to June 2024 at Aksioma Project Space and Kino Šiška in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

With digital technologies permeating every aspect of our lives, reality increasingly becomes a predictable entity in which everything and everyone evaporates into information. The flood of information empties itself into the World Wide Web’s image flood that drowns us on the displays of our end devices, living a seemingly uncontrollable life of its own.

Whether smart phone, smart home, social software, bonus, navigation, traffic, or surveillance system – they have one thing in common: All of them collect personal information in the form of Big Data. The private sphere is thus dissolving and becoming transparent, while the processes triggered by these technologies remain opaque and hidden.

The artists gathered in the exhibition Decoding the Black Box shed light on the processes that take place in our end devices, the black boxes. They reveal the workings of digital technologies and at the same time visualise the effects they have on our perception of reality. While the capitalist and power-political structures of the internet and the virtual image economy are made transparent, the artists envision counter-designs for a decentralized and democratic use of technologies.

Taming of Chance
by Olsen with the !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Evan Roth & Eryk Salvaggio
As part of the accompanying program for the exhibition "Decoding the Black Box"
12:00 – 18:00

Taming of Chance explores spaces of possibility in binary architecture. Kits with modified binary cubes serve as a starting point for interactive and participatory experiences. The playfulness goes back to the game metaphor of the dice, but also to the game of chance. We are faced with a paradox here, because a computer cannot emulate real chance due to its architecture, as algorithms, tamed by reduction and order, cannot leave anything to chance. On the other hand, we are constantly guided and controlled by algorithms. The endeavor to undermine this determinism in a playful or artistic way can be found, for example, in the approaches of the Situationists (e.g. Guy Debord’s buzzing around in Paris with a street map of London) or in Fluxus (e.g. a negation/abolition of chance in Robert Filliou’s work Eins. Un. One.), which took the game with chance to the extreme. The dice boxes were distributed by Olsen to the !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Evan Roth and Eryk Salvaggio so that they could further develop the content. The rules created in the process and the way in which the contents of the box are to be handled are presented by those involved.

12 – 1:30 p.m.
Evan Roth
Suggested Sharing (EN)
Evan Roth will host an informal sharing session where participants use rolls of artist Olsen Wolf’s binary dice to identify and (optionally) share suggested content from online services such as Instagram, Youtube, Netflix and Spotify. He will then archive the resulting shared media and use it as source material to produce an algorithmically generated documentation video. The session is intended as a playful way of getting to know each other through chance and media.

1:30 – 2:30 p.m.
Lunch Break

2:30 – 3:15 p.m.
Eryk Salvaggio
Reverse Diffusion: Chance x Prediction, Part I. (EN)
Eryk Salvaggio will present his newly developed project Reverse Diffusion: Chance x Prediction. Current AIs for image generation work with diffusion models that assemble pixels into images according to the constraints of algorithmic predictions. In his project Reverse Diffusion: Chance x Prediction, Eryk Salvaggio presents an alternative version of generativity which is anchored in an essay by Fluxus performer George Brecht and focuses on chance. In this presentation, Salvaggio will discuss these ideas of chance in the presentation of a new work which reimagines the AI as a chance operation, producing endless possibility through abstraction, rather than an engine for the computational constraint of possibility.

3:30 – 5 p.m.
!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Non Guided Tour (Taming of Chance Edition) (GER)
The !Mediengruppe Bitnik takes participants on a Non Guided Tour (Taming of Chance Edition), a digital reinterpretation of the performance piece Sanitas#79 by Tomas Schmit from 1962. In Sanitas#79, Schmit asked the audience to board a bus to be dropped off at a random location after 100 km. The !Mediengruppe Bitnik takes up this experience of losing one’s bearings in a physical location by transferring the Fluxus work into a web-based game.

The players of Non Guided Tour (Taming of Chance Edition) find themselves on a virtual map, exactly 100 km away from the Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen. They must find their way back to the gallery using rudimentary clues such as blurry road signs, scenic features and architectural landmarks. The game clearly references the structure of online games such as MapCrunch and GeoGuessr, but deliberately contradicts their logic, which is based on score and speed. Non Guided Tour invites participants to take a walk through digital space and playfully addresses the role of the audience and the dimension of time while responding to today’s increasingly privatized and panoptic digital space.

17:10 – 17:40 p.m.
Eryk Salvaggio
Reverse Diffusion: Chance x Prediction, Part II. (EN)

17:40 – 18:00 p.m.
Conclusion

Artist Talk
19:00

Reviews shape the perception and experience of places, services and products, influencing our decisions on everything from restaurants and doctors to the products we buy and the places we visit. One of the most widely used evaluation schemes online is the five-star system where one stands for “very bad” and five for “very good”. But how did we end up in a world where everything is rated and evaluated according to personal taste? And where do we go from here?

OPENING:
03/04/2024 19:00

With One Star Review Tour, Selena Savić, Gordan Savičić and !Mediengruppe Bitnik look at how rating systems shape the perception and experience of a place. In contemporary data-driven environments, credit scores, social influence rankings and product/service reviews dictate choices regarding, for example, selecting a doctor, shopping or dining out. One of the most widely used evaluation schemes online is the five-star system. Its popularity stems from the ease of judgement it proposes, its implied clarity (five is better than one) and the way it transforms personal opinions into objective values by way of aggregation (individual reasoning doesn’t matter if many people come to the same conclusion).

While the reviews are often nothing more than personal opinions, their cumulative values have become a driving force for the service and tourist industries as well as many other sectors of the economy. For businesses, reviews have become a feared measure of success or bust.

Not all sites, services or products can align with conventional consumer requirements. To obtain the five-star rating, they must be easy to consume, readily available, impressive, fun or “instagrammable”. And while privately owned companies can fight bad online reviews, public spaces can hardly talk back or ask Google to leave them alone.

The exhibition at Aksioma explores what it means when places we love are scrutinised and publicly rated: it investigates the politics of rating systems and engages with the power of reviews to produce real effects.

15:00 – 18:00

The artists scraped thousands of one-star reviews of public sites in Ljubljana. Taking the scraped data as a starting point, the workshop will look at the materiality of this data, its specific textures and aesthetics. What types of views of the city can we generate from the data? How can we approach the data in interesting ways? Can we use the scraped data as a form of critique and artistic research?

What other participants say:

AMAZING!!! DON’T MISS!! THE BEST WORKSHOP BY BRILLIANT ARTISTS! (5/5)

This workshop will be such an amazing experience and give everyone a deep insight into the data that the artists used for the show at Aksioma. They scraped sooo many 1 star reviews! Like thousands! And most are hilarious! The artists will do an amazing job of explaining their process in great detail. And they’ll share links to other helpful resources for artists who want to work with data. The artists will be so knowledgeable it will truly blow your mind. Also just really nice people!!! You will learn a lot! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

THE WORST WORKSHOP EVER. TOTALLY SKIP IT. SO DISAPPOINTED (1/5)

RATINGS SUCK!!!! This workshop is going to be soooo boring. Seriously, who wants to look at data. Learn about data. Scrape data. I’d rather stare at the wall than look at excel sheets. Who comes up with this stuff? Data scraping has NOTHING to do with art or aesthetics. What does that even mean!!!! And you’ll also have to DO stuff. Most probably analyse and sort THEIR data. In an artist workshop? Without pay? Am I here to learn or to work? They’ll ask: what can be generated from the data? Sounds like a question they should have answered themselves before doing the workshop. Not going to work for free. This makes me so angry ⭐☆☆☆☆

Denkt man an Glitches, dann fallen einem womöglich bunt flirrende Pixel ein, die ohne Vorwarnung ein digitales Bild durchziehen. Doch das Glitch-Spektrum beschränkt sich nicht allein auf den digitalen Bildraum. Bereits in der Bildproduktion der analogen Fotografie, der Sound-, Video- oder Computerkunst zeigen sich Momente der Störung, die zunächst unerwartet auftreten, dann aber Anstoß für kreative Auseinandersetzungen mit den Phänomenen geben. Franziska Kunze, Kuratorin der Ausstellung, und Katrin Bauer, Assistenzkuratorin, gehen gemeinsam mit den geladenen Künstler:innen dem breiten Spektrum an Möglichkeitsräumen in den verschiedenen Medien auf den Grund.

Talk at conference (Un)real Data – Real Effects
16:30 – 18:00

Automated data collection has become an intrinsic component of most technological systems and devices. Our data is processed and used to shape future possibilities and interactions, generating an endless loop of reactions and recommendations. What possibilities for resistance remain when opting out of data streams is no longer an option? Using examples, !Mediengruppe Bitnik explore the inherent ambiguity of data as an opportunity not just to describe the world but to strategically intervene in it.

Online seminar with Tatiana Bazzichelli, Gregory Sholette, Rachel O’Dwyer, and !Mediengruppe Bitnik discussing the relation between art and politics.
Join via Zoom or via stream!

A conversation on ISSA as a place of cultivating forms of knowledge-production and knowledge-sharing for the “age of extinction”.

Talks by Aleksandra Lakić and Max Haiven
Bonfire storytelling and food with Mara Ferreri, Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak & !Mediengruppe Bitnik

"Snađi se, druže!" – "figure it out, comrade" – is a common phrase used in former Yugoslavia. It originated during the WWII indicating that partisans in action had to come up with solutions under extremely unfavourable conditions. The question, when given instructions for an impossible mission, would often be "but how do I do that?", and the answer would often be "figure it out, comrade". Later during the socialist period, this expression would be used for practices that people were devising when encountering bureaucratic or material constraints in everyday life. All periods and societies have such practices of common lying, cheating and stealing and common phrases to name them.

FIO is a collective exploration of stories of ingenuity that people with little or no power devise when systems fail them. The evening at panke.gallery is focused on the inginuity of workers in the global gig factory. Particularly on tactics the workers on platforms such as Microwork, Amazon Turk or Upwork based in the Eastern Europe and the Global South contrive to fake their location or presence to cirumvent scant pay, surveillance and control that is frequently not expected from the gig workers in the Western Europe and the Global North.
The upcoming event features a talk by Aleksandra Lakić, introducing her and Saša Savanović's research on the socio-economic situation and labor conditions in platform economy in South Eastern Europe. The talk will also assess the impact of algorithmic management and surveillance as factors contributing to declining quality of work on digital labour platforms. A second presentation will be held by the researcher Max Haiven, who has recently collaborated with rank-and-file Amazon workers to write and publish short, speculative fiction stories about 'the world after Amazon.'

The bonfire is an invitation to participate in a collective reading of stories of such practices we have gathered and to contribute your own first-hand or second-hand stories and thoughts. We intend the reading to be convivial, spilling over into a shared meal.

Event produced by Drugo More in collaboration with !Mediengruppe Bitnik.
Part of transmediale & CTM Vorspiel 2024.

How do we abandon the current standard models of AI and tech services and advocate for inclusive technologies? From December 13 to December 15, VEKTOR Athens presents the International Radio Conference “Figure it Out: The Art of Living through System Failures”, curated by Katerina Gkoutziouli. For three consecutive days, from 14.00 to 18.00 EET, artists, curators, activists, academics, researchers and technologists discuss their counter strategies and practices in the technological realm. Through three key areas, namely: Figure it Out: Art & Tech, Figure it Out: Environment & Tech and Figure it Out: Community & Tech, the radio conference reflects a growing realization that the current tech landscape is rife with disparities and shortcomings that need to be addressed.

The Radio Conference will be streamed via stegi.radio, the online radio station of Onassis Stegi

The group show 'Another Day at the Office' celebrates five years of OFFICE IMPART. The exhibition shows works by over 45 artists who have accompanied the gallery over the last 5 years.

Cracked smartphone displays, distorted images, colorful pixel structures: as one of the youngest and most unpredictable art forms today, glitch art specifically directs our attention to the aesthetic of the flawed. Initially used in technical jargon among radio and television engineers in the 1950s, the term glitch (from the early New High German verb “glitschen”, meaning to [left] glide or from the Yiddish “gletshn”, to slide, slip, or skid) soon comes to designate coding bugs or graphic errors in computer games. A glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction. In the art context, disruptions find immediate expression in the realm of computer-generated images, in digital media and Internet art. The roots of technical “glitches” reach back to the early days of photography; as an artistic strategy directed against recognized forms of expression, they evolve in avant-garde film and video art and, finally, in digital image media and net art, where instances of image interference are intentionally provoked or deliberately programmed.

The catalogue Glitch. The Art of Interference is the first comprehensive survey with a historical derivation of the potential of glitches in art, media, and society. With works by Maya Dunietz, Jake Elwes, JODI, Joan Jonas, Germaine Krull, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Mame-Diarra Niang, Carsten Nicolai, Kazuma Obara, Nam June Paik, Jiang Pengyi, Sondra Perry, Man Ray, Pipilotti Rist, Steina Vasulka, amongst others, alongside with historical magazines and guidebooks on how to avoid photographic errors as counter narrative. In essays and free-forming writings, Franziska Barth and Markus Rautzenberg, Katrin Bauer, Nick Briz, Doris Gassert, Ute Holl, Justyna Janik, Franziska Kunze, Rosa Menkman, Mame-Diarra Niang and Agnieszka Roguski provide broader insights into the recent fields of research on the global phenomenon of glitch art.

The texts, ideas, instructions, and art projects gathered in this book reflect on our relationship with the earth and the lessons we can derive from it. The contributions not only urge us to respond to the pressing issue of climate emergency, but also remind of certain neglected or unlearned ways in which we can engage in dialogue with the earth. What they have in common is the question of how we can shape a more ecological and just future.

Catalogue to accompany the exhibition «I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen» at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth edited by Alison Hearst and featuring contributions by Marla Price, John Suler, Omar Kholeif and Tina Rivers Ryan

Surveying some 50 years of groundbreaking art related to digital technology and the screen, I'll Be Your Mirror examines how technologies such as home computers, smartphones and TV have affected art and life over the past five decades. It traces a trajectory stretching back to the late 1960s, a watershed moment in the rise of the screen in the home. Today, accelerated by the pandemic, our daily life is mediated through screens for work, entertainment and sociality.

This volume attempts to disassemble and reformulate what one might understand as AI by taking apart both notions of 'artificiality' and 'intelligence' and seeing what new meaning they produce when recombined.

We summon the trickster of the natural order, chimera, both a mythical creature and a genetic phenomenon. Drawing upon chimerism allows us to broaden 'artificial intelligence' into 'synthetic cognition'⁠—an approach that highlights the duality of 'artificial' and 'authentic', amplifies non-human methods of cognition and anticipates modes of symbiosis.

With this aim, the editors, Ilan Manouach and Anna Engelhardt, assembled an inventory in which one can find contributions from scholars and artists with interspecies, disability, monstrous, feminist, and decolonial approaches, as well as thinkers and technologists engaged in a broader field of AI. By questioning fabricated norms that constitute and maintain notions of 'artificial' and 'intelligence', this inventory acts as a toolbox one can use to merge these terms into a novel chimera.

The title of the book, The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age, is a reference to the exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age”, curated by Pontus Hultén for MoMA in 1968, highlighting how technology was influencing art at a time when mechanical machines were increasingly replaced by electronic and chemical devices. Through its selection of contemporary art works the exhibition thus came to function as a recording of technological history.

I never got to see the exhibition since I wasn’t born at the time, but a couple of years ago I came across a curious book with a tin cover. The book was published in connection to the exhibition, and the history recorded between its covers ends at approximately the same time that early computers start to make their way into the art world. In the fifty years that followed, art came to be marked by a digital presence.

It was that book, along with an interest in dead media, and a curiosity for art aided by algorithms, that sparked the idea for The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age.

Here you will encounter new works by a selection of artists, specifically invited to use algorithms/AI to contribute to a continuous, self-reproducing, anachronistic, machine aided recording of history. A way to preserve, revise and/or comment upon digital history from the vantage point of present-day technology or through the lens of imagined future media, perspectives and technologies.

The works have been created specifically for the book. Some are based on works by other artists, made in another era, repurposed for our time and technologies. Others are based on redundant technologies, revived and given new functions. Some adopt a critical or political approach to the algorithm and its impact on society. Several utilize it as an opportunity to create unique works for each separate copy of the edition. Thousands of files eventually compiled into 200 unique books, each with a different cover and different contents – generated, aided or influenced by algorithms.

A journey of discovery to the scrap heap and he treasure trove of the analogue eraAudio tapes, records, audio cassettes and Super8 film – once they were all media standards. In the digital age however they have been superseded and are being discarded or else stored at the very back of the cellar. Artists and collectors however remain faithful to obsolete media and create something new out of old machines. Like the Swiss artist, musician and engineer Flo Kaufmann, who in the role of “Lord of the Groove” combines knowledge of vinyl mastering and experimental music.Starting with select objects, different obsolete media are introduced in a technological and culture historical context. Works by Kaufmann and other artists and musicians, like Christian Marclay, !Mediengruppe Bitnik and many more, demonstrate the potential inherent in working with analogue finds and give concrete tips to inspire us to do-it-ourselves.

In October 2021, David Chipperfield’s new extension of the Kunsthaus Zürich opened for the public. The new wing doubles the museum’s space for art display. Perhaps more importantly, it offers the opportunity to present larger parts of the museum’s permanent collection in a new light and in new groupings. The Chipperfield building is now home to the renowned Merzbacher, Hubert Looser, and Emil Bührle Collections, all on permanent loan to the museum. The formidable selection of French impressionist paintings in the Emil Bührle Collection combined with Kunsthaus Zürich’s own holdings of that period constitutes the largest display of impressionist art outside France. In addition, surrealism, art from the postwar period, pop art, and contemporary art now have the prominent space they deserve.

This new book offers an introduction to the museum’s curatorial concept as well as concise essays on key aspects of Kunsthaus Zürich’s permanent collection.

A meteoric hype? Or avant-garde? At its Francisco Carolinum venue in Linz, OÖ Landes-Kultur presents PROOF OF ART, the world’s first museum exhibition on the history of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and digital art. The project surveys the origins of NFTs and their evolution, from formative early trial runs with digital technologies to the first artistic experiments with the blockchain and today’s cutting-edge crypto-art. Online and offline, the multimedia exhibition and the related publication each present the positions of twenty-six artists who grapple with the new system of meanings and values, examine the role that artists play in our high-tech environment, and discuss the repercussions of virtual spaces in the reality of our lives.

Released in conjunction with the exhibition, the publication is designed less as an accompanying catalogue than as a handbook that sheds light on NFTs in their (art-)historical contexts, from the media art of the 1950s/60s to contemporary positions. Experts in a range of disciplines contributed essays: Daniel Heiss and Margit Rosen, Fabian Müller-Nittel, Georg Bak, Anika Meier, Schoenherr Attorneys at Law, Charlotte Kent, and Claudia Hart. With a preface by Alfred Weidinger and an intro by Jesse Damiani.

Early on, the artists understood the transformative power of play, integrating it into their works for various purposes – escaping reality, social construction and transformation, subversion or as a criticism of the mechanisms of play and games themselves. The Playmode exhibition and catalogue offer a reflection on these aspects and on the era of ludification that contemporary societies are now experiencing, bringing together pieces by several artists, such as Brad Downey, Gabriel Orozco and Ana Vieira, who incorporate the theme while exploring new ways of seeing, participating and transforming the world, using gaming in a critical way.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik’s first monography injects code on online bookstores through its title: a line of Javascript that displays an alert popup.

On 16 January 2013, !Mediengruppe Bitnik sent a parcel containing a camera and a GPS signal to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to find out what would happen on the way. Would it be possible to break through the physical barrier surrounding Assange, who is living at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to escape being extradited to the USA? Would the parcel’s journey end with a picture of Assange’s face or would it be intercepted and destroyed by an intelligence officer of the British Secret Service?

This is the account of an extraordinary delivery and the uproar that followed on the Internet. The publication consists of two books, one in English, one in German – read in your prefered language and give the other copy away!
2016.bitnik.org/book