Nei Zigma presents the show Orbital Acoustic, where he brings together songs from his recent EP Nei Zigma, released in July 2020, as well as compositions from a new album Orbital that is currently still in production. The concert features poems that narrate the ancestral heritage of indigenous and African memory in Brazil, between Rock, Samba and Funk, as well as original compositions. Nei Zigma is Brazilian singer and songwriter. He is a multifaceted artist who translates Brazil's rhythmic cadences into poetic images, all the while embracing his roots. In July 2020 he released his EP Nei Zigma with YB music label. Produced by the guitarist Guilherme Held, mixed by Bruno Buarqueand and mastering by Felipe Tichauer, the EP is composed of 5 songs written in artistic partnerships by Brazilian poets and by the artist himself.

During the first half of 2020, the social isolation imposed by the pandemic suspended the recordings of the album Orbital. At the moment, in order to complete the finalization of the album, they wait for a more favorable and safe sanitary situation, to gather the musicians in the studio again in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Palestine/Denmark/UK 2019, 28 min, Digital, Picture ratio 1:2.66, Arabic with English subtitles

In Vitro is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above.

In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder, 70-year-old Dunia is lying in her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia comes to visit her. Alia is born underground as part of a comprehensive cloning program and has never seen the town she’s destined to rebuild.

Director: Larissa Sansour Director, Author: Soren Lind  Production: Ali Roche  Camera: Anna Valdez Hanks  Editing: Sue Giovanni  Co-Production: May Odeh  VFX Supervisor: Henrik Bach Christensen  Original Music/Composition: Niklas Schak Supervising  Sound Editor: Tom Sedgwick  Sound Design: Ben Hurd  Costumes: Anne Sofie Madsen, Isabelle Cook  Art Director: Simon Godfrey  Script Supervisor: Maxim Sansour Actresses: Hiam Abbass DUNIA, Maisa Abd Elhadi ALIA, Marah Abu Srour YOUNG GIRL, Leila Sansour NUN

In Vitro was commissioned by the Danish Arts Foundation for the Danish Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2019 and produced by Spike Island.

Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian artist/director. Central to her work is the tug and pull between fiction and reality. In her recent works, she uses science fiction to address social and political issues. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos and sculptures.

Sansour’s work is shown in film festivals and museums worldwide. In 2019, she represents Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennial. She has shown her work at Tate Modern, MoMA, Centre Pompidou and the Istanbul Biennial as well as the Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival. Recent solo exhibitions include Bluecoat in Liverpool, Dar El-Nimer in Beirut and Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen.

Sansour lives and works in London.

larissasansour.com

Soren Lind (b. 1970) is a Danish author, director and scriptwriter. With a background in philosophy, Lind wrote books on mind, language and understanding before turning to film and fiction. He has published novels, shorts story collections and several children’s books.

Lind screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide. Recent venues and festivals include the 58th Venice Biennial, MoMA (US), Barbican (UK), Nikolaj Kunsthal (DK), Berlinale (D), International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL) and BFI London Film Festival (UK).

He lives and works in London.

2017, 17 min, Single Channel 2K Video, Filmed on 8MM Cine film

The experimental 8mm film Amplifier is a reflection on the presence and significance of history in our everyday surroundings. The work focuses on Helsinki Olympic Stadium, regarded as one of the most beautiful functionalist sports buildings in the world. Completed in 1938, for Olympic Games that never took place, it represents a historical paradigm shift and stands as a modernist landmark for utopia and oblivion. As the stadium closed due to major renovations, its abandoned athletic arena, shattered benches and bulldozed foundations provoked a chain of conflicting thoughts.

In the film distant voices resonate inside the desolate monument, where dance, magic and architecture meet in a symbolic encounter. A masked dancer (Heikki Vienola) explores the site with an improvised performance. His movements are broken and grotesque, inspired by Japanese Butoh dance. In traditional Butoh the dancers transmute into other lifeforms, such as animals – abandoning the idealistic idea of a perfect and athletic human body. The contrast between body and stone, the passing of time and the relationship between present and past get convoluted in an immersive, sensory, nearly physical experience.

Saara Ekström works in film, photography, text and installation. Perishing, growth and temporality are themes that reoccur in her work, which communicate through a narrative based on metaphors and associations. Chronotopes where time and place densify, time itself that nurtures and erodes, and the ambivalent desire to both remember and forget are at the core of Ekström’s art. 

Ekström’s work has been shown extensively in various museums, film festivals and biennials in Europe, the Americas and Asia. She received the Finnish media art prize AVEK-award in 2018 and the prizes of SW Finland in 2017, Finnish Art Society in 1995 and the Aboa prize in 1994. She was the Helsinki Festival Artist in 2005 and was nominated for both Ars Fennica and Carnegie Art Award prizes.

saaraekstrom.com

2017, 47 min, 16:9 HD, Finnish with English subtitles 

Black Hole Mama is a personal black-and-white documentary tracing out details in a neighborhood facing a massive change. People living in a house doomed for demolition miss their community and are afraid of losing it forever. At the same time, they reflect on life as a whole and their own purpose within. Gradually, their memories and stories are woven into a tapestry where the convivial everyday life intertwines with darker tones. In the end, one just needs to decide what to bring along and what to leave behind.

Director, cinematographer, writer: Heidi Piiroinen Editor, writer: Kalle Sipilä Re-recording mixer: Veli Laamanen

Heidi Piiroinen (b.1978) is a Finnish photographer and documentary filmmaker. Her work as a press photographer for the Finnish daily paper Helsingin Sanomat has garnered a number of awards. She graduated from the Turku Arts Academy in 2002 and studied photojournalism at the Lahti Institute of Design in 2002-2004. Piiroinen was a visiting scholar at the University of Berkeley, where she studied documentary film 2015-2016. Her debut documentary film Black Hole Mama premiered at DocPoint in January 2017. The book Ohikuljetut -erään kerjäläisperheen tarina by Heidi Piiroinen and Kimmo Oksanen won the State Award 2019. Piiroinen was awarded the Patricia Seppälä Foundation Photojournalism Award in 2020.

heidipiiroinen.com

Egle Oddo presents Perception, a text she created to be interpreted by actor James Lórien McDonald. The monologue tells the short story of an individual who believes perception is only possible through faith. The actor will perform it live during the festival on Kontula.

Egle Oddo (b.1975) was born in Italy. Her work focuses on linear and non-linear narrative as an art form. Interested in operational realism, meant as the presentation of the functional sphere in an aesthetic arrangement and its inter-relations, she combines photography, moving image, installation, sculpture, environmental art, and experimental live art. In her pieces industrial production morphs towards delicate handcraft, life forms appear and emerge out of sculptures and objects, film photography appropriate digital images, selected trash mixes with fashion, precious edible minerals and ancestral recipes are served as part of ritual meals. Her work has been presented at international biennials, Museums and relevant institutions, as well as cutting edge and independent alternative spaces and events.

James Lórien MacDonald (b.1977) grew up in London, Ontario, and then completed a BA in Theatre and English Literature from the University of Toronto. He currently works primarily in stand-up comedy, Live Art, and Nordic larp. He is consistently drawn to questions of embodiment, duration, undermining social norms, humour, and trolling. He moved to Helsinki in 2002 and after his text-heavy training in theatre, he gravitated towards training in Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, Suzuki and Viewpoints, Grotowski, Lecoq, and Butoh, working chiefly with the Höyhentämö theatre in Helsinki, and mask theatre company Metamorfoosi. He is versatile in performance art, participatory theatre, game-based theatre, and Nordic larp. He later started Feminist Comedy Night and Feminist Comedy Academy, paving the way for more diverse voices in Finnish stand-up.

The performance reflects on sentence 13 of the “100 anti-theses on cyberfeminism”: By utilizing a clever double negation, the sentence affirms the necessity of words, or meaning, to work together with knowledge of numbers. Numbers alone would just imply a simple collection of factual references. Instead, knowledge of numbers integrates the idea of an intelligence within, an algorithm operating together on equal ground with text to produce a singular cyberfeminist position. This strong position resonates only too loudly with the contemporary situation: big data centers development and loss of collective discourse embedded, or promoted by capitalist maneuvers. The performance aims at reactivating the necessary convergence of words and knowledge of numbers in a performative form. The text is interpreted from its digital form to produce new sounds. The knowledge of numbers, and its ability to process data, together with words emerges as a force to bring people together.

Grégoire Rousseau is an artist and educator based between Helsinki and Paris. He is currently a PhD candidate at Aalto university on "Commoning Education, Educating the Commons", and graduated both as Electrical Engineer and Master of Fine Arts. His artistic work questions the role of the machine, the algorithm within the digitally controlled society, and the complexity of the neo-liberal interests in relation to public knowledge, to commons within technological space. Besides artistic practice, Rousseau has been teaching in Finnish Academy of Fine Arts for ten years where he developed and implemented the first space dedicated to technology in 2013. He regularly lectures on art within the technological space; Aalto university, ENSBA Paris, French Institute in Finland, CAC Shanghai, Kismif. In 2001, he founded electronic music record label Tuulanauhat; in 2014, he co-founded Rabrab Press with Sezgin Boynik, Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Arts. In 2018, he authored the publication “Learning from electric energy in the arts, knowledge happens together”; in 2020, he initiated Station of Commons, a platform of commoning practices within technological space. 

rousseau.fi  stationofcommons.org

The voice and its possibilities have been one of the main interests of Jérôme Grivel’s work for more than a decade. In the performance series titled Occurrence, he explores the abilities and limitations of his own body through different types of what he calls "vocal gestures" as a metaphor and meditation of humanity’s ceaseless desire for growth and its desire for ever greater intensity. For the Drift festival, his performance Occurrence / liquidity will study both the exhaustion and the fluidity of the body through a free exploration of the vocal capacity.

Jérôme Grivel is a visual artist, performer and musician. His work explores the relationship between human sciences, politics, the construction of our own bodily subjectivities and the emotional responses to them. His sculptures, his architectural projects and his performances raise questions about our relationship with space, movement and ways of appropriating coercive situations to make a positive use of freedom. His work is critical, sometimes violent and anti-establishment but also full of humor and tenderness, and deals with the idea of finding our own respons-hability to what surrounds us.

Jérôme Grivel exhibits, performs and is hosted in residence in France and abroad including (selection) Palais de Tokyo, Paris (Fr); Collection Lambert, Avignon (Fr); Kunsthausl6, Fribourg (De) ; L’L, Brussel (Be) Espace de l'Art Concret, Mouans Sartoux (Fr); Institut d'Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne (Fr); Mulhouse Biennial (Fr);  Salon de Montrouge Fr);  Site Gallery, Sheffield (Uk) ... He was shortlisted for several prizes and grants in France as for example the Emerige Revelation Fellowship in 2017, the Science Po Prize for Contemporary Art in 2019 and the Salomon Foundation Residency Award in 2020. 

Since 2015, he collaborates regularly with choreographer Michaël Allibert on projects between dance and visual arts.

Jérôme Grivel lives and works in Paris.

documentsdartistes.org/artistes/grivel/repro.html

The Solvent is a mutant ambient performance that leans to both ancient and new technologies. The music is derived from early music/medieval modes and the timbre of the harp, but at the same time, it reaches towards the future, using procedural operations to create its passages. In The Solvent, ecological change is viewed through symbiotic movements and reactions where the driving resonance is found at a molecular level. The idea of transition from one state to another, one age to the next, is at the core. What kind of traces are left behind when a system progresses to a new era? And how to create narratives, recipes, and predictions for these possible futures?

The structure of the performance builds around a series of recipes. A recipe is a guide for mixing ingredients, and just like other complex systems, the result is often more than the sum of its parts. Moreover, a recipe can open up a view on interdependence, an existence conceived through a process of reciprocal interaction.

When asked about the definition of life in the Gravity Assist: What is Astrobiology? podcast, the head of NASA’s astrobiology program Mary Woytek answered that there is one thing common to all definitions. Life needs a solvent, a medium or solution that can facilitate reactions.

This performance is partly based on compositions from Laitinen’s upcoming album released in late 2021 by ÖM sound/SVART records.

Tuomas A. Laitinen is an artist who works with moving image, sound, light, glass, chemical and microbial processes, as well as algorithms to explore the entanglements of multispecies coexistence. Laitinen composes situations and installations that inquire into the porous interconnectedness of language, body, and matter within morphing ecosystems. In recent years, Laitinen has been working around questions of ecology, mythology, and processes of knowledge production. He often works with translucent and transparent materials in order to find ways to layer complex material relations and different epistemological systems.

Since 2016, one strand of Tuomas A. Laitinen’s artistic practice has touched upon the research into cognition and consciousness in other-than-human minds, focusing on octopuses in particular. This endeavour is emerging through different forms: glass objects made for octopuses, multiple video and audio works, and a series of glyphs—made both as a font and with glass—derived from research on octopus arm movements. 

Laitinen´s works have been recently shown in the 21st Biennale of Sydney, 7th Bucharest Biennale, Screen City Biennale 2019 (Stavanger), SADE LA (Los Angeles), Amado Art Space (Seoul), Moving Image New York, A Tale of a Tub (Rotterdam), Art Sonje Center (Seoul), Helsinki Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, and MOCA Shanghai. Laitinen received The Fine Arts Academy of Finland Prize in 2013.

tuomasalaitinen.com

Olle Holmberg's ever shape-shifting compositional practice concerns itself with ecosystems, traditional ritual music, microtonality, ambisonic field recording and modular synthesis. Drawing inspiration from caves, swamps and altered states of consciousness, he conjures deeply textured hyper-detailed psychedelic sound worlds, connecting hypotheses of pre-historic entheogenic realms to speculative cultures of extraterrestrial exoplanets.

Deep Swamp’s visuals, created by Folded Visuals, take the viewer to an unknown territory after dark. Visions of caves, ferns and soft moss blend into mysterious signals and a splash of circuit.

Olle Holmberg, born 1984 in Sweden, is a composer, performer and DJ based in Berlin. Since 2013 has mainly been creating music as Moon Wheel and Tusagi, on labels such as Northern Electronics, Not Not Fun and Where To Now?. He studied live audio-vision under Robin Fox in Melbourne, Australia, and has held residencies at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and AqTushetii in Georgia. Has given live performances at Berghain, Herrensauna, CTM Festival and Atonal in Berlin, KinoBeat festival in Brazil, as well as Norbergfestival and Intonal in Sweden. Hosted the program The Journey on Berlin Community Radio.

soundcloud.com/moonwheel

Helsinki-based live visual and video artist Folded Visuals (Merle Karp) often works on topics like her relationship with nature, as well as technology and dreams. She aims to evoke feelings of both comfort and unease. She is a founder of Aavistus Festival and her work has been seen, among others, at Polar Night Light Festival at Ruka, Norbergfestival in Sweden, I Land Sound in Estonia, Aufwind in Austria, Kazakhstan Central Concert Hall and Hear Art - See Sound festival in Armenia. merlekarp.com

A unit of soil is slowly and silently roaming around in its realm of hollow decay. Consistently it grinds a deeper cavity by swirling its way towards the core.

Somewhere else, some other time, giant jaws constructed to crush are feasting with something that used to be. A vast cloud of dust hovers around the scenery, witnessing the crushed crumbs of concrete cruising rapidly on lifted conveyor belts. At the end of the line they are ready to fall, compose a pile, stack together, waiting to be used for something else again.

Damage occurs through time and the same matter takes another form. (revolve around dust)

Meditating on the circulation of material in oscillating densities and scales provides a joint undertone in Aala Nyman and Linda Lazarov’s collaboration – clusters of crumbs, sand and aggregate; both human and nature induced; revolving and moulding, assembled and destroyed. Aala Nyman is a visual artist enthusiastic about the themes of memory and communication. In her work, relations between objects and abstract concepts interface with her core values, kindness and continuous curiosity. Through mediums like video, photography, ceramics and textiles she alters her ideas and observations into creations. A DJ and member of Electronic Market collective, Linda Lazarov seeks to contribute to a state of sonic nonconformity. Owing much to early electro-industrial explorations and Detroit’s afro-futurist underwater mythos, she builds bridges between different rascals’ works, stitching them together with a fleeting common denominator.

soundcloud.com/lindalazarov electronicmarket.agency

Soylent Green will take audiences to a holistic dystopian journey to "home". It is a journey through different landscapes, organic elements, textures, nature, microorganisms, chaos, order and levels of stimulating lights, where it seeks to question the different paradigms of the future. Who is coming or what is coming? Is there a future?

J. Culebro is a photographer, VJ and audiovisual producer, activist and engineer originally from Chiapas, Mexico. Culebro’s photographic work explores solitary fragments of urban landscapes, unknown characters, objects and abstractions of reality. His work has special interests regarding climate change, sustainability and environmental conflicts. He defines his work as a "mixture of cinematic styles peppered with darkness and mystery."

soundcloud.com/sunnysibar soundcloud.com/anttisalonen jaimeculebro.wordpress.com

Initiated in February 2020, Station of Commons investigates the possibilities of reappropriating technology within public space. The point of departure of the research questions both centralized knowledge and data centers operated by major organizations and its underlying social implications. What are the interdependencies between the users, the providers, the services, the technology and related knowledge at work? And how to rethink another model of shared empowerment situated in time and space unique to its agent, or communities?

For the last year, this practice of radical technology found various forms both online and in the physical space. Station of Commons write texts to articulate practical issues together with critical discourse with the "Situated Tutorials" series, organized many Open Source audio streams, participated in the symposium "What system actually" with Kassel university, "The Coming Community" part of Manifesta13, and the exhibition "Digital Commoning Practices" in Oksasenkatu11 gallery gathering a wide range of practitioners active in Commons activism. Station of Commons creates settings and spaces of collaboration with artistic, technological and curatorial means that open for the imagination of situations of possibility to learn from the future.

Situated at the intersection of Open Source technology, radical education, and contemporary art, the practice-based inquiry explores the potential of digital commoning practices in the educational field and the potential of emancipatory educational approaches in the field of technology. The main research question that is followed during the research is: How to develop digital commoning practices as a way to emancipate, to learn and know more together?

Station of Commons focus on audio practices developed into the regular radio program "Station of Sounds". Station of Sounds is a moment of discussions on the mode of production of physical objects related to sound form. What motivates the production of the physical object and how to articulate the artistic and political discourse embedded within the materiality of the object. During the session, four artists will discuss their relationship with sound, through playing their own latest physical production or releases of interest. After each discussion, we will listen to the soundtracks selected by artists.

Participants: Gregoire Rousseau, Minerva Juolahti, Constantinos Militiadis, more to be announced.

This presentation will take as a starting point recent discussions around self-abolition, in order to think through the relationship between abolition and the categories used to name aspects of capitalist social relations. By taking into account Marx’s differentiation between concrete-in-act and concrete-in-thought, the presentation will attempt to articulate the differences between the concepts subsumption, real abstraction, reification and form-determination. Through an examination of the relationship between abstraction in thought and in reality, the subject of self-abolition will be problematised.

mattin.org

This talk tries to conceptualize a new ontology of real estate drawing on its many intersections with finance-power. It probes into a compounded phenomenon at the intersection of seemingly never-ending supply of mega plans for new cities around the Global South, and the increasing financialization of housing over the last few decades. Different variations of this phenomenon appear in different contexts under different names, very often in conjunction with their emptiness or insinuating their failure: phantom urbanism, ghost cities, etc. However, in terms of relative size, housing construction markets in places like Egypt, Nigeria or India are silently rising as both templates and testing grounds for what post-Dubai urbanism could be. Their rise also echoes the rising importance of housing-generated financial instruments in extending the terrain of finance-capital into highly unregulated markets of the Global South.

This talk will unpack three strands of the studio Diakron’s ongoing organisational development projects. Together they present a shared exploration of how novel organisational forms can allow art to engage with systemic issues within emerging science and technological development. The three projects are; Primer, a platform for artistic and organisational development housed in the global water technology company Aquaporin. Twin Earth, a new research trajectory exploring climate modelling and conceptions of futurity that informs our current work Scries, presented in the 13th Shanghai Biennial. And finally, the initial stages of a para-organizational developmental work across different institutions, frameworks and forms of practice, to support and foster diversification of the sector of art, guided by articulate missions and types of specialization.

Aslak Aamot Helm works with creating capacities for engaging in systemic problems through emerging organisational forms. The core trajectory of his practice is to trace how concepts and ideas travel across cultures and disciplines. This involves exploratory methodological designs, where problem formulations, research processes, artistic productions are invented collab- oratively in various constellations. Outcomes of this work have been exhibitions, government reports, organizational strategies, artworks, transdisciplinary communities of practice, documentaries, or fictional as well as academic texts. Aslak is currently a postdoctoral researcher with Medical Museion, Diakron and Serpentine Galleries. In his project titled “Re-energizing art institutions at the intersection of art, science and technology” he is working to study and further para-organizational missions and strategies across a diverse selection of transdisciplinary art organizations and practices. 

diakron.dk

If money is fiction, it's because economy is an art form. An overlooked art form perhaps, but given that all economic structures need to be created (not just money), its origins are similar to empty canvases or pages. Sure, it could be "relegated" to a craft... but, given the pervasiveness of economy, how it looms over everything we partake in, would such a relegation be a mistake? A loss of expanse in an area where we're already squeezed by limitations?

In this session, you get to explore the practicalities and possibilities of economic creation. While we might take our first steps through the surface of money, the journey will lead us down to the same forges that form things like nations: Ultimately there's no economy without its governance, and organization. Indeed, it is organization -- to build an economy is to organize it into existence.

As we travel, we'll guide ourselves with these questions: How can we create economies with the characteristics of artistry? What are the instruments for composing such things to existence?

Pekko Koskinen

I (re)design conventional realities into playable forms. Among my "works" you'll find fictional religions, reforged social conventions, potential economies and self-designs. Some of these have been sanctified as art in various places of power such as Mercosul Biennial, SIM, Volksbühne and Moderna Museet. Others remain harder to categorize... Strategical instruments? Social contraptions?

As to where I'm located: After several years as a research admin in Reality Research Center (RRC) and as a member of YKON, I currently function mostly in the Economic Space Agency (ECSA).

2020, 17 min 11 sec, Single Channel Video 

Created for Busan Biennale 2020, this speculative fiction is a simulation of the near future, around a decade after the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020. As a sort of 'creative sabotage of the future', the project delves into a possible world, reflecting and distorting the conditions of the current world. 

In the wake of climate change and depletion of natural resources brought on by fossil fuels, eco-friendly bio-fuels have become society’s main energy source. The chief source of energy in the world is algae—macroalgae that are fermented to produce biofuel. 

In the Korean city of Busan, a “biomass town” has been established over a long belt stretching from Gijang to the waters near the Oryukdo Islands. (Kelp from Busan has been renowned since the 19th century for its quality and yields.) Surisol Underwater Lab, which manages an integrated process involving seaweed farming, water quality, ocean currents, and biomass, is also located in the area of the Oryukdo Islands.

Sohila, a former humanitarian status holder who left Yemen escaping the Yemen War, is a senior researcher at the lab. She has just returned to the lab after taking an early month-long vacation for Ramadan. She hears good news and bad news from Surisol, an artificial intelligence system that manages the laboratory alongside the human beings there. Sohila sends Turbo Shell (the remotely operated vehicle) to conduct reconnaissance in the waters in question. Viewing the images sent by the ROV, Sohila shares its point-of-view as it is imperiled during its journey when it encounters a large swarm of squid and turbulent currents. Suddenly, she blacks out. This segues into a flashback, as she recalls what happened to Korea, and to her, during the COVID-19 pandemic that swept over the world in 2020.

* The character Sohila was played by Sohila AlBna'a, an actual Yemeni migrant living in Korea.

ayoungkim.com

2019, 15 min 24 sec, 3D Animation

‘The Master Algorithm’ is a companion work to Zheng Mahler’s ‘Nostalgia Machines’ which is part of an ongoing body of research and exhibitions on the political economy of the fourth industrial revolution in China and its intersection with aesthetic practice. The work is an exercise in speculative world making, providing alternative narratives for reading technological progress in China and the algorithmic development of the Asian city which might offer utopian challenges to the present.  

Every year, Chinese netizens enthusiastically examine the bookshelf behind Chinese president Xi Jinping while he delivers his new years message for clues to his current state of thought. In early 2018, it was noted that amongst copies of PLA history, general economic theory, Homer, Gogol and Hemingway his editions of Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ and ‘The Communist Manifesto’ had been placed within easy reach of his desk. Also noted was a copy of Pedro Domingo’s ‘The Master Algorithm’, a 2015 treatise on machine learning and the possibilities for AI to augur the next evolutionary leap in humanity when a ‘master algorithm’ is discovered which unites neuroscience, evolution, physics, statistics and computer science. The central hypothesis of Domingo’s visionary text is that ‘All knowledge-past, present, and future-can be derived from data by a single, universal learning algorithm.’  

Given Xi’s knowledge of the revolutionary potential for a master algorithm coupled with the state resources mobilized towards achieving the goals of China’s AI development plan, fueled by the single largest dataset on the planet gathered from China’s surveillance state (data being the new oil in the AI economy), the speculative conceit of this work is that China discovers the godlike master algorithm, or monster algorithm which will take current AI technologies implemented by the Chinese state like the social credit system and evolve them into new forms of governance and civil society that encompass every shade of darkness and light.  

At present, China is creating the world's largest digital police state, with iris, face and gait recognition technology being deployed to monitor activists and Uighur minorities in Xinjiang. The social credit system which the Chinese government is developing relies on data gathered on the population from the surveillance state and party controlled social media apps to instantly reward and punish individuals based on their political behavior. These instruments of the Chinese authoritarian state dominate Western narratives about technological development in China, but ghosts of the techno-orientalist imaginarium of China and the east, generated in the first wave of Japan panic in the 1980’s, fog the real dangers and unrealized potentials of this revolution.  

The social credit system is still not fully operational. The AI benchmarks for the Chinese state in 2020, 2025 and 2030 are yet to come. There is still space to imagine alternate worlds; how might the visionary and temporal scope of cyberpunk mutate to accommodate the city as convolutional neural network? Are there still socio/political fissures to be prised apart, bifurcations leading to unlikely urban utopias that are still possible before the system formally coalesces and is it worthwhile to speculate what these scenarios might be? 

In late 2018, Xinhua news agency in China debuted its first AI newsreader developed through a complex combination of facial recognition, face modeling, speech synthesis and deep learning, modeled after real life newsreader Qiu Hao, he began appearing in China state televisions news broadcasts as the first AI member of its news team. The AI doppelganger of Qiu Hao is the eponymous narrator of ‘The Manster Algorithm’, downloaded and compressed by a billion seeders and leechers, somewhat pixelated around the eyes, the only hint of his digital mortality are the dead pixels in the interface.

‘The Master Algorithm’ will be installed as a holographic projection of Qiu Hao, the human personification of the master algorithm, a figure which mutates, grows and disappears into clouds of data that re-materialize as techno-orientalist nightmares and Asian algorithmic utopias and cityscapes. Speaking in multiple tongues through computer generated voices, Qiu Hao ‘The Master Algorithm’ contains multitudes and takes on different personas to narrate different stories, reciting a chronological sci-fi history of the fourth industrial revolution in China sub specie aeternitatis. Each Chinese techno-utopia is narrated through vignettes moving backwards in time, linking each scenario concretely with the possibilities already embedded in the present.  

Accompanied by a synth soundtrack composed by electronic musicians Gordon Mathews ‘The Master Algorithm’ is rendered through 3D animation via the vaporwave a e s t h e s t i c s of anime and the haunted return of cyberpunk tropes. Vaporwave is the contemporary recycling of the generational techno-orientalist darkness of cyberpunk incorporated for the critical potential embedded in Mark Fisher’s hauntology and more perversely, for cyberpunks aesthetic potential to be repurposed through vaporwave to produce a soft power offensive that seduces the audience into consuming the utopian possibilities this work proposes.

Zheng Mahler are an artist (Royce Ng) and anthropologist (Daisy Bisenieks) duo working together on research intensive, community based, site-specific projects often utilising digital media, performances and installation to explore relationships between art and research practice. Drawing from each other’s respective backgrounds, they examine the limits as well as the methods and strategies of expanding both their familiar disciplines while experimenting with new interdisciplinary possibilities or cross pollinations, where anthropological approaches are applied to art practice and artistic methodologies are utilised as research exercises in the studies of anthropology. Together they have exhibited, performed and participated in numerous art spaces, institutions and residencies, working alongside various communities in Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and the US.  

www.zhengmahler.world

2018, 7 min 31 sec, HD, Stereo sound

‘Everyone knows there is a forest. there is no name, no information, no entry and no space.’

This half real and half virtual forest is located in central Seoul, South Korea. By Korean online map services this area is shown a strange topography. Some exclusive buildings, the presidential blue house and streets disappear on the map. Instead, the fake and expanded forest is covering the area. In fact, the South Korean government doesn’t allow access to sensitive geographical information about security of military facilities – specifically to North Korea. Thus, South Korea denied a request by Alphabet Inc.’s Google to export accurate digital map data from the country. Not only restricting the digital map data but entering the real forest is also regularly limited offline due to military training. Eventually the virtual forest was born by Korean geopolitical issue and exists only in Korean online maps, even though this area is originally displayed on Google maps. This film is based on the above facts and spreads out the missions with fictional protagonists who are affected by the virtual forest. A Resident, a food blogger, a taxi driver and German antique collector play in virtual Seoul without knowing the truth of fake forest. While they approach their own purpose, the forest comes up with an unexpected occurrence.

Written, directed and edited by Hyeseon Jeong 3D Game Artwork by Elvis0529 (Steam Workshop) Music: Infinite // Meadow, Synthetic//Pines, Hidden//Street by Staqq Overflo Sound effect: Hyeseon Jeong Sound mix: Bernd Zimmermann

heysun.xyz

Canada/Lebanon 2017, 13 min 

Cinema devolved into the slow-motion industry: spectacles repeat. Ultima Ratio speeds up by slowing down the image-fix. Traversing the crime-enriched Bekaa valley, the camera uncovers the age-old industries of hashish, models for altering what we see. So too, the camera follows futures, a flash-forwarded optic that seeks to perceive what can be seen anew, cut, particled into vivid fields of matter. “In hashish there is no likeness,” only zero-sites for vision-production then, now as visual senses submitted to the rule of reason. The new reason, as this cinematic skin sees it, is not dead old technology, power and blood, not accelerated nothingness, hype and retro-fascism, but technology, each and every instance, as a talking with the dead--emotions, optics, hashish, radio transmitters, melo-dramas, fiber optic telecommunications, ideologies--and now, hashish as primitive technology, the Now as a science-fiction beyond the double binds, the bad infinities of u-/dys-topia. Instead, a tension-less state, a lack of anxiety over demarcating sapience from sentience, automation from human, intelligence farms from organic machines. They--these name voyagers of the ultimate reason--have no story, it has already happened, spirit became mainframe. Bodies metamorph into databanks. A cinema mixing 3-D objects and documentary footage views this state ahead of the state Δ the future returning as past--Mountain of the Sun.

Music: Mhamad Safa Funding Provided by: The Canada Council for the Arts

Bahar Noorizadeh is filmmaker, writer, and platform designer. Her work has appeared in the Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, DIS Art platform, Transmediale Festival, Berlinale Forum Expanded, and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others. Upcoming engagements include participation at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2020. Noorizadeh’s current research examines Contemporary Art, finance and emerging technology via their shared speculative procedures, building on the notion of “Weird Economies” to precipitate a cross-disciplinary approach to economic futurism and post-financialization imaginaries. She is pursuing this as a PhD candidate in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.

baharnoorizadeh.com

2015, 1h 10min, HD. English, Russian, and Arabic with English subtitles

The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) engages in the entanglements of propaganda. The film researches geopolitical agitprop as a non-linear and hybrid form juxtaposed with documentary episodes, music video, found footage, interviews with theorists, writers, and activists by addressing the 2014 intersection of the Malaysia Airlines incidents, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and the rise of Islamic State (IS).

A film by Metahaven Music by Kuedo Co-produced by Lighthouse Commissioned by Lighthouse and The Space Featuring: Benjamin H. Bratton, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Peter Pomerantsev Cast: Gwen Pol, Georgina David, Annabel Reid Screen Gazers: Georgina David, Xuanhong Huang, Astrit Ismaili, Kees de Klein, Annabel Reid, Sofija Stankovic, Xiaoyao Pippa Xu Camera: Remko Schnorr, Metahaven

sprawl.space

The work of Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, and design. Films by Metahaven include The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) (2015), Information Skies (2016, nominated for the 2017 European Film Awards), Hometown (2018), Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018), and Chaos Theory (2021). Solo exhibitions include Turnarounds, e-flux, New York (2019), Version History, ICA London (2018), Earth, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2018), Hometown, Izolyatsia, Kyiv (2018), Information Skies, Auto Italia, London (2016), The Sprawl, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2015), and Islands in the Cloud, MoMA PS1, New York (2013).

Group exhibitions include Ghost:2651, Bangkok (2018), the Busan Biennale (2018), the Sharjah Biennial (2017), the Gwangju Biennale (2016), Private Settings: Art after the Internet, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2014), and Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013). Recent lectures and events include “An Evening with Metahaven,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019), “After The Sprawl,” Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2019), and “Inhabitant,” Harvard GSD, Cambridge (2020). Recent publications include PSYOP: An Anthology (Koenig Books, London, 2018), and Digital Tarkovsky (Strelka Press, Moscow, 2018). 

instagram.com/metahaven

Bebetton will produce a wine collectively. Bring an ingredient you think could produce an interesting result! There are many things growing out there. We will decide together what to combine for our brew and revisit the wine at a later date to share outcomes. Feel free to bring glass jars for side projects.

NB: Maximum number of 10 participants.

Bebetton is an art initiative by Eeva Rönkä & Jani A. Purhonen was founded in spring 2020 as a test site in conjunction with artist studios of Roihupelto, Helsinki, with the intention of mixing disparate elements in meaningful ways. One of Bebetton’s foci lays in production of wine in an extended sense, resulting in concoctions, fermentations, poetry and play.

instagram.com/something.is.weathering

Liquid Dependencies (previously called Lilies on the Water: What does a decentralized caring society look like?) is a LARP derivative of the long-term project ReUnion Network (a blockchain-based platform for long-term P2P care relationships for a commons-oriented economy, more info reunionnetwork.org). The game is a collaboration between ReUnion Network and Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid in the context of the Shanghai Biennale, in which they invite participants to co-generate a ReUnion society together: 

Players run into different characters who stumble upon a random series of societal and individual events in the span of a few decades, during which they establish their safety nets through a diverse set of P2P care relationships. The ReUnion welfare system regularly issues Personal Tokens (PT), while the Relationship Coins (previously called ‘Composite Coins’) which are combined by two people’s PTs can be used for purchasing services at the local market; its actual impacts can be even broader than the normal currency. As a relationship evolves, the welfare system will also issue Relationship Coins directly as rewards for committed P2P care relationships. 

In the Helsinki version, ReUnion's initiator Yin Aiwen will collaborate with the Finnish collective Trojan Horse for a vernacular Finnish version of the game, which will be launched at the Drift's festival. 

trojanhorse.fi

Small victories on the streets of Helsinki is the subject of series of posters by Boynik and Henriksson. History gets written from the perspective of the winners, which in the case of Helsinki urban space has been and still is the national bourgeoisie. There is no room for commemoration of genuine People’s struggles. Rather, such are remembered as acts of sabotage and terrorism. By visualising moments of mass uprisings as diagrams, we wish to ignite sparks toward future.

Sezgin Boynik is a theoretician based in Helsinki. He completed his PhD on Yugoslav “Black Wave” cinema. He co-edited Nationalism and Contemporary Art: Critical Reader (MM & Exit, 2007, with Minna Henriksson), History of Punk and Underground in Turkey (BAS, 2008, with Tolga Guldalli), Noise After Babel: Language Unrestrained (Spector Books, 2015, with Minna Henriksson). Recent publications include In the Belly of the Beast: Art & Language New York Project (Rab-Rab Journal Vol. 4, No. 2, 2017, with Michael Corris), Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin's Language (Rab-Rab Press, 2018), Free Jazz Communism (Rab-Rab Press, 2020), Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology: Concrete and Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia, 1968 - 1983 (OEI Press, 2021). He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rab-Rab Press in Helsinki. 

rabrab.fi

Minna Henriksson (b. 1976, Oulu, lives in Helsinki) is a visual artist who works with a disparate range of tools including text, drawing, linocut and photography. She studied art in Brighton, Helsinki and Malmö. Her work is often collaborative, and relates to the anti-racist, leftist and feminist struggles. In recent years her work has often dealt with archives and histories. Her work is research based and engages with covert political processes that appear to be neutral or natural. In 2017 Henriksson was awarded with the Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Award of artistic work committed to the ideal of democracy and antifascism.

minnahenriksson.com

Faster Harder Stronger engages in conflicting images of the post-Soviet gentrification in the Estonian capital Tallinn. The posters as a triptych form reconstruct the contradictory relation between the historical decay of Soviet architecture and the signs of nationalism, global tourism in Tallinn. 

In the city, images of the medieval Old Town are represented as a national symbol and landmark in the context of global tourism and capitalism. On the other hand, after the Soviet Union collapsed, Linnahall, a public space constructed during the Soviet period, has been in semi-ruin. Some industrial factories which evoke memories of communal production have also been ruined or transformed to commercial places as Estonian land property shifted from state-owned land to privatization.

Julia Trofimova is a fashion and textile designer. Her research and design projects explore the relationship between social noise and design, as well as subculture and hybridity. Her works examine the ways in which fashion design can be used as a vehicle to enhance engagement with society.

Soko Hwang is a multidisciplinary artist, designer and curator based in Helsinki. His artistic and curatorial practices had the focus in observing and deconstructing, from an anti-colonial perspective, the violent history, the national narratives and colonial legacies of euro-centralism through experimental video works, photography and installation.

sokohwang.com