The Metabolic Museum-University is an experimental educational program of the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. The Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova collaborates in a part of its program.
Over seven days, selected exhibitions are transformed into an unusual and ironic clash between a museum, a university and a body. Unique furniture based on a home-camping style provides visitors with the means to sit down, read, write, and take part in lectures, conversations, experiments, and exercises. Special metabolic chairs have their own table, light and mini-beamer enabling participants to spam the hang by projecting their own visuals into the gaps between artworks.
Each of the seven days corresponds to an Organ of the Week and is directed by a Faculty Member of the Metabolic Museum-University. In addition, innovative Stimuli prepared by guest artists and scientists interrupt the daily sessions with creative and intellectual impulses.
The Metabolic Museum-University is open and free to all visitors with entry tickets to the Biennial venues and museums. It encourages participants to take part in all sessions for the full week if possible, but sporadic visits are also welcome. Sessions will be held in English.
ENTIRE SCHEDULE OF THE METABOLIC MUSEUM-UNIVERSITY
25 July 2019 – 2 August 2019, Various Venues
For updated information, please contact the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, International Centre of Graphic Arts Ljubljana or write to mm-u@hfg-karlsruhe.de.
PROGRAM of MMU at the +MSUM
Sunday, 28 July 2019, 11.00–13.00 and 14.00–18.00, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova
EYEDAY
Directed by Alexander Schindler, Felipe Meres, and Ariana Dongus with Lizzy Ellbrück
EYEDAY leads you down several paths of visual perception.
Alexander Schindler begins with the concrete object and its two-dimensional visual representation. Then tries to sensitise the visitors to the unconscious processes of kinaesthetic perception. He comes to the conclusion that with acts of cognition, every object, as well as its visual representation, is in constant motion. It is never still but always spatial and temporal. During interactive moments, the visitors dedicate themselves to so-called model-based images. They are the result of intensive rendering processes of highly detailed metric measurements of spatial situations. Their appearance on our screens suggests the possibility for manifold observations of nearly endless scale and perspective. Schindler asks: are we able to abandon the directionality of the linear perspective we have become so accustomed to? Can we apprehend the extended process of “Polyscopy”, multiplying perspectives on an object in space and recognizing it as a kinetically constructed phenomenon? For Schindler’s session, we follow the path of visual perception by means of an audio guide. Participants are asked to bring their smartphones with a mobile internet connection to EYEDAY.
In the second session of EYEDAY, Felipe Meres focuses on the roles that 3D scanning and hyper-realistic imaging technologies play in the documentation of ethnographic collections in museums across Europe and the U.S. While anthropologists and curators highlight the benefits that could come from the unprecedented level of access to the objects that these technologies provide, the question of what it means to submit ethnographic and ritual objects to such secular technologies remains underexplored. The process of 3D scanning ethnographic artifacts inextricably ties the objects to a network that includes agents not often associated with museums, such as action games with intensive graphics renderings, blockbuster films with complex CGI effects as well as tech companies that develop the graphics cards, 3D rendering software, algorithms and image-capture technologies used in the process. What are the effects of forcefully subsuming ethnographic artifacts in such hyper-realistic network of CGI and in the larger project that aims to produce a level of photorealism never achieved before, effectively rendering the distinction between simulation and reality unattainable to the human eye?
In the final session, Ariana Dongus discusses the coded gazes of camera sensors from city surveillance to smartphones and how these billions of images of the world have become precious raw material in an age of algorithms and artificial intelligence. She will critically investigate the evolution of techniques for identification and control, tracing the emergence of new norms that connects the historical emergence of biometric fingerprinting in the colonial and industrial age to today’s War on Terror. She asks, how can we form a collective political strategy to resist the objectification of people and their rendition into suspicious subjects, de-humanized and stripped of self-agency, history, and intelligence? The lecture-performance invites participants to enter a multipolar, visual landscape of object traces, biometric apparatuses, texts and archival images to take a closer look at the ‘genealogy of obsession’ to measure differences.
STAFF OF THE METABOLIC MUSEUM-UNIVERSITY AT THE +MSUM
Prof. Dr. Clémentine Deliss studied Contemporary Art and Semantic Anthropology in Vienna, Paris and London, and has a Ph. D from the University of London. She is an independent curator, publisher, and cultural historian and currently Professor of Curatorial Theory and Dramaturgical Practice at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design.
Ariana Dongus is a media scholar and researcher based in Berlin and Karlsruhe. She is currently a Ph.D candidate at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, where she also coordinates KIM, a research group for critical studies in artificial intelligence. She also teaches a seminar on ‘Women in Computation’. In exploring the intersection of biometrics, colonial pasts, and new forms of work and machine intelligence, she contributes to a critique of today’s digital economies.
Lizzy Ellbrück studied Culture & Technology and Art Studies at the Technische Universität in Berlin. Since 2017 she has been studying Art Research & Media Philosophy and Exhibition Design, Curatorial Studies and Dramaturgical Practice at Karlsruhe University of Art and Design.
Felipe Meres holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Bard College and he is currently pursuing a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the New School in New York. Meres’s photographs, films, sculptures and essays explore relationships between structures of meaning and indeterminate matter. His work invites us to reconsider the patterns of difference we create in order to make sense of, and regulate, the objects, bodies and behaviours that surround us.
Alexander Schindler has a Master’s degree in Media and Communication in Social and Economic Contexts from Berlin University of the Arts. He has worked for the Vilém Flusser Archive in Berlin. His research focuses on the history and theory of media in relation to the precarious situation caused by anthropogenic climate change. He is currently preparing a contribution for the publication and exhibition ‘Critical Zones’ by Bruno Latour on the intersections between cybernetics and earth systems science.
METABOLIC MUSEUM-UNIVERSITY
Cooperation between the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and the MGLC, International Centre of Graphic Arts for “Crack-Up – Crack Down”, the 33rd Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana 2019. With the participation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, the Slovenian Museum of Natural History, and the National Gallery of Slovenia, Ljubljana.
Concept and Direction: Prof. Dr. Clémentine Deliss, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design
Additional Guidance: Prof. Dr. Matthias Bruhn, Prof. Andreas Müller, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design
Development & Organisation 2018–2019: Francesca Romana Audretsch, Janina Capelle, Lizzy Ellbrück, Teresa Häußler, Diane Hillebrand, Cécile Kobel, Christina Scheib
Correspondence and Communication: Lizzy Ellbrück, Francesca Romana Audretsch, Christina Scheib
Communication Design: Cécile Kobel
Social Media: Cécile Kobel, Lizzy Ellbrück
Furniture and Spatial Design: Diane Hillebrand, Janina Capelle, Teresa Häußler, Christina Scheib
Support Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design: Hanne König, Thomas Rustemeyer
Organisation MGLC, Ljubljana: Nevenka Šivavec, Director, and Yasmín Martín Vodopivec, Assistant Director and Coordinator of the Metabolic Museum-University in Ljubljana
With thanks to: Slavs and Tatars, Asya Yaghmurian, Zdenka Badovinac, Adela Železnik, Alenka Pirman, Breda Cinc Juhant, Barbara Jaki.
