Lithograph: Circulation 2 - Total Art Platform (Bangalore, India; 2013 - via Marc Dussieller)

Discoursor 004
9 January 2023 | 17:00 | seminar, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova

You are invited to attend an interview with Borut Savski, an intermedia artist, composer, producer, and co-founder of Trivia and Circulation 2 (Slovene: Cirkulacija 2). The interview will be conducted by Jaka Železnikar, the organizer of the Discoursor series.

The conversation will revolve around the various aspects of digital creation and (self-)archiving. as well as the conservation-restoration practices in terms of Savski’s work and that of Circulation 2. The specificity of the work and the relation to the artwork, as well as going from project to project and from work to work, open up many interesting questions about what constitutes an artwork and how it can be archived and documented within a fluid understanding of the artwork itself, and how to approach the issues of conservation and restoration.

Before the interview, Savski will present the exhibited works.

On Tuesday, 9 January 2023, at 5 p.m. at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova.

5 p.m. presentation of the exhibited works

5:15–6:00 talk

6:00–6:15 discussion/Q&A

After a short break you are invited to attend Discoursor 005 at 6:30 p.m.

Exhibited works

- illustration: Kaja Avberšek – Circulation 2 + Light Guerilla (2011)

- picture/lithograph: Circulation 2 – Total Art Platform (Bangalore, India; 2013 – via Marc Dussieller)

- picture/montage: Shit=Gold (collective work; 2022)

Borut Savski

Borut Savski is self-employed in culture as an intermediate artist, composer, and producer. He is a co-founder of Trivia and Circulation 2. He mainly deals with mechanisms that can be programmatic, audio, visual, and collaborative. All these approaches have their starting points in learning about nature and society, and in attempts to improve these systems in practice at the level of micro-communities of participating individuals. The basic concepts are those of aliveness, which is not necessarily just biological; spontaneous dynamics; changes/adaptations – self-regulation; and the possibility of relative autonomy, especially of thoughts, opinions, actions, and the production of meaning (→ from seemingly omnipresent nonsense). This predominantly concerns a decent role for the individual in a (decent) society.

Borut Savski’s text about Circulation 2

Existing as an association since 2009, Circulation 2 became active in the field of interdisciplinary approaches to art two years earlier (2007). Its symbolic beginning and point of origin was a project involving an exchange between two scenes, Graz and Ljubljana, entitled Intermediate Spaces / Zwischenraume (2006). The method employed in this project was already typical of Circulation, since it was mostly of the platform type with a large number of participants on both sides and hosting local scenes in both places. Less than a year later, Circulation 2 was founded in Rog. The name was taken from that of the space we used at the time. Initially, Circulation 2 was formally under the auspices of KUD Trivia, which allowed us to receive some rather symbolic public funding for certain projects. Later, in 2009, it became independent as the Association for Interdisciplinarity, Self-Production and Circulation of Contemporary Art Circulation 2. The key concepts were thus contained in the name.

The first conceptual series was titled Platform for Total Art, which meant that art included all activities directly related to the act of presenting artworks. In this way, an artistic product expands to include all the work necessary for its production. Very early on, in 2010, the phrase “The platform is a work of art” was coined. A little earlier, in 2009, Vadim Fiškin brilliantly retorted to Mike Cimolini’s rather contemptuous rhetorical question (“What is art anyway?”) with “Art is what an artist does.” Translated into the context of Circulation: the totality of an artwork can be seen from the point of view of the total process, rather than just the artistic product. The oppositions to classic exhibition venues, principles of exhibiting, roles of curators, and so on also took shape back then. Self-production is individuals self-organizing every time in a way that suits them, and also reflecting on the most suitable form of presentation.

This conditionally includes (my) later reflection on the value (mystification) of the artwork itself (→ product) in comparison with the (“total”) artistic approach/process, which is inappropriately inferior in the platform orientation, since the platform as a concept primarily contains ethical considerations about collective work methods. So ethics as a value (as a principle and not “worth”). All these reflections were published as they occurred in the form of added reflections to the event announcements during the entire existence of Circulation 2. Art as part of public discourse. Added to this was the then-current notion that every little thing an artist does is gold. Artists as modern-day alchemists. What is important in such evaluations is that the artist’s initial motive must be ethical – a certain value. Thus, the truth. Money (= worth) is not a value…

In 2009, the platform principle led to the so-called extended Circulation, which comprised all the participating artists, often more than 20. This brought in its wake reflections on a situation as a spatially determined action, or an event (“happening”) as a temporally determined action. These are all elements of self-production, including all the necessary tasks for the realization of a project (applying, organizing and providing technical support, all done by the artists themselves). And of course, the self-evident work in the primary role of artists.

The main point has always been our space, defined as a space of production and presentation – a physical hub where local and wider public life takes place, based on the premise that all those closely involved are independent individuals who participate in collective activities on the basis of their own interests, and this approach enabled consensual action for quite a few years. The originality of the approach was in sharing the space and the resources, rather than dividing the space into several smaller ones. This helped with the so-called socialization, bringing greater awareness of the commons and the personal. It also led to the increased use of the word “modularity,” supposedly denoting the coexistence of approaches (and presentations) that are not necessarily completely compatible, but variable and in a more or less tense relationship with each other.

Self-production (and interdisciplinarity) also contains reflections on how to record events as they occur as automatically as possible, and finally package them into a kind of multimedia product. This involved two parallel software solutions: one on a home computer and one online. Both were designed to include almost the entire set of records (image, video, audio and text material) and compose a combined temporal record. This can be chronological or random. In use from about 2009 to 2016, these two methods were later replaced by more classic approaches to video editing. The dry factuality of the automatic method did not meet the criteria of the editor’s selective ways. In the field of sound archives, a third approach is still relevant: online radio.

Cirkulacija TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HcNSiN4I-g, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWN3j1ZNtso

Online projection of webcam footage: http://www.cirkulacija2.org/wp-webcam.php

Online radio: http://www.cirkulacija2.org/wp-cumulus.php