[spectre] New Materialisms (Station 1)

[Darko Fritz]

> New Materialisms (Station 1)
>  
> 15 . 07  - 05 . 08 . 2015
>  
> part of the exhibition-in-progress New Materialisms
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> artists: Petrič / Turšič . Praxis (digitized) . Armin Medosch
> curator: Darko Fritz
>  
> program:
> 15 . 7. 21 h . Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič . informance (information performance)
> 18 . 7. 21 h . Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič: Cosmosapiens and the TerRatop . presentation
> 23 . 7. 22 h . Armin Medosch: What is history? Homage to Praxis, Praxis group and Korčula Summer School . theoretical performance, peripatetic symposion (The gathering between 9 and 10 pm)
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> 
> On July 15 at 9 pm, the exhibition New Materialisms (Station 1) will be open at the gallery grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art in Korčula. The exhibition presents audiovisual installation Voyager/ non-human agent by Slovenian artistic duet Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič. At the opening the artists will perform an informance (information performance).
> The exhibition also presents the digitized archive of Praxis journal, which can be copied by the visitors to their USB sticks and external memory discs.
> Two separate presentations will be held in English: on July 18 at 9 pm Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič will hold a presentation under the title Cosmosapiens and the TerRatope, while on July 23  Armin Medosch will take us for a walk in a form of peripatetic theoretical performance.
>  
> New Materialisms (Station 1) is the first in the series of the three-year program carried out in cooperation of grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art from Korčula, HICA (Highlands Institute for Contemporary Art) from Scotland and Technopolitics, association for development of new discourses in art and science from Vienna. Project New Materialisms explores the nature of auto-poietic (self-organized) neotworks, whereby  HICA's and grey) (area dialogues with partners' organizations, spaces and artists will be extending across Europe through 2016 and 2017. New Materialisms reflects on the historically divergent art practices and related discourses of Concrete Art and Conceptual Art, especially as identified through the 1960s, as Modern and Postmodern, and as understood through the prism of today's post-media approaches in fine arts, and the post-digital condition of contemporary life (where the digital realm is interwoven through all aspects of society). Accordingly, New Materialisms also forms a dialogue between significant artists from this earlier period, who may be seen to be first exploring the territory, and current practitioners, now operating within a post-media context. Thus New Materialisms presents a mirroring of “organismic” states, ultimately proposing aesthetic experience as a significant mechanism in the processes of formation of the physical world.
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> About the exhibited works and presentations
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> Installation Voyager/ non-human agent uses algorithm and data collected from the instruments from the spacecraft Voyager, which since 1977 has been travelling across the universe. Existing space programs focus mainly on understanding the farthest of our surroundings and on developing technological solutions, but tend to overlook the importance of implementing artistic development practices and methodologies in the form of a basic question: What is it like to be a human in space?
> Voyager/ Non-human Agent project investigates the possible art forms in outer space, a composite of art and science, and the processes of science culturalization.
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> 
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> In the frame of the presentation titled Cosmosapiens and the TerRatope Špela Petrič will talk about the influences of the post-(bio)technological interregnum on the developmental challenges of artwork about/with/from living systems. She will discuss issues of authenticity, interfaces and paradigm contestations in connection to her practice and interdisciplinary art-sci collaborations. Miha Turšič, artist, designer and KSEVT (Cultural Centre for European Space Technologies) director will present the ongoing mission of incorporating arts and humanities as constitutional human practices into space exploration programs. For this talk, he will focus on space architecture, non-human habitability and post-gravity art.
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> Exhibition New Materialisms (Station 1) also presents interdisciplinary works based on the legacy of Korčula Summer School and Praxis Journal. The collective of critical thinkers around the journal developed a singular trajectory of humanist Marxist and socialist analysis in the context of non-aligned Yugoslavia. Together with the affiliated Korčula summer school the journal functioned as a hub for the exchange of critical perspectives between the East and the West in the years 1963-1974. In the proceedings of the summer school and the journal participated many prominent figures of the period, a.o. Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre, Karel Kosik, Jürgen Habermas, Lucien Goldmann.
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> Praxis (digitized) is a collection containing the (digitized) issues  of Yugoslav, international, special and pocket editions of Praxis journal. It also contains the journal Problemi and a smaller number of monographs that provide context for the understanding of the work and historic significance of the Praxis journal.  Praxis (digitized) is a part of the project Public Library, accessible at http://praxis.memoryoftheworld.org.
> Public library is a project initiated by  Marcell Mars and  Tomislav Medak, aimed at lobbying for the institution od public library and everybody's right to access knowledge as its fundamental principle. Public library dwells on the possibility of building distributed infrastructure for accessing digitized knowledge, constructed by amateur librarians.  Within the Public Library project, the collection Praxis (digitized) was created by  Ante Lešaja and Tomislav Medak.
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> Besides the archive Praxis (digitized), the work by Armin Medosch, Austrian artist, theoretician and lecturer, also relies on Korčula Summer School and Praxis journal legacy.
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> On July 23 Armin Medosch will carry out the theoretical performance, peripatetic symposion titled What is History? Hommage to Praxis journal, Praxis group and Korčula Summer School that reflects on the mutuality of interrelations among these phenomena. Through series of site specific performative lectures, Armin Medosch will be exploring various notions of materialism(s), historical, dialectical and new. Medosch's performative lecture is an improvised free speech, putting forward the question: “What is History?”. The topic of the second Korčula Summer School gathering, “What is History?” will also be Armin's topic. To speak freely means to get back to the origins of philosophy, to the form of friendly conversation. There will be no script and there should also be no recording going on. One core topic will be Praxis’ specific understanding of reflection theory, according art and culture semi-autonomy in relation to the productive apparatus. Medosch will seek to place Praxis in this respect in a context with Western Marxism and its art theories, including Adorno, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Williams, Jameson and others.
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> Presenting Praxis legacy in manifold forms is also a part of the project History of Contemporaneity, conceptualized and carried out by the informal platform kor::net (Korčula Network), and which includes historiographic research and mapping of highly relevant artistic and cultural practices that marked the promotion of contemporary trends on the island of Korčula in the 20th Ct.
> More at: http://korculanetwork.info/kornet/pages/praxis.
> 
> More about the project, as well artists' bio, at http://grey-area.org/exhibitions/NM1.
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> gallery is open daily from 21 to 22 h
> Put Sv. Nikole bb (close to the town center)
> free entrance
> 
> supported by
> zaklada Kultura Nova
> Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia