ISkRA residency 2022

For the first ISkRA residency we hosted Maks Valenčič and Enea Kavčič, theorists and writers based in Ljubljana who run the blog https://fastright.substack.com/.

They devoted their three-month residency at Osmo/za to exploring the genre of theory-fiction. They were interested in the extent to which this kind of approach (and style of writing) is suitable for addressing various contemporary themes in the domain of contemporary art and theory, e.g. the liberation of art, reflections on artificial (general) intelligence, the Anthropocene, etc. Theory-fiction in general is an approach that combines fictional and real elements in eclectic ways, where the latter are underpinned by theoretical insights and references, mainly in order to approach in a textual assemblage the dynamism and interdisciplinarity of a world that is difficult to write about. The world is already programming and is therefore faster than writing and its reflection.

Maks Valenčič focused on the relation of theory-fiction to media theory or, more specifically, media archaeology and in what ways key representatives (and their quotes) have a theoretical-fictional substrate. In this connection, he was mainly concerned with Kittler’s famous quotations, i.e. in what ways media determine our situations, how to think the technological a priori in a time of radical mediatization and indiscriminate computation, what is the relation between the a priori in question and similar (or in similar ways deterministic) concepts, as for example Marx’s relation of the base and the superstructure. What does looking at technology itself and finding concepts in it tell us about our reality, about the fact that, as Kittler (and his contemporary Ernst) would say, the coldness of technology (and computation) is constantly speaking through us? During his residency, Valenčič focused on this very productive intersection of theory-fiction and media theory and/or archaeology, which complicates established narratives in a particular way, taking the domain of dealing with time out of philosophy and (re)finally making it media-critical. Let us not forget that Satoshi Nakamoto did not write about block-chain, but time-chain.

Enea Kavčič took a similar path of research, only in her case theory-fiction became an even more psychedelic and delirious practice. She focused on the demolition of classical dualisms, eg between man and animal, reason and instinct, etc., or the way in which these distinctions and divisions are the result of the past and of a past conceptualisation of the world in which the only actors are human beings. Theory-fiction is one of the best media for the dissolution of such differences, and even more so for the theoretical-fictional demonstration of the artifice of such differences. Kavčič thus delved into a detailed study of psychedelics and crazy mushrooms during her residency, trying to deduce the key mechanisms and ways in which mushrooms control the environment through such chemical impulses or stimulations.

The residents also involved Jan Kostanjevec, a philosopher and programmer, in the research process. In addition to extensive discussions about computation and the ways in which abstraction can now be implemented, following the great success of deep learning, they worked together to devise a protocol for sorting the research material. Due to the interdisciplinary nature and the flood of potentially interesting content that successfully combines theory-fiction and classical theory, the systematization of pdf-documents and, above all, Twitter-links is crucial. That is why during the residency they were developing an app that would do just that.