Florin Flueras, Michael Marder, OMSK Social Club, Protektorama toxica, JP Raether, Simon Speiser, Subash Thebe Limbu, Špela Petrič, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, Jelena Viskovic, Lea Vene & Lovro Japundžić, Gediminas Žygus.
21 – 25 August 2023 @ Osmo/za & Cukrarna, Ljubljana
✦ Mission statement
ARIA (Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly) is a gathering of hyperstitional agents, a chorus of in/human voices on a mission to immanentize the eschatological horizons.
ARIA is an exercise in unworlding, unnaming, unlearning, and unbinding the entrenched structures of mankind’s current collective hallucination, so that a second rhythm, a refrain for a second life in the material world can start to emerge; planting the seeds for a second nature and our second bodies as the existent ones foreclose around us.
By engaging in unnatural participation with anomalous alliances through techniques of unsorcery and anthropoforming disguised as play with maximal bleed, ARIA will manifest an arrivant cosmo-grammar from chaosmosis to invoke new intra-world visions.
✦ About ARIA
ARIA is a summer school that takes the form of a a role-playing game. It takes place through the lens of a fiction-theory narrative, bringing together artists, critical thinkers and experts from diverse fields for a blend of closed-door workshops and a public programme.
Imagining new possibilities of what our world can be, ARIA explores theoretical, artistic, and curatorial approaches to ideating, crafting, and inhabiting alternative futures in the context of a changing planetary ecology.
ARIA is structured as an RGP (Real Game Play) designed by OMSK Social Club. The participants selected through an open call engage in an immersive role-playing experience, co-creating the story of ARIA, which provides the binding tissue and frames the activities of the programme.
➤ ➤ Join us in Ljubljana for the public part of the programme of lectures, discussions and a film screening on 22 & 23 August at Cukrarna. Find more information about the schedule and speakers here.
Mentor
ARIA (Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly) is a summer school designed as a role-playing game that takes place through the lens of a fiction-theory narrative. It hosts an international cohort of mentors – artists, critical thinkers, and other experts to explore ways of imagining new possibilities for what our world can be in the time of changing planetary ecology. ARIA is developed by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth and organised in the framework of More-than-Planet project.
How to apply
The open call for participants of closed-door workshops for 2023 ARIA edition is now closed.
To attend the public programme, no registration is required.
Production
ARIA, Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly
21 – 25 August 2023
Public part of the programme: 22 & 23 August 2023
Curated by: Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth
Real Game Play design: OMSK Social Club
Visual design: Olbram Pavlíček
Organization and PR assistance: Lara Mejač
Production: Projekt Atol Institute
Co-Production: Cukrarna Gallery, osmo/za
Technical help: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana
In collaboration with: ŠUM Journal and Grounded festival. The round table “Curating and Worldbuilding practice” is organized in collaboration with the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory.
Programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Public Affairs and the Municipality of Ljubljana – Department for Culture. ARIA is organized as part of the More-than-Planet project and co-funded by the European Union.
Mentors and speakers
Florin Flueras’s work expands into spheres of politics, philosophy, spirituality, health care, media, education, and literature – affecting conventions and certainties, producing performative meetings between art and its outside. With Alina Popa, he created alternative art environments, artworks as Artworlds (Unsorcery, Clinica, Black Hyperbox). With Ion Dumitrescu, he initiated Postspectacle, applying performative tools outside art, like in the Candidate’s presidential campaign. In Love, Unexperiences, Unimages, Unhere, he introduces into public spaces presences and states that can affect what underlies the conceptual and perceptual, what it is possible to think, see, and feel in different contexts. In certain prestigious art events, the works appear uninvited as Unofficial Unworks. Flueras doesn’t see his recent practice as visual or conceptual but rather as affect art. His writing is part of his works, and his works part of his writings. https://www.fflueras.ro/p/florin-flueras.html
Michael Marder is an Ikerbasque Research Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013), The Philosopher’s Plant (2014), Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020), Dump Philosophy (2020), Hegel’s Energy (2021), Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), and, with Edward S. Casey, The Place of Plants (2023). https://www.michaelmarder.org/
Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás is a curator and art historian. She has been curating exhibitions around themes such as the genealogy and social impact of planetary computation or electronic surveillance and democracy at institutions of contemporary and media art – including ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul), Tallinna Kunstihoone, and the Ludwig Museum Budapest – since 2006. In 2019, Nolasco-Rózsás started her curatorial research into the “virtual condition”. She is also the initiator and head of the international collaborative project Beyond Matter at ZKM | Karlsruhe, which brings together several institutions, such as Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the Aalto University.
Omsk Social Club is a stewarded and sprawling collective whose artistic practice is created between two lived worlds, one of life as we know it and the other of role play. These worlds bleed into one, creating a chasm of enquiry that takes the form of a specific immersive methodology, for which in 2017 they coined the term Real Game Play: collective immersion and speculative worlding. From these live iterations, media relics are harvested, such as films, scripts, and large-scale installations invoking states and gateways that could potentially be a fiction or a yet unlived reality. https://www.omsksocial.club/
Špela Petrič is a Slovenian new media artist with a background in the natural sciences. Her artistic practice combines biomedia practices and performativity to enact strange relations between bodies that reveal the underpinnings of our (bio)technological societies and propose alternatives. Petrič has received several awards, including the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement (Slovenia), the Bioart and Design Award (Netherlands), and the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria). https://www.spelapetric.org/
Protektorama toxica is an Artificial Identity, crystallised in 2011, and the root vessel of the lifeline of Protektoramae, a herd of WorldWideWitches. She has worked as a Smartphone Sangoma and an Unholdenschar. In 2014, she forked to become a travelling witch (called globalis), and in 2016, evolved into a Rare Earth Occultist (toxicae). She continuously develops her ritual practice, and in the past, was seen exploring mountaintops, stone circles, and other natural sites without reception, as well as visiting places of advanced technology (such as Times Square in 2014 or Berlin’s Apple Store in 2016). Protektorama’s interventions expose the reality that our most advanced technology is interwoven with what we call archaic or nature, despite our illusion of human mastery over nature and environment. https://www.instagram.com/protektorama/
JP Raether lives and works in Berlin. He attended Berlin University of the Arts and is currently holding a professorship for MA Live Art Forms at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg, Germany. JP Raether and aLifveForms are supported by the Fellowship Programme 2020/2021 of PACT Zollverein (Essen). http://www.johannespaulraether.net
Simon Speiser is an artist who conjures fictional concepts that merge nature with technology. Speiser grew up between Germany, Ecuador, and Bolivia. His experience with nature in South America, especially on his father’s cacao farm in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, has had a significant influence on his practice. He closely follows the development of emerging tech while placing a variety of media and disciplines, ranging from writing, sculpture, weaving and printing to video and VR installations, in dialogue with one another to explore the intersection of art and science fiction.https://www.simonspeiser.de/
Subash Thebe Limbu is an Indigenous Yakthung (Limbu) artist from what is currently known as eastern Nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting, and podcasts. Subash has an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), a BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and an Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance, and science/speculative fiction, and feature the recurring themes of migration, climate change, and indigeneity or, as he calls, Adivasi Futurism. Subash is based in Newa Nation (Kathmandu) and London. https://subashthebe.com/
Jelena Viskovic’s work focuses on games, leisure spaces, and the narratives they produce through time and space. In her research and works, she responds to new and archaic technologies, social organizational platforms, and public spaces. She often appropriates historical artifacts or technologies as if they were games that can be seen as a process, an interactive space, with a playable mechanic that can be tinkered with and modded.
Lovro Japundžić & Lea Vene are independent curators based in Zagreb, Croatia. They work together at the Močvara Gallery, a nomadic exhibition/performance project that operates as a gallery division of the Močvara night club. This “boutique” curatorial programme is dedicated to site-specific installations, performances, and commissioned solo productions, which combine playful and often confrontational approaches towards normative structures. Recently, they have mostly been focused on performance art and productions that often imply provocation or performative situations, re-examining established definitions of choreography and the dynamics between a performer and their audience. Since 2019, they have explored the subversive potential of role play, working with artists such as Trakal, Ed Fornieles, Wojciech Kosma, Billy Bultheel, and Brody Condon; worked on anger as a positive and regenerative tool with collectives such as Young Boy Dancing Group and New Noveta; created a floating lexicon of marvels and catastrophes in a collaborative workshop as part of the R-Lab course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm; and organized performances with artists such as Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Sanna Helena Berger, Candela Capitán, Mina Tomić, etc. https://www.instagram.com/mocvara_gallery
Gediminas Žygus’s practice involves interdisciplinary projects, including music albums, installations, performances, and short films. Gediminas works within the intersection of politics and art, and explores themes such as collective worldmaking and scientific failure. Their broad and encompassing practice morphs and evolves with every interaction, location, and collaboration. They have also collaborated with various artists, such as Holly Childs, with whom they have produced several albums and performance works. Gediminas holds a MA in Film, Design, and Politics from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. https://soundcloud.com/gediminaszygus
