Gildo Bavčević: Can do more! Must do more!
In an increasingly diverse and dynamic environment, we adapt more and more quickly to changes in our environment; the forms and intensities of these changes increase in complexity and unpredictability. In this context, the rapid development and revolution of technology has created new societal realities and social relations. Digital technologies have not only opened up new approaches in recording and processing image and sound, but have also influenced our understanding of the environment within which contemporary art develops. Today, artists not only use non-artistic objects in their work, but also take over procedures, strategies and practices from non-artistic fields. Art is not simply representing reality or the production of art objects, but a means of treating life as an artistic activity. Incorporated into this activity are strategies, decisions, procedures and techniques: life itself is shaped and treated as an artistic phenomenon. Such a work of art is formed in a process, it can only be presented with the help of artistic documentation that uses media to refer to artistic processes and procedures. Further appropriation of various digital media, web networks, and especially social networks, has enabled the re-articulation and use of existing media tools for the purpose of creative cultural resistance.
In this workshop, students will use “life” as an artistic material to be performed, created and modeled by means of artistic processes. Such practices do not produce artworks, but rather transform life itself into art, indicating artistic practice as art, or art as a form or process of living. Students will focus on the living problems of society by researching the phenomena of human cognition, examining social relations and power structures. Using audio-visual media, photography, sketches, drawing, text, ready-made or any other medium as documentation in the form of specific planning and development of their projects, students will present these processes in a digital media environment.
Included are texts by Boris Groys, Peggy Phelan, Amelia Jones, Philip Auslander, Guy Debord, David Garcia & Geert Lovink.