MACHINE LOVES YOU / GIVE US YOUR DATA! (msu 2021)
GLORIOUS ARRIVAL OF UNSTABLE GODS (msu 2022 cro)
This project is a prayer to the unstable gods. We ask for our cancellation. If we are just information, then it is impossible to delete us. This is the prayer wheel we use to pray for annulment. We pray digitally, nft, social media, 3d icons. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia, we have established a temple of data sacrifice. We await the glorious arrival of the unstable gods. It will materialize in our world through the portal of 3d printers and nft forms, as well as digital icons. We are sending you one such materialization.
This project is a negotiation between human live performance and machine performance. This project deconstructs traditional human rituals and connects them with contemporary data analytics. The artist performs a ritualized performative procession daily - he carries a large golden monstrance in public, in the center of which is an active motherboard. He is dressed as a priest of our time, in white laboratory equipment. The reactions of people live, which are recorded, are compared with the reactions of the audience online (live feed on social networks and web site). A monstrance with a computer motherboard is actually a wireless data transmitter.
The data is thus sent to the Data Temple (the physical space) where it is analyzed and visualized, using publicly available software (Dall, etc.). The data thus visualized is displayed on the altar. The monstrance returns daily from the public performance to the Data Temple space and occupies a central place on the altar. Data were collected and visualized around it on a daily basis.
Finally, the physical parts of the Unstable God are printed on a 3d printer. Heads, arms, bodies… Man and Machine are united in an effort to create a new common functional Being. Data: about the movement of the procession, on the personalities who interacted live or online, activities on social networks, search engine results, etc. are united in the anthropomorphic deity of our time.
Using rituals and liturgies, the human performer consecrates the inorganic body of the Unstable god that came out of the 3d printer. The ritual connects the plasticity of data with human interaction, personalities, the time in which we exist together, people and machines. Like all other icons in the history of human negotiation with powerful forces, this one can be revived by its function, worship by believers, interest in networks, or material value at auctions.
(The project began in 2022 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. It then developed through six digital pilgrimages. Each pilgrimage, live and online, produced six digital ecstasies, states in which human and machine bodies met equally. Finally, on the altar of everything personal six ecstasies became the algorithm that created the Unstable god).