ABSTRACTS

Sustainability and capital
Marina Gržinić

In principle, it is possible to state that all the events in today world are brought back to a single event. This event I will name in reference to Santiago López Petit as the impossibility of capital to restrain from exploitation and expropriation. This unrestraintment of capital is the accomplishment of co-property between capital and power. It shows its radical form when analyzing ways of exploitation of people that are the result of new capitalist labour division due to new forms of mobility and postcolonial migration.

Silent Weapon of Extermination
Sebastjan Leban

We need to realize that we are being subjugated by capital and all other mechanisms of control not only on the material level, but that we are also forced into epistemological thinking imposed by the system of power. Any form of resistance towards capital, social inequalities or either bad environmental policy, within such an epistemological thinking does not constitute the real point of resistance and is therefore appropriated by that same system of power. Therefore, new strategies must be developed in order to be able to continue to de-link ourselves from capital and the colonial matrix of power.

How to Make a Digital Handwatch at Home
Janek Simon

During my presentation I will say  few words about  making things at home.

My artistic practice is quite often influenced by three factors:

1. I make most of the things by myself

2. I quite often work with things I know nothing about

3. I usually start working when it's already too late. How my pieces look and work (or don't work) is quite often a result of these factors.

It’s economic growth, stupid! On climate change, mad-eyed moderates and realistic radicals
Tadzio Müller

Social movement debates about climate change are increasingly framed in tired clichés: wild-eyed radicals pushing for a rejection of established climate policy (emissions trading, carbon offsets, other techno-social fixes) against reasonable moderates with tropes such as “the problem is too urgent to wait for the revolution”.

However, there has been only one process in the last twenty years that has led to a significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions: the collapse of the Eastern European economies in the early 1990s; and one that promises to have a similar effect, namely the current world economic crisis, which has reduced demand for fossil fuels. What do these processes have in common? Drastic reductions in economic growth rates. Allthewhile there have been two processes at the international level that have not led to significant emissions reductions: the market mechanisms of governmental climate politics, and attempts to increase the proportion of renewable energies in the energy mix. Is it maybe the ‘anticapitalist radicals’ that have realism on their side, while it is the moderates whose position is just wishful thinking? Do we maybe have to achieve more than a mere ‘greening’ of growth – do we maybe have to tackle our addiction to economic growth itself?

The Subsistence Level Standard Project 1984 W.
Tamás St.Auby

'The International Parallel Union of Telecommunications was founded in 1968 in Hungary under the codename Parallel Course / Study-Track. The goal of the Union is the realisation of the Subsistence Level Standard Project 1984 W. Following its long years of illegality, IPUT opened the first centre in 1975 in Geneva, at the start of the exile of the First Dispatcher. From 1975 to 1979, the preparation of the Five-Year-Plan was in process. Between 1979 and 1984, The Mutant, The Mutant Class and The 24th Canton were realised, and subsequently the practical extension of the Research for Anatomical Immortality came through. The results of the 12-year-long probe of Turba were presented by IPUT in 1996 at the Grotesque Centres in Budapest and in Geneva. In 1991, the Geneva Centre was robbed. Following the 1989 Hungarian State prank, IPUT opened its Near-East-European Homogenous Affiliate in Budapest, and from this office coordinates the post-1984 phases of Myth-Correction.'

A Sustainable Aesthetics: Contextual and Ethical Beauty
Alina Asavei

Unlike Kantian aesthetics according to which something is judged as beautiful independently of what one knows and values (which constitutes the paradigmatic sense of beauty in  traditional Aesthetics), the judgments of contextual beauty cannot exclude ethical, ecological or environmental concerns. We are not simply “stricken by beauty” but on the contrary: the judgment that something is beautiful diminishes, disappears or is even replaced by repulsion if one’s ecological or moral values are confronted with a “destructive beauty”.

Sustainability in the Face of Hard Reality
Alan Watt

The Environmental Impact of Contemporary Art
Maja and Reuben Fowkes

The international gatherings of the art world are resource intensive, relying on an invisible hinterland that stretches across the globe. Events typically involve a large number of flights, bringing participants and audience large distances for short stays, while exhibitions require the transport of artworks by plane or road, or the production of new works using a wide variety of non-renewable materials. Exhibition spaces have to be lit, heated or cooled, and often substantially modified with temporary walls and other installation structures, the publicity for events typically involves the conspicuous use of glossy paper for disposable handouts, while openings often bring excessive consumption of luxury food and other perishables. This presentation considers how to develop a model for assessing environmental impact that is relevant to the concerns and special qualities of contemporary art.

Home
Speakers
Programme
Abstracts
Booking
Blog

Marina Gržinić, Middle Class War Pig

Sebastjan Leban,
Still from the video Lecture–Performance; from the series Contemporary Structures of Colonization: Silent Weapon of Extermination

Janek Simon