Throughout April and May 2024, Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art launched two exciting publications and hosted two events in collaboration with art historian and curator Valentina Tanni. These delve into Tanni’s latest research into internet aesthetics and culture while experimenting with inter-format or expanded publishing practices, and are as such part of a broader collaboration between Aksioma, NERO and INC under the European project .expub.
The first publication, the English translation of Valentina Tanni’s latest book, Exit Reality, served as the foundation for this initiative. The occasion also saw the release of the 50th edition of PostScriptUM, featuring Daydreams, Playable Nightmares and Out-of-Body Journeys, a conversation between Tanni and Silvia Dal Dosso. Furthermore, Tanni was invited to Ljubljana to hold two events under the framework of (Un)real Data – Real Effects, Aksioma’s 15th edition of the discursive programme Tactics&Practice: a lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, and a Let’s Play with Marxist media guerilla Total Refusal at the Slovenian Cinematheque.
What follows are some snippets and impressions from these events.
Book launch
Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold
Starting from the advent of vaporwave, which infused the network’s native imagery with spectral qualities in the early 2010s, Valentina Tanni’s latest book takes us on a descent through the levels that traverse the silent horror of the backrooms, brushes against the obsession with sensory stimulation of ASMR, delves into the algorithmic surrealism of weirdcore, and lands in the exploration of pseudomagical practices such as reality shifting and memetic rituals.
Format: 10,5 x 16,7 cm Pages: 264 Language: EN Year: 2024 ISBN: 978-88-8056-254-2 Links: https://aksioma.org/exit-reality https://www.neroeditions.com/product/exit-reality-2
Originally published in Italian by NERO, the English translation of Exit Reality is co-published by Aksioma and NERO, bringing the latest exploration of contemporary internet culture to an international audience
PostScriptUM #50
Daydreams, Playable Nightmares and Out-of-Body Journeys with Silvia dal Dosso
This conversation-turned-essay between Valentina Tanni and Silvia dal Rosso, artist and co-founder of the Clusterduck collective, responds to and expands on the subjects explored in Tanni’s Exit Reality.
Or as the blurb puts it:
Can thought aka theory be as fast and up-to-date as reality itself? Perhaps not, but this conversation […] about internet aesthetics (and, inevitably, ethics) comes as close to it as possible. What are “landscapes beyond the threshold”, why a suffix is more #core than a prefix and how dark has hivemind become in the meantime? Hell, let’s just call it Applied Post-Ballardianism – “we all went to the same pool”, after all.
Followers of PostScriptUM may notice that this milestone publication debuted an all-new visual design for the series going forward.
The conversation was released almost simultaneously in Italian, English and Slovenian. The Italian edition debuted online with NERO, while the English and Slovenian editions were published by Aksioma as free e-publications, with print copies available for purchase. Each version features unique stylistic and iconographic adaptations specific to its format, reflecting an experimental approach to publishing across multiple languages and platforms.
Lecture
Internet Aesthetics: A Journey Beyond the Threshold
In the middle of May, as part of Aksioma’s 15th edition of the discursive program Tactics&Practice, curated this year in collaboration with the artist duo !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Valentina Tanni delivered a lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (ALUO) in Ljubljana, focusing on the symbolic meaning of space—both natural and man-made—in the context of web culture.
In a fun and light, but thoroughly analytical mode, Tanni’s lecture, much like one of those “Iceberg chart” videos, plunges us into the depths of contemporary internet aesthetics and their origins, including vaporwave, liminal spaces—a term which has enjoyed quite a buzz lately—and their cultural implications. Referencing many examples, not skipping of course The Backrooms, but also digging at the roots of this and other phenomena, Tanni ties these themes to the idea of the internet itself as a liminal space, and the boundary between the physical and digital worlds as an open portal, creating a split between body and mind, reality and simulation. The recurring imagery of thresholds, it is said, symbolises a collective desire to bridge this gap.
The lecture was followed by the workshop Open-ended Stories where, together with media guerilla Total Refusal, we learned about their ways of appropriating games to repurpose them for artistic, activist or nonsensical projects.
Let’s Play
Brexit Reality with Total Refusal
On the following day, Total Refusal teamed up with Valentina Tanni to publicly explore the virtual cityscape of a near-future London in the videogame Watch Dogs Legion. The city is not only an illustration of a techno-capitalist nightmare, but also a wild playground for hackers and gamers. What better way to explore the premises of Exit Reality than to dive headfirst into an artifact of some contemporary cultural significance? Thus, the idea of a Let’s Play was born.
Walking, driving, flying and hacking through the digital city in front of a live audience, with the ever-charming setting of the Slovenian Cinematheque contributing to an almost surreal atmosphere, Tanni and Total Refusal discuss the game’s qualities and affects while contemplating an exit from a dystopian reality marked by surveillance.
The day wound down with a pop-up bookfair in the Cinematheque lobby, giving everyone a chance to take home more than just memories, and to linger a little longer in that space where time warps, reality shifts, and we’re left wandering somewhere between here and there.
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With this series of events in Ljubljana, we are taking steps to reconsider how we engage with and disseminate knowledge while bringing together internet culture with practical and more experimental interventions that challenge conventional formats. For more information, see .xpub.