Daniel van der Velden – Metahaven, Dzina Zhuk & Nikolay Spesivtsev – eeefff, Jan Brož & Michal Landa - Parallel Practice
Panel Discussion I
Blurring the distinctiveness between images of the real and the virtual world shifts the question of the plausibility of a photograph even further. The defenceless pixels of the images involved in advertising and election campaigns, images used as proof in an online article, or digital records archived for security purposes are easier to edit than their analog predecessors. By combining the appropriate graphical design with an image, not only do artists seem to bring (perhaps) an actual message, real research, or a trusted pre-election survey. The questions of how to manipulate the contemporary virtual reality, behind what facade the most sensitive data are hiding, and why is it important to let yourself be fooled by the same techniques as the advertising industry, will be discussed by a member of the Dutch group Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden), the Russian artistic duo eeefff (Dzina Zhuk & Nikolay Spesivtsev), and the Czech experimental and graphic studio Parallel Practice (Jan Brož and Michal Landa) with German performer and journalist Sabrina Apitz as the moderator.
guests: Daniel van der Velden – Metahaven, Dzina Zhuk & Nikolay Spesivtsev – eeefff, Jan Brož & Michal Landa – Parallel Practice.
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Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden)
is a politically minded design, research, and art studio based in Amsterdam. Founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel Van der Velden in 2007. As graphic designers they are challenging the usual relationship between the client and designer, proposing themselves to carefully selected individuals and subjects their corporate identities and design solutions. They have written a string of books that explore the politics of graphic design and visual propaganda—including 2015’s Black Transparency—and worked on projects with the subjects like Sealand, an off-shore micronation which played an iconic role as a data haven during the “dotcom” boom or WikiLeaks and L.A.-based artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst (Herndon’s album Platform), amongst others.
eeefff (Nicolay Spesivtsev and Dzina Zhuk)
is an artistic duo of independent artists, researchers and activists that explores technology’s impact on a human and ways how to hack the present day to find ways for alternative tomorrow. They combine artistic practices with computer science, economics, science fiction and creating software and hardware hacks and tools.They contextualise digital city infrastructure, problematize human-non-human interactions and focus on horizons of desires of IT-workers. They participated in festivals and exihibitions such as Work hard, play hard! in Minsk (2017), Momentum – 8th Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art (2015) or exhibited in ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Paranoiapp, 2015).
Parallel Practice (Jan Brož & Michal Landa)
is a studio based on collaboration between graphic designer Michal Landa and artist Jan Brož, which was created in 2013. The idea behind this experimental studio is to find a pathways between the applied and the free as well as between the commercial and the cultural. The identity of the Futura Center for Contemporary Art in Prague has become the first and backbone collaboration project, and other projects include, for example, the design of the A2larm news site or the redesign of the Euro economic weekly magazine (in cooperation with Mütanta). The studio was awarded at the 27th Brno Biennial in 2016 and won the The Most Beautiful Czech Book Award for authors under 30 years for the publication of Second Nature in 2014.
Sabrina Apitz
is a freelance project manager, moderator and curator. She has conceived and organized international conferences, symposia and workshops in the areas of culture and digital society. She is an instructor at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and she also works as an editor and journalist, including for the Berliner Gazette, Wikimedia Deutschland. She is a co-founder of the Europäischen Gemeinschaft für Kulturelle Angelegenheiten (EGfKA), a Berlin-based theater collective which has combined post-dramatic and classic forms of theater with well-founded theoretical work and a clear political orientation. Sabrina Apitz is recently involved in long term search through Snowden Documents.
