Universal Objects series
Environments from the Universal Objects series are non-narrative, endless surroundings made of three-dimensional objects. Some of them behave like automatons and perform minimal gestures. Most of these works are made in game engines and refer to the many questions this procedural, generative medium opens regarding its usage and the content it usually conveys.
Infinite space, abstract objects, or humanoid representatives are constantly drawing us back to their origin of raw, generated, digital materiality. These objects are simultaneously actual, real, present, and absent through their ethereal being.
The 3D objects are dynamic, transformative objects holding the possibility of infinite performative action. They act algorithmically – whether to propagate site traffic, advertise, seduce or represent us – while being our own digital ghosts and fetishes. The medium of game engines and three-dimensional objects within the Universal Objects series involves exploration of the “matter” they are made of by opening them up, turning their structures inside out, and testing their clashing behaviours. Exploration of noise has been present in my work for the last twenty years. Over that time the scope of approaches to analysis has expanded – from information noise as a cultural phenomenon to materiality of analogue noise, to noise versus signal in relation to anthropomorphism.
Various algorithms of noise might be understood as the base of the many elements of the digital world. Noise might be a tool that leads to new discoveries and mutations, subversively enabling insight into otherwise invisible streams of signals. Contrary to some other works where noise is almost totally abstract, within the Universal Objects series algorithmic noises, broken objects, their deformations and mutations sometimes gain humanoid shapes in various situations and dynamic environments.
Game engines are generative, procedural, virtual machines within which are numerous smaller machines operating behind the curtain. The larger part of this machine is invisible to us because it operates within a “black box” surrounding, usually of no interest to the average user.
The name of this cycle arrives from archetypal objects that are readily available within databases of objects – how users approach them, how they change and are filled with projected consciousness, with functions, and what roles they are assigned within digital worlds, and how those objects perform within these constellations.
Legacy
Universal Objects: Legacy 1/2
Virtual world art installations
3D graphics, world building, digital sculptures, sound: Tanja Vujinović
Production: Ultramono, 2017
Legacy 1
Virtual world art installation or video work (1:33 minutes)
Legacy 2
Virtual world art installation or video work (6:20 minutes)
Legacy 1&2 questions computer game engines as a medium for the production of contemporary art - its materiality, simplicity of reproduction, and ephemerality of data, through a view into works and thinking of three legendary artists from the history of 20th century art, all of whom were opening up similar topics regarding the ephemerality of art objects: Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, and Kazimir Malevich.
We are progressively handing over our cultural databases to agents of artificial intelligence. Otherwise abstract agents are here gaining avataric shapes in a simulated surrounding where they disinterestedly observe and analyse our cultural heritage. How will deep learning and other techniques for training artificial agents manage to distinguish between the ordinary and Klein's balloon, and any black square and a can from Malevich's and Manzoni's artwork?
Artworks Universal Objects: Legacy 1&2 created in computer game engines are a continuation of a series of virtual environments, also existing in the form of video works. Within the world of virtual environments and in relation to the latest computer technology, we could, paradoxically, run into the word “legacy”, often used for protocols and objects that are not even six months old but have already been surpassed by better performing and updated versions of themselves.
Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, and Kazimir Malevich have, all in their own specific ways, dealt with the theory and questioning of art objects; within Legacy 1&2 we have a “guest appearance” of Manzoni’s cans of Artist’s Shit, Malevich’s paintings Black Circle and Black Square, and aerostatic sculpture balloons consisting of 1001 blue balloons by Yves Klein.
Each of Manzoni’s 60 cans from May 1961 have supposedly been filled with 30 grams of the artist’s excrement. They have achieved the status of cult works of art whose preservation again stirred the international community in the mid-nineties of the twentieth century because of one Danish museum’s negligence that caused leakage from one of the cans.
Klein’s action of releasing 1001 blue balloons was part of his opus with which he researched “zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility”, where, under the influence of Zen philosophy, he strived to enable the audience to simultaneously feel and understand the idea of the work. The action with balloons was reproduced 50 years later during the closing of his retrospective show.
Malevich, the author of the manifest “From Cubism to Suprematism” and pioneer of geometric abstraction, has researched the spiritual within art throughout his entire opus, and from the series of his most reduced paintings, here, we have his legendary black circle and black square on the white canvas.
As in some previous works from Universal Objects, humanoid objects are simulating the consciousness of their surrounding, and now they are placed in a surrounding that has reproductions of the above-mentioned legendary works from the world of visual art, ones which simultaneously open up questions of ephemerality of artwork and its conflict with tradition, establishing new models of preservation and reproduction of artefacts and actions, just as nowadays new forms of interdisciplinary art may still be waiting for sustainable solutions to all of these questions.
Formations
Universal Objects: Formations 1-7
Audio-visual works
3D graphics, video, sound: Tanja Vujinovic
F1: 1,32 minutes, F2: 3,19 minutes, F3: 2,58 minutes, F4: 3,24 minutes, F5: 2,49 minutes, F6: 4 minutes, F7: 4 minutes
Production: Ultramono, 2017
Universal Objects: Formations 1–7 is a series of seven videos showing rituals executed by humanoid virtual objects. These sets of behaviors seem like strict tasks being performed in choreographed rituals. The game these eight bots are always replaying is floating between autonomous and regulated behavior. They coexist in a group while being constantly regulated by the looks of the other bots, which can be understood as the Look, the regulatory instrument that J.P. Sartre wrote of.
As in Noh theatre, slow rhythm, “masks” suggesting states of consciousness, emphasized gesticulation, movements that are inspired by movements of Zen monks, but also movements that have roots in martial arts are all creating an endless non-narrative that embodies repressive forces of technological surveillance and the transmission of consciousness to the digital domain.
Park
Universal Objects: Park 1/2/Garden
Virtual world art installations
3D graphics, world building, digital sculptures, sound: Tanja Vujinović
Production: Ultramono, 2016
Contemplative digital ecosystems occupied by mutated digital objects and bots that perform rituals. Avataric objects, generated locations, and virtual flora seem to be dependent and attached to one another.
What type of the post-digital placeholders we use to get in touch and intervene into the panorama of the networked grid? What bio-political ideologies guide us in these processes? Are virtual spaces just a testing ground for the processes that will soon be available due to the proliferation of biotechnology and synthetic biology?
Park 1 & 2 examine the status of virtual spaces to host content that questions utopian and dystopian reading of technology. Contrary to the typical computer and video games, here there is no score, speed nor adrenaline fueled activity. Everything is slowed, and the only interactivity offered is the ability to move around the space.
Laguna
Universal Objects: Laguna/Zen_garden
Virtual world art installations
3D graphics, world building, digital sculptures, sound: Tanja Vujinović
Production: Ultramono, 2017
Placed between chaos and order, avatar objects have been treated like explosion particles, with the aggressive effects silenced and slowed down. These environments show the essence of digital objects and their states of being with all the noise they contain and the glitches their frictions produce.
What is our understanding of self in a post-digital world? What containers carry our identities? How do we cope with biological limitations, and how do we shape these containers that we have been placed within? What do we do and hope for in order to transcend our physical limitations and disperse our identities further? How will all these be shaped in the future with further development in artificial intelligence and biotechnology?
One of the most prominent features of simulations is one's ability to appear within the created environment either as a first-person representation which mimics the real-life position of participatory observation or to observe the action from a distance including one's own representation within the space. This remote action at a distance of both cases enables the immersive illusion of freedom from social and cultural restraints and behavioral patterns of real life and seemingly twists the biopolitics of everyday experiences.
Among many problems we might encounter with such seemingly passive activity, “gamers” need electricity to immerse themselves into virtual worlds. The tremendous amount of electricity is being used every day on our planet for the sole purpose of playing digital games, or as some would like to call it - within this type of recreational activity. How can this everyday gaming affect us as species and what roles digital gaming activities have in our lives? How can we mitigate the environmental crisis and the enormous needs we have for energy production?
Universal Objects: Laguna and similar work Zen_Garden are like levels of the same work, created in a computer game engine. Events and behaviors of digital objects show their materiality and liminality and are scattered to form a puzzling landscape. Micro events and so-called non-playable characters or objects are stuck in idle modes, infinitely performing routine tasks. Body parts and bodies as completed and functional units coexist in this habitat of discrete events.
Observers
Universal Objects : Observers/Levitations
Video work, 1:44 minutes and digital prints
3D graphics, video: Tanja Vujinovic
Production: Ultramono, 2015-2017
Avataric objects, representations of semi-abstract agents of artificial intelligence that are constantly crawling and regulating space around us, have the role of observing, analysing and classifying data. Avatars observe iterations of themselves displayed in a gallery environment.
Placeholder Images are made for virtual worlds Park 1/2 as a stream of collisions and glitches of avatars' body rituals. Levitations is a series of seven digital prints of avatars caught amidst ritual levitations created for virtual worlds Park 1/2.
Explosions
Universal Objects: Explosions
Four channel audio-video work, 16 minutes
3D graphics, video, sound by Tanja Vujinovic
Production: Ultramono, 2015-2017
Explosions is a work containing four scenes of exploding objects. Only for a brief fragment of time are we able to see the delicate objects before and after they start exploding. These events are silently observed by a group of avatars.
Amidst the technological revolution which is spreading to many previously separated realms of knowledge, generating new disciplines and provoking new experiments, what type of previously non-existing matter might we generate along the way? New life forms are emerging in the shape of hyperrealistic life forms and behaviors, simultaneously happening in vitro and in silico. Scientific research and biohacking labs enable interventions within genes and their coupling - what these new entities provoke and oscillate towards their surroundings? Synthetic biology (in vitro) and computational generative synthetic life forms (in silico) - lifelike, organic particles, plant matter, steel, concrete, glass particles, plastic - all of these particles are turbulently mixed up within a vortex of simulated matter. We are progressively handing over our cultural databases to agents of artificial intelligence. Otherwise abstract agents are here gaining avataric shapes in simulated surroundings where they disinterestedly observe and analyse our cultural heritage.
Bff
Universal Objects: Bff 1/2
Audio-video works, 2:50 minutes each
3D graphics, video, sound by Tanja Vujinovic
Production: Ultramono, 2017
Universal Objects: BFF 1/2 are two psycho-scape vignettes about the heaviness of online life, about the depths of shallow relationships and their implications on the cosmetic appearance of avatars.
Surfaces of screens, projections, desktop simulations, and application windows - it seems that every encounter happens at the very surface of things, in seemingly immaterial apparitions of multimedia constructs that erect and disappear at the click of the button. Yet the users are deeply emotionally invested in virtual worlds and their specific narratives.
How do we portray and place ourselves into the contemporary lifeworld? What type of the post-digital placeholders do we use to get in touch and intervene into the panorama of the networked grid? What bio-political ideologies guide us in these processes beyond superficial ones like instant gratification and improvement? What is considered aesthetically pleasing in processes of body constructions within virtual aesthetic surgeries? Are virtual spaces just a playground for the changes and processes that will soon be available due to the proliferation of biotechnology and synthetic biology?
While asking myself these questions, I am also developing a speculative narrative that ties all the works from the circle about what might potential futures hold. Simulations that we have delegated to represent us, our object representatives which are also our comfort and transitional objects, our capsules, are surface objects, simulations of hollow, inflated geometrical shapes of variable resolutions and textures. Users' representational images (icons, thumbnails, avatar objects) in cyberspace have a life of their own. Detached from their users, they represent imaginary fleeting moments and interactions staged for the mediated post-reality. Forced positivity, good mood, ecstatic behaviors, and facial expressions have a backside of constant tracking and analysis of other users.
Mindfulness
Universal Objects: Mindfulness
Audio-video work, 10:14 minutes
Video, audio recording and editing: Tanja Vujinović
Production: Ultramono, 2015
Mindfulness is a record of meditation in the otherwise noisy, crowded place of online social gaming environment Second Life. As principles of fashionable mindfulness dictate, the avatar is trying to be aware of its surroundings, to breathe in the atmosphere and to remain in the moment of digital blissfulness.
References
Bogost, Ian. Unit Operation: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. The MIT Press, 2006.