The new Reboot exhibition is an exploration of aestheticism in the context of the changing environments of our daily life-world. Works featured in the project exhibit not only a profound variety of experimental and investigative attitudes but also an astute sense for the aesthetic being of their works. The results of these attitudes presented in physical objects carry within themselves an ambiguous unity of formal recognizability and unexpected materiality which provoke the viewer to radically differentiate form from contents in a deconstructive performance of entirely new aesthetic reality, irreducible to concepts of design or art-work in general. The curators of the exhibition chose works that convey to us the sense of reality itself becoming a certain spectacle for which this project presents a micro-aesthetic level of one greater aesthetic whole – not a purely the macro-aesthetic which conveys the traditional notions of iconographical, formal, and compositional analysis, critique and interpretation, but micro-aesthetic as a direct link towards the spectacular reality. The micro-aesthetic concerns itself with information, relations and the entropic regimes of our visuality as an aspect of the ‘’world-picture’’ (taken at the same time as the picture-of-the-world, world-considered-as-a-picture and a world-view). Again, these works lie just beyond interpretation as their aesthetic being does not depend on how one critically engages with the art-object but the way one relates often contradicting information contained between its various forms and materials in which these ideas take physical shape, from textile banners to vax daggers, and beyond. They are simulacra, since they only very ambiguously correspond to similar objects found in our ‘real’ daily environment. Samuel Dominguez taps into this simulational aspect through his technological – and purely speculative but profoundly Debordinan, or spectacular- reproductive systems of virtual objects, plants, prints and sculptural arrangements under the glow of an artificial sun (or simply the gallery light) as a metaphor for an ‘imaginative landscape’ in the form of ‘SF ecologies’, as he calls them. This artificial (or Virtual light, title of William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic) emanates also from the small formats of Rene Grgić-Đaković whose works demonstrate well the metastable environment of post-modern painterly expression, bringing the vision of the presently situated future into the environment of a classical genre. They are both speculations on our collective past, preserved in material artefacts and the fictionality of our future as a form of virtual presence, a future with which we are always in dialogue through various forms of our digitalized daily life. Praying on the simulated, virtual and technical are also the works by Denise Maud where representations, or technical virtualizations brought about with advanced technical imaging procedures become themselves aesthetic objects, compositions made up of informational relations and arrangements in space as well as on the surface of the image-like art-object. Virtual ambiguity of an art object presented by Ajda Kadunc further emphasize the spectacular confusion of iconic representation and material reality in which this iconicity is established – here in the form of waxy toy daggers that symbolically fall through several layers of technical-image-reality (dagger as a toy, as a simulacra of a dagger, as a virtualization of a toy,…) before they become contemplative informational phenomena. Ivan Idrish Hidayatulloh shows a video work that extends into the real space through anesthetization of the watching experience, making the video (installation) ambiental in character. His holistic approach to the idea of an art-object being only a nodal point between various aspects of our material being in the world corresponds to what can only be described as an alternative flow of relations that inform a certain new phenomenology of art as an alternative form of life-world experience. Same goes for Ilham Samudra who, with his textile works – wrapped around solid objects with strong materiality – gives a certain ‘soft focus’ to oftentimes monolithically perceived artistic traditions and musealization practices. It reframes the notion of ‘soft power’ into a type of aesthetic discourse which can be artistically articulated and critiqued from the standpoint of daily life in a globalized culture. Thus, in its totality, Reboot 2.0 is – in its totality – a phenomenology of art, a propaedeutic exploration into the aspects of our aesthetic being in the world and the ways in which one might engage with a variety of daily phenomena on a purely visual or affective level, in an attempt to create alternative flows of information as well as new social relations mediated by art-objects and not social-media spectacles.
Curated by Leandra Agazzi and Miran Blažek
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