Performance and video by Julia Wolf in collaboration with Anni Katrin Elmer, Janis Lejins and Alexander Weiss

Performers: Anni Katrin Elmer, Yoh Morishita, Julia Müllner, Camilla Schielin and Andrea Vezga

Critically engaging with TikTok’s NPC phenomenon, this artwork stages five performers as ‘non-player characters’ engaged in deliberate slow-motion, reenacting the digital avatars’ behaviours. They interact with a depth camera, which captures and streams a first-player view to a screen, reflecting a collective, sensor-driven narrative.

This performance took place as part of the opening of the exhibition radical ⇌ matter: When Materialism is no Longer Enough in January 2024.

About the exhibition:

radical ⇌ matter: When Materialism is no Longer Enough offers a rigorous, playful, interdisciplinary approach to our contemporary real. Set against the hyperpolished atmospheres of robotically automated knowledge systems (RAS), generative and distributive intelligences, and wildly proliferating deep-fake narratives, this exhibition invites you to experience the infinite world of folds, psychedelic/neural sensory camouflaging, machinic aliveness and synthetic encounters – all part and parcel of our 21st century forms of agency, ethics, collective responsibility and new imaginaries.

Dancing ever closer to strangely alive and deeply compelling human⇌machine⇌interspecies co-evolutions, we find ourselves moving away from the old materialist canons of method, rationality and reason that asked: “supposing it could be otherwise, what would your otherwise look like” towards a slightly more graphic, urgent, raw, re-think: “supposing it already is ‘otherwise’”– how does this ‘otherwise’ enable new forms of agency, aliveness, and responsibility in the face of multi-modal generative Ai, non-conscious cognitions, TouchDesigner?

Our initial answers demanded a full ‘stripping-off’. A radical⇌matter that demands: Strip away the old metaphysics of materialism! Strip off the speculative, object-oriented, historical or idealist well-past-their-sell-by-date wine in new bottles! Strip off these old knowledge systems which for so long have occluded new imaginaries, different forms of resistance, poetics, and libidinal economies. Take a walk with us on the wild side – a wild side that is already here, shape-shifting and proliferating.

Artists:

Amir Bastan, Sonia Bernac, Yasmine Boudiaf, Jonathan Boyd, Bernhard Cella, Clarissa Leonie Cohausz, Selina de Beauclair, Sylvia Eckermann, Maximilian Gallo, Johnny Golding, Ivonne Gracia Murillo, Tonica Hunter, Ajamu Ikwe-Tyehimba, Ameera Kawash, Jeremy Keenan, Gerhard Lang, Tina Lechner, Thandi Loewenson, Manu Luksch, Gerald Nestler, Jannis Neumann, Harold Offeh, Julian Palacz, Mukul Patel, Maggie Roberts, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Linn Phyllis Seeger, Dario Srbic, Noor Stenfert Kroese, Tanja Traxler, Shira Wachsmann, John Wild, Julia Wolf

Curatorial Team:
Johnny Golding, Martin Reinhart, Tanja Traxler