Knots & Nets

Jelena Viskovic’s work focuses on games, leisure spaces, their historical narratives and relationship to memory. Her work incorporates cultural and counter-cultural imaginaries of the Southeastern European regions. She uses simulation and game mechanics as non-linear narrative devices, but also carefully crafted ornamental components built into sculptural and architectural systems, responding to new and archaic technologies, social organisational platforms, and public spaces. Her work has been shown at the V&A, London; Transmediale, Berlin; IFCA, Maribor; Kraftwerk, Berlin; Amaze Festival, Berlin; Electromuseum, Moscow; Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam; AQB, Budapest; Screen Space - Mathew Gallery, New York; Impakt Festival, Utrecht.

The works of Tommy Støckel are centered around found objects, spaces and situations. His projects draw inspiration from our everyday surroundings as well as from digital material, which he recontextualises and presents through a wide range of media. Apart from physical sculptures, his works have appeared as books, billboards, typefaces, emojis, digital games and in-world interventions. Tommy Støckel has had solo exhibitions at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main; Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen; SMART Project Space, Amsterdam and Arnolfini, Bristol. His work has also been shown in The Atlantic Project, Plymouth; CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm and the Gwangju Biennale.

Website Sculpture (panke.gallery) is a snapshot capturing the complex and rich web presence of an exhibition space with a focus on digital or net- based art and club culture –caught at the moment right before the exhibition opening. Tommy Støckel has taken the website of panke.gallery as work material for his sculpture in the physical gallery and mapped the website’s structure and content to use it as the foundation for a new site-specific work. A modular system, where each module represents an individual page or link, registers the website's structure with its long list of exhibitions, events, reviews, etc. and recreates it as a growing entity made up of the history of panke.gallery. If you follow the meandering “arms” of the structure outwards from the centre, you travel back in the exhibition space’s five-year history through the titles of the events copied directly from the website. Titles relating to the context of digital art and technology include such titles as “net.art and the gallery system”, “myspam” and “a=tF2”. Tommy Støckel’s projects investigate the use of found digital material and its transformation to physical art objects –the translation from a digital readymade into a thing to show in an exhibition. Støckel has experimented with artworks that exist as physical objects accompanied by digital versions in the shape of emojis or mobile games, and he has tried to introduce conceptual Land Art in the virtual world of Second Life. Website Sculpture (panke.gallery) is equally an artwork that has a digital counterpart dictating the structure and parameters for the sculpture. Found gallery elements have been used for the presentation in the space.

Ilinx is a mixed-media installation depicting cascading variations of a game called Sprouts, which uses a few simple rules to generate evolutionary algorithmic structures. Three ceramic sculptures, as the game’s starting points, are accompanied by three pastel drawings of possible game-states, and interconnected by an augmented variation of one of the sketches. The various formats of the work can be drawn and redrawn in different locations, including panke.gallery’s openAR.art platform and ilinx.xyz

Ilinx (whirlpool in Greek), in the language of game studies, is a kind of play which creates a temporary disruption in spatial perception, like dizziness and vertigo. This activity presupposes interaction with others, and spaces that afford such disruption. Ilinx is developed in the context of Jelena Viskovic’s artistic research and work about perception, (social) networks and games. It is a continuation of her 2020 game Lamassu which is about the philosophy of metaphysics, developed in collaboration with with Federico Campagna.

Games like Sprouts and the Game of Life engage with complexity in a playful way, dizzying and weirding the dialectical logic of the scientific worldview by using qualitative approaches to games and play. These same approaches are implemented in the design of internet-based media and social networks in an extractive way, instead of allowing users to shape their own systems and network structures as players and disruptors. Increasingly, games and social media are becoming indistinguishable from work. By contrast, ilinx explores the possibility of looking at algorithmic rules: viewing networks as non-productive, but sensory-disruptive, organic, tactile interactions, and dizzying ornamental systems.