SYSTEM 7; A SITUATION FROM THE "RESOLUTION" SERIES;
Mala galerija (Moderna galerija) Ljubljana;
Photo by Moderna galerija Ljubljana (Lado Mlekuz & Matija Pavlovec)

The importance of communication

Marko Peljhan´s concrete utopias

The work of Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan often includes communication through technology. During the years he has tried out everything from amateur-radio to Internet on his audience. Here Paris based curator Hans Ulrich Obrist talks to Peljhan, who amongst other things offers the world an "apocalypse tool" of communication.

Hans Ulrich Obrist was born in Zürich in 1968. He is an international editor and curator. Since 1993 he is in charge of the programme "Migrateurs" at the Musee d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. He is the curator for Museum in progress, Vienna (since 1993), and the migratory Museum Robert Walser (1993). He is also the founder of the Nano Museum (1996), co-founder of Voti - Union of the Imaginary (1998), co-founder of Salon 3 (1998), Elephant and Castle, London, and a lecturer at the University of Lueneburg in Germany. During 1999 some of his projects are "Cities on the Move V", at the Hayward Gallery, "Laboratorium", Antwerpen Open and "Sogni/Dreams", Fondazione Rebaudengo. Hans Ulrich Obrist lives and works in Paris, Vienna and London.

Special thanks to Zdenka Badovinac and Igor Zabel
This interview was published in Art Orbit #3 www.artnode.se/artorbit

HUO: Let's start with your new series of work.

MP: System Seven is the first in a series of new works called A Resolution. This will be a series of works which will give very physical and practical solutions to certain problems of society, the art system, cultural policy and so on. It's really entirely different from my previous body of work.     There are three different fields that I'm really engaged in: one is performance, the other is a more constructed model with real physical work and useful things (like Makrolab) which have a purpose, and this third one which begins with this new series. It has a sort of double coding: on the one hand it is formally sort of entering the appealing side of art, and on the other, it is giving (again) definite practical and applicable solutions to certain problems. I conceived this specific piece after reflecting on my work when I was in Australia. When I was so far away from home I could see things differently, and the news was coming from home about the U3 Triennial of Contemporary Slovenian Art, and so on.

HUO: So that was at the time when you were in Australia and you heard about all these provincial and also nationalistic reactions to Peter Weibel's exhibition in Ljubljana?

MP: Yes, there were some comments like that, but it was a generational and conceptual split between the two or more contemporary art schools in Slovenia in the first place. One reacted to the other. It had to do also with cultural politics. It's not just that people have different opinions, it's also that some of the people who have different opinions have power. So, since I was invited to do a work in Mala Galeria, which is a very prestigious place in the middle of the city, I decided to do a piece that would deal with all this.

"Projekt Atol, namely, which started in 1992 and has, up to 1998, been developing on different levels and in different ways, included a lot of communication between different people. I decided to do a tribute to them because there are all these people behind famous works that people don't realize they exist."

HUO: At the same time, the gallery is like a shop window, which is nice because it is very open to the street and can be seen. The viewers see the piece and the piece sees the passers-by.

MP: Yes, this was the idea. I said I would do a piece dealing with all this and also providing some clues and also, in a way, reconstructing my relationship to all the people I work with. Projekt Atol, namely, which started in 1992 and has, up to 1998, been developing on different levels and in different ways, included a lot of communication between different people. I decided to do a tribute to them because there are all these people behind famous works that people don't realize they exist.

HUO: Like photographers and ...

MP: Photographers in the first place and then people like designers, technology engineers, programmers, architects, the actors you see in the performances..

HUO: Leon Golub once wrote this text against the ideology of two dimensions and against three dimensions, for an oscillation between the two. Your piece seems to oscillate in that way, between 2-D and 3-D.

MP: Yes, it has this quality. I realized it later when I really started to work with editing. I noticed sometimes that things become three dimensional because of the setting, and I use this to imprint the allegory. It was a kind of battle with myself not to do something nicer than it is. There are also a lot of hidden messages in the weapons and elsewhere. Messages that are written throughout the whole piece.

HUO: Like rebuses?

MP: Not rebuses, but there are words which appear on different objects and on people.

HUO: Are they logos?

MP: Not real logos, but some of them are reconstructed logos. For example, on the radio equipment you have a logo, but it's not the logo of the radio company who built this equipment, but the name of an Italian comics writer, who had a big influence on the person who has the radio. And the logo comes back with this musician whom I worked with for ten years; it's like his main identification point. I included things like that which are meant to be noticed by people in the know.

"When I started to construct this I suddenly realized there are twenty-three people in the core collaborative group, and then maybe ten satellites. But not for every project."

HUO: So there are different readings. I recently did an interview with Douglas Gordon where he pointed out that for him, the 90's are mainly about the promiscuity of collaborations. In previous decades you had established teams of artists working together all the time, like General Idea or Art and Language You had fixed constellations, whereas in the 90's you have much more fluid constellations. I think all over the world there is a lot of collaborative practice between different disciplines, but in always changing teams. For me your piece speaks about that. Multiple collaborations with ever changing teams, and at the same time you seem to work with several people fairly regularly. How does this all work?

MP: When I started to construct this I suddenly realized there are twenty-three people in the core collaborative group, and then maybe ten satellites. But not for every project. What is also interesting is that a lot of these people, after working with me in the beginning, started their own careers, and it was very enjoyable for me as a personal experience, that when I called them all up, everybody came. I was starting to think, "Why did I think they wouldn't come to take the pictures and hold the guns in their hands?". You couldn't know this, but five of the men in the picture are conscientous objectors who weren't even in the army, which I think is quite a high percentage for one picture (laughs).

HUO: When you say that a lot of these people went on to start their own careers, it reminds me of Andy Warhol's Factory.

MP: Well no, I wouldn't put it so high. We were, and still are, very young. It was just a certain moment in time, 1992, when things just started coming together. And then in 1993 I met some more people, then some more in 1994, and in 1995 the influx was over in a way. Then these people slowly started to work on their own things. But of course there are also people in this picture who have had very long careers and are also my collaborators.

HUO: That was also true of the Factory; there were people who had music careers already and those who didn't. What I mean basically by the Factory dimension is that you make visible people who would not normally be seen; they become protagonists. This brings me to the question about Guy Debord and image of warfare in the media. One cannot help thinking that all these tools and prostheses, like the Internet, have been invented by the military complex. The game of Guy Debord - which is a part of your show - even more underlines this war dimension. Could you talk about this aspect of the piece?

MP: This has been one of my main preoccupations over the past four years. In 1995, I wrote a problematic text called "The Art of Intelligence and the Art of War Making". This text was spawned by my experience in working on the UCOG-144 project, which stands for Urban Colonization and Orientation Gear.

"And then you think about the Internet, how it was invented and why. Suddenly, you realize that almost everything that surrounds us, technologically (even though some people would not agree with me and I've had arguments in the past about this), comes from the military-industrial complex, one way or the other, visibly or invisibly."

HUO: This was more on the performative side of your work.

MP: Yes. It was a performance but employing technology and technological models which were strictly and directly from the military-industrial complex. My first question was how to reflect these tools. I started communicating with the producers of these tools. They started sending me letters, more and more of them, and they became very amusing. And then I started to play the game, too. I started to ask for more information from all these different companies in the defense industry, from electronics to more sophisticated weapons. This is sort of an ongoing project which I will unveil when it stops at a certain point. There is quite a pile of communication with the military-industrial complex where they address me: "Dear Mr. Peljhan, thank you for contacting us. Here is what we can offer you." And they are selling commercial navigation systems for rockets...

HUO: So this is really on the market; it's available to everyone?

MP: It's available to everyone because it doesn't include the explosive material. The explosive you can buy at the right time, it's so simple. And then you think about the Internet, how it was invented and why. Suddenly, you realize that almost everything that surrounds us, technologically (even though some people would not agree with me and I've had arguments in the past about this), comes from the military-industrial complex, one way or the other, visibly or invisibly.

HUO: Sometimes it's very visible. I was sitting with Jonas Mekas in a cafe in Paris and he had this very old "bullet" camera that he was permanently loading and unloading. It was really like a machine gun.

MP: There it's very direct. I decided that it's very important to reflect this aspect because I work a lot with technology and I am faced with this ethical "maybe". As boys we were always playing war games. Then suddenly war happens. First the small war in Slovenia in 1991 and then the war in Bosnia. One of my larger Atol performance pieces was about the war.

HUO: When was this?

MP: In the spring of 1993, which was not even a year after the war in Bosnia started, and it was all about the war. What was very interesting and frustrating here in Ljubljana was that nobody noticed it. There was a complete misunderstanding.

HUO: How did you come to the title Atol?

MP: Atol comes from the word for the atoll islands in the Pacific. It has to do with the isolationist strategy that I also write about in my lecture.

HUO: The one for your Documenta project.

MP: Yes. There was always this utopian vision, because there was always some physical territory designated as the territory of this small community.

HUO: Was there a Hakim Bey reference, in terms of the Temporary Autonomous Zone?

MP: Well, I didn't know about Hakim Bey then, but of course when something is called "temporary autonomous zone", and if you read the description of what Atoll is and tries to be, you see they have some kind of relation. When Hakim Bey was is Lubjana last year we did this conference in Ljudmila on "Beauty and the East". I don't know if you heard about it.

"Strangely enough, after showing this work yesterday I was very surprised because the work is very appealing at first level. It's like a nice piece, which is not very characteristic of my work."

HUO: I read about it on nettime.

MP: I also talked about him at this conference. His work has a different edge to it. Mine is much more applied. His is more mantal and individual.

HUO: His is more like a concrete utopia.

MP: Yes. I'm always trying to develop Atol. It's like an ongoing battle with myself and with my methods. Strangely enough, after showing this work yesterday I was very surprised because the work is very appealing at first level. It's like a nice piece, which is not very characteristic of my work. They normally look like very applied things (even though it's a performance) with everything sort of hanging from the side. The same with Makrolab. Of course Makrolab could be enjoyed by people who know Archigram and so on.

HUO: Did you design the architecture?

MP: I worked with an architect. There is a whole booklet tracing the process of how this architecture came about. Maybe we should publish it (laughs) because it's very very interesting. The first Makrolab concept was a concept of micro performance, a "very performative" model on this structure. This structure was without a roof, but it was meant to be for a long term performance.

HUO: A kind of stage.

MP: Yes, a kind of stage for a performative model, but one which was designated to be time based, for very long periods of time. Then, there was the combination of this performance model and the experience of working with technology directly, like the Internet. I started using the Internet by coincidence when we worked on the Kandinsky piece. This piece was again sort of reflection of a tool. Makrolab was a piece I designed when I started to use computers in my work. The experience and notion of a historical avant-garde was always very important for me, especially in the formative period when I was at the theater academy.

"The originality was again spawned by a collaboration, this time with a hard-core programmer who is one of the protagonists in the painting. "Listen", he said, "we shouldn't do this in normal animation; we should do this in computer logic". So we reprogrammed the whole sequence so that it became real-time animation, so that what you see is what the computer is actually calculating when you're watching it."

HUO: Did you refer to Chlebnikov in your Documenta text?

MP: Yes. Chlebnikov is sort of a main reference for me, but then so is Kandinsky's writing. For the theater, Kandinsky was the first one in history to actually materialize an abstract performance. There may have been others we don't know about, but Kandinsky was the first to have built an abstract theater performance and to have clearly stated it as such; this was the "pictures at an exhibition". So I took "the pictures at an exhibition" and my computer and then asked myself, "If I were Kandinsky and I wanted to make something abstract, what would I do?". So I used "pictures at an exhibition" and this tool, but not in a way that just anybody could use it. The originality was again spawned by a collaboration, this time with a hard-core programmer who is one of the protagonists in the painting. "Listen", he said, "we shouldn't do this in normal animation; we should do this in computer logic". So we reprogrammed the whole sequence so that it became real-time animation, so that what you see is what the computer is actually calculating when you're watching it. This is a very important little element. We don't use a translation model, a language; we use the machine language. The abstract spawned from the material world; the immaterial and the material coming together (because computers are still somewhat unknown to us). Of course there are models you can explain, like in a microprocessor. It's quite simple; it's on-off all the time. But there are so many operations that our imagination can hardly deal with it. We don't really understand each time we use it how complex it is.

HUO: In any case it's not about representation (and this is also true about Makrolab) but about dynamics of becoming, about complexity.

MP: It's not about representation. This is the first piece that has a representative facade. It's like that because it's set in this particular space with this particular theme. I use the most appropriate medium, which I feel out and then study. My first idea for a work here was also on the notion of the street and movement, but it was much more logically based. Then I decided, "no, it is time for a statement" -- after the reactions to my appearance and to my work at Documenta. On one level people there tried to understand what was going on, but on another it was dismissed.

HUO: It was physically visible also, with maximum exteriority of such a large scale exhibition. But at the same time it was a laboratory which was somehow immaterial.

MP: And it was also physically removed from the exhibition by 25 kilometers.

HUO: Was that your decision?

MP: Yes.

HUO: Why?

MP: Well, just as I decided to be here at Manifesta on a very direct level, the decision there was that the work needed to be isolated.

HUO: Yeah, you can't have a laboratory where you have a million people passing by.

MP: Absolutely, it doesn't work. I even wanted a more remote space but they couldn't give it to me because it was a mess. I had five locations to choose from but only this one was nice.

"Everybody, especially in the digital art world, is preaching about the complete uselessness of space and the notion of space disappearing. I think that the condition of the world is telling us completely the opposite, that we have to rediscover space and dimension; we have to really understand where we live."

HUO: You mention a lot the time-based dimension of your work. There also seems to be a link between the three different levels you were describing at the beginning. As when you say that Makrolab was linked at the beginning to the idea of inventing a "performative" space. At the same time in your text about Documenta you talk about the necessity of creating or inventing spaces, almost as a resistance to the disappearance of space. Could you talk a bit about these notions of time and space in your work? In the 90's there has been a lot of discussion about time becoming more important than space in art; "time-based art" to use John Latham's term.

MP: I had my experience with "time-based" art; I did a performance and made some videos. This experience provided a clue to what was missing. It was of course the spatial dimension: but not space in terms of gallery space or the space you are occupying which is pre-defined by some social code. The space that you define, the unmapped space. So, I conceived the UCOG (Urban Colonization and Orientation Gear which by its title is about rediscovery of urban space. Tthis project is still going on, by the way; the problem is that we have some serious problems with software because we came to the limits of the technology. I'm planning this work for Sarajevo and I think it's perfect for their situation: the rediscovery of urban space in Sarajevo is sort of a moot task at this moment.

HUO: We talked yesterday with Sadar & Vuga Archtitects here in Ljubljana . They just had a show in Sarajevo where they showed photographs of buildings, ruins of skyscrapers from the 70's. One of the central skyscrapers was being rebuilt and the first company to occupy it was Ericsson. So, before there was a basic reconstruction for primary needs, there were mobile phones and DHL. As they told me, it's all about communication.

MP: This again speaks about the need for physicality. You would need cellular phones or DHL if you didn't still and always need to move in the spatial dimension. It's sort of a sign of the times. The first communications to happen between Bosnia and the outside world were the airlines. Everybody, especially in the digital art world, is preaching about the complete uselessness of space and the notion of space disappearing. I think that the condition of the world is telling us completely the opposite, that we have to rediscover space and dimension; we have to really understand where we live. I created Makrolab as a sort of colonization (but not in the negative sense) tool, because it always has to reflect where it's set. You set it somewhere, and then what? You have to see where you are.

HUO: Is it looking for a place?

MP: Yes, absolutely.

HUO: It won't be established in a city permanently; it's on the move, right?

MP: It's on the move.

"As far as relations between objects and representation are concerned, I never make an object for the object's sake. Either it has a practical use or it has a very definite temporal dimension and a lot of content."

HUO: In the break you mentioned the Tactical Radio Toolkit piece, which is interesting to talk about in relation to this exhibition because it's an oscillation between object and a process. Apparently it's more about an object, but in reality it's also about a process.

MP: The Tactical Radio Toolkit is a piece designed very quickly, because the decision to make it was last minute. So it had these ugly appendages. It wasn't very appealing for the general art public. It demanded a lot of attention which is inherent in my work. This piece here is the first one that uses a direct appeal. You come in and you see a nice picture with nice people, and you don't have to think anymore if you don't want to. With other pieces there were all sorts of enigmas inside. For example, with the Tactical Radio you had to put on the headphones and stay there for half an hour to directly experience the thing. It was a whole complex story. It really demanded time. My experience in Documenta was very frustrating at the time. So, at Manifesta I will use the "dumb method", a very simple touch screen, so that people can really use it and get the information. The interface will be much more intuitive. In Documenta I used an interface which I thought was intuitive because I worked with it all the time. It was absolutely not intuitive; it was like the enigma hall of the exhibition -- this black box full of information that you couldn't get out. I now realize that not everybody thinks like me and uses computers in the same way; it's a different world. I'll use more intuitive approaches in the future.    

As far as relations between objects and representation are concerned, I never make an object for the object's sake. Either it has a practical use or it has a very definite temporal dimension and a lot of content. With this specific allegory here, System Seven, this is very clear. Every one of the nineteen persons here in the picture has his own story and can read the painting his own way. There is also a board game and a sound generator, so to actually experience the work you have to be in there to look and listen.

HUO: It's participatory.

MP: On a very subtle level, which is fine for a gallery on a street, because people don't have time. If you have four minutes it's a lot nowadays.

"In the early 80's when there was not much communication with the outside world, every night a few of us would go to our radio club and spend the whole night talking to people around the world, then go to school in the morning."

HUO: Can you talk about the mix of media? You use the Internet, computers... and the radio also plays a role in different pieces. Complementary media..

MP: In one of my projects I invited people to build their own radio. This interest in telecommunications is very old for me because as a kid I was a radio operator. In the early 80's when there was not much communication with the outside world, every night a few of us would go to our radio club and spend the whole night talking to people around the world, then go to school in the morning. I think it was a very formative experience; it gave me the opportunity to communicate at an early stage.

"It would work on high frequency short-wave and be encrypted. It would of course have its own power supply and would work when all kinds of other communications (satellite, etc.) break down; it's an apocalypse tool."

HUO: Pre-Internet.

MP: Pre-e-mail, pre-Internet. It was strange communication. Amateuer radio communication is something you have to experience to understand what it's about. It's scary. It's a world with very definite codes -- about not being political, or racist. This notion of not discussing issues or content, of just affirming contact, is very frustrating. When an amateur radio operator called, you just talked about, "Oh, my signal is very nice. How is your signal?" "How's the weather?" "The weather is nice." "Do you have a family?" "Yes." Talking about your family is already political so you don't talk about your family. You have millions of ham radio operators around the world with very strong communication tools for spreading content, which they don't use. It's like this force which is waiting for a tragedy to be turned on. And when the tragedy is over it's turned off. So you hear "there's an earthquake... amateur radio operators called in saying everything is fine", and amateur radio operators played a positive role in the war in Bosnia. It's like a reserve waiting to benefit society, but it doesn't guide. It's really problematic. I'm trying to fight the battle to actually organize people who would use short wave radios in different ways than ham operators. One of the projects that I'm preparing (it's a very practical and not very artistic project) is to link all kinds of new media centers around the world.

HUO: You were talking about your Atoll project and the idea of a type of communication that would function when all other systems break down.

MP: The idea is to create a system for communication and distribute it to potential users. It would work on high frequency short-wave and be encrypted. It would of course have its own power supply and would work when all kinds of other communications (satellite, etc.) break down; it's an apocalypse tool. I think this is very important if we are talking so much about communication between people, of media and media criticism, and also about art. But artists are not so interested in communication. Art is more about distribution.

HUO: It's a great last statement.

MP: I feel this; because I entered the art system from the side and I discovered that it's very similar to performance world where it's all about distribution and a lot of money is involved.