SLIME

Hybrid exhibition

Curated by Joshua Simon

On-site: February 16 – 18, 2024 | Hauptraum

On-line: February 16 – June 30, 2024 | slime.secession.at

SLIME is a unique hybrid on-line and on-site project about our hybrid realities. Taking place at the Secession as an on-site event and as an on-line program, it includes commissioned and historic artworks, talks and performances, screenings and workshops (including one for making actual slime). Taking its name from the children’s toy—a metastable plasma-like substance that has both unique material and tactile features and a constant presence online through tutorials and documentation of people playing with it—SLIME tackles the social, cultural, political, and sensory operations of digital hybridity.

Where we meet today—at the point of realization, as opposed to the point of production—shifts occur in the ways meaning is organized: from strikes to riots, from working class to surplus populations, from solidarity to conspiracy, from organization to petty sovereignty. Digital hybridity enhances finance’s assault on social reproduction. The belief in the digital as an unmediated mode of operation generates sensory and political frontiers that embody this logic—be it ASMR or extreme right-wing politics. Exploring this social phenomenon and its precursors in art, the program at the Secession looks at our political, economic, and cultural realities stemming from the digital hybridity that is SLIME.

At the center of the iconic main gallery at the Secession, artist Francesco Finizio deploys his newly commissioned installation Tickle Drown Thing (2024), which renders the gallery as a kind of disrupted delivery point for picking up your online shopping. Across from Finizio’s work is Elisa Giardina Papa’s 2022 Leaking Subjects and Bounding Boxes: On Training AI. This book and installation present images collected by the artist while working as a human trainer for various AI vision systems. On the ceiling grid towards the back of the gallery, Ulrich Formann is showing his newly commissioned work Echo-System (2024), a planetarium-like constellation of conspiracy networks the artist has tracked on Telegram. On the wall, an enlarged detail from Albrecht Dürer’s print, The Triumphal Chariot of Maximilian I (1518–1522), features the word “Ratio” circled by an intricate swirling line. In online culture, Dürer’s Ratio (Latin for “reason”) has an opposite meaning: it describes a post getting a lot of bad comments, presenting a discrepancy between high engagement and low approval, which the algorithm reads as popularity.

Participants on-site program:

Robert Birchbauer, Albrecht Dürer, Francesco Finizio, Ulrich Formann with Yul Koh, Elisa Giardina Papa, Liv Schulman, Steffi Stanković, Sophia Stolz, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Noam Yuran, the shapes of the sculptures of Franz West, and the birthmark of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

Participants on-line program:

Liat Berdugo, Lulo Demarco, Rrose Sélavy/Marcel Duchamp, Eva Egermann and Cordula Thym, Thomas Feuerstein, Pauline Ghersi, Monica Heller, HaYoung, Shachar Freddy Kislev, Alison Nguyen, Ruth Patir, Oliver Payne, Mika Rottenberg, Liv Schulman, and Lior Zalmanson

Friday, February 16, 2024 

6pm Opening & Greetings

6:30 – 7pm Sickness unto Death | Performance by Liv Schulman

In her signature monologue style, artist Liv Schulman presents her newly commissioned performance piece. Taking its title from Søren Kierkegaard’s book about despair, the performance involves individuation, Cartesian logic, faith in God and its apparent non-existence, as these lead to a commercial opportunity—a new way of approaching capitalism: less rigid, more creative. Guided by the philosophy of a desperate self that is falsified to the extreme, the protagonist of Sickness unto Death tells a story that seems to extend through a series of smoking holes in the walls.

7:30 – 9pm Public Talk by Noam Yuran

Noam Yuran is a Senior Lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society program at Bar Ilan University, Israel. He studies political economy, the history of capitalism and visual media. His new book, The Sexual Economy of Capitalism, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press later this year. In his talk Yuran will explore the condition of living with digital objects.

Saturday, February 17, 2024

6 – 7pm Echo System | Presentation by Ulrich Formann with Yul Koh

2024 is a super-election year in Austria and Europe. In his most analog work to date, data artist Ulrich Forman examines conspiracy theory networks on Telegram. In a planetarium-like setting, the artist will present and discuss the echo-chambers that make a constellation of conspiracy theories. Using blacklight, Formann will depict the shapeshifting elements that gravitate toward and enhance each other, including political parties, media outlets, foreign agents, authentic resentment, and authentic bots. Yul Koh, an expert in the field of conspiracy theory and documentary film, will be present as part of the presentation.

7:30 – 10pm Slime Costume Blowout Cake Extravaganza and Dance Ball

Guests are requested to come dressed up as Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1931–2022) for a costume competition. Temporary tattoos with the iconic birthmark of the former president of the Soviet Union will be offered on site; there will be a Fake-or-Cake tribute to seminal Viennese artist Franz West, with cake versions of his sculptures by cake artist Sophia Stolz. The winner of the Gorbachev costume competition will receive the first piece of cake. Activist and comedian Steffi Stanković will reign as judge and decide on the winner as she will conduct the cutting of the cake ceremony. Guests will be inducted into a TikTok choreography by Zumba® jammer Robert Birchbauer, followed by a TikTok playlist dance ball.

Sunday, February 18, 2024 

11am – 1pm Slime Workshop

Together with the educational team at Secession, we invite everyone, particularly kids—from 6 years and under the supervision of their parents—to make slime from scratch. We will play with consistency, stickiness, color, texture and smell, to make the perfect slime for our videos and to take it home.

*Places are limited to 12 participants at a time, visitors and spectators are welcome to join at any time. Registration is not necessary. The activity is on a first-come-first-serve basis.

2:30 – 4pm Tour in the Exhibition and on Zoom* with Francesco Finizio & Joshua Simon

Guests are invited to join Francesco Finizio and Joshua Simon at the Secession for an exhibition tour, discussing Finizio’s installation Tickle Drown Thing (2024) and more. The event will take place simultaneously in the space and online via Zoom.

*Please bring along your phone and a set of headphones.

4:30 – 6pm Public Talk by Ana Teixeira Pinto

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art and a theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute. She is the editor of a book series on the antipolitical turn, published

by Sternberg Press. In her talk, Teixeira Pinto will discuss the predicament of capitalism with a transhuman face.

Free admission to the entire on-site program.

slime.secession.at

16.02.2024        Liv Schulman

23.02.2024        Liv Schulman

01.03.2024        SLIME@Secession
08.03.2024        Ruth Patir
15.03.2024        Alison Nguyen
22.03.2024        Liat Berdugo
29.03.2024        HaYoung
05.04.2024        Mónica Heller
12.04.2024        Ana Teixeira Pinto

15.04.2024        Shachar Freddy Kislev
19.04.2024        Lulo Demarco
26.04.2024        Eva Egermann and Cordula Thym
03.05.2024        Pauline Ghersi
10.05.2024        Oliver Payne
17.05.2024        Mika Rottenberg 

24.05.2024        Thomas Feuerstein

27.05.2024        Sophia Stolz & Steffi Stanković & Robert Birchbauer
31.05.2024        Lior Zalmanson

03.06.2024        Francesco Finizio & Joshua Simon
07.06.2024        Ulrich Formann with Yul Koh
14.06.2024        Noam Yuran
17.06.2024        Rrose Sélavy/Marcel Duchamp 
21.06.2024        Liv Schulman