Konstanet

Approach and see!
Step into the demo vault!
Guided by the engineer’s sulphur touch,
two days and nights of magic!
The hidden daughter of no-one,
the monosyllabic girl!
A dark seance
of profound mysteries –
Olimpia’s still heart
and beating lungs!

/ / /

Anna Slama & Marek Delong
Curated & written by Keiu Krikmann
Sound by Norman Orro

Young Girl Reading Group 151: Folding City
by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė
2 December, 18.00
ARS, Pärnu mnt 154, Tallinn (room 111)

By pronouncing words out loud, emphasising the relationship of body to text, a collective body is created. YGRG is a sonar-social architecture of shared curiosity and synchronicity. The reading becomes a rhizomatic network of voices, suggestions and references. A vulnerable hyperbody is formed. It is composed not only of particles and molecules that circulate within, but prefaces, dedications, citations, appendices, illustrations, references, notes, diagrams and thoughts which travel in reverse.
YGRG 151 is a further development of YGRG 144 performance that took place at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London as part of In Formation event series curated by Juliette Desorgues.

Reading parts of Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing”.

Performers: Maria Metsalu, Pire Sova, Keiu Krikmann, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė.

Costume: YGRG and Anne Karine Thorbjørnsen.

Sound: Brooklyn Bridge.

After the performance you are invited to stay for drinks, snacks and music with a DJ set by Norman Orro.

Organised by Keiu Krikmann (Konstanet) and Maija Rudovska (BCC: Season of Learning).
Konstanet is a project space operating both online and offline.
Blind Carbon Copy is a network platform for curators and art practitioners from the Baltic and Nordic countries that initiates and supports exchange, connections and education via network infrastructures and interrelationships. blindcarboncopy.org

Supported by Nordic Culture Point: The Nordic-Baltic Mobility programme for Culture, the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
Thanks to Ari King, ICA London and Juliette Desorgues, Safiya LaGillé, Ellenx Tellnobody, and Catherine Prieto Österberg.

Our reality of existence straddles two plains; an online realm and the physical space, often becoming parallel representations of one another. Using this model as a mode of presentation, Coping Copy at Konstanet, simultaneously displays work online and in a gallery space. In Coping Copy, the underlying themes of relationships, technology, and memory are negotiated through video, text, and sculpture. Titled after the 1977 tabletop role-playing game Traveller, Jeffrey Scudder engineered software to create a single pixel continuously moving within a blank screen. Through unconventional narrative, Traveller explores how language and drawing, which is often thought of as poetic expression, has become increasingly systematized by computer software in the attempt to find rationalization.

In an act of recontextualization, Jennyfer Haddad has altered the entire space with two text boxes on opposing walls of the gallery that she has painted entirely half green and half pink. One of the text boxes contains a question that the artist asked google. Opposite of this is the other text box with the resulting answer from another user. Jennyfer’s work seeks to place the viewer in the realm of fantasy, looking beyond the limiting parameters of reality. Deirdre Sargent’s strategic positioning of sculpture and video aims to collapse time, space, and identity through the blurring of fiction and documentary devices as well as photographic manipulations. In her video piece Traveling, the viewer sees two representations of a single woman, distanced by sixty years, engaged in interview, the dialogue exists on its own terms, overlapping the scenes without boundaries. It seems as though Deirdre’s primary concern is to question the limitations of experience once the experiencer has lost the sense of self.

All of the physical and online work, six pieces in total, insert the belief that our contemporary lives are not singular existences, but divided by the digital and the real. The interplay between the work in Coping Copy reveals a non-narrative vantage point. From this, the viewer imbues their own experiences of the self in a symbiosis of form and formlessness.

– Daniel Herwitt

Download and run Traveller on your Mac.

Konstanet is presenting Daria Melnikova’s work at Estonian Photographic Art Fair. Daria shows two new artworks developed as an extension to her exhibition EX-UVIA,  launched at konstanet.com in May 2016.

→ See EX-UVIA by Daria Melnikova.

She was always thought of but never touched. Her soft skin turned to angles, her fertile lands to blocks of colour.

The descendant of “Magic: The Gathering” and first-person video games that are based on explorations rather than solving tasks.

There are five basic lands – plains, islands, swamps, forests and mountains. And you choose one. You are looking into her eyes, the eyes of an exhibition. This is Fuchsia version 3.

Fuchsia version 3 is the last chapter of Maria Metsalu’s project “Fuchsia”.

Music: mobilegirl
Voice edit: Steve Martin Snider
Texts adapted from:
“Dear Esther”  (The Chinese Room)
“Firewatch” (Campo Santo)
“Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture” (The Chinese Room, SIE Santa Monica Studio)
“The Void” (Ice-Pick Lodge, ND Games)
“CHYRZA” (Kitty Horrorshow)

~in search of a ‘happy place’~

There is no physical space I can call “home”, just an emotional bonding that chains me to somebody or something. A fragile image of an unfinished house is like a shell with a tendency to turn into a fossil over the time, highlighting the story that has certain beginning and an upredictable end.

Exuvia, from the Latin word “exuviae”, is a biological term regarding that which is stripped of a body, cast-off skin or covering of various organisms. Although the process of shedding refers to the animal world, I relate these brittle formations and relics to ghost houses devoided of their keeper and comfort maker – a woman. Leaving her exuvia She goes out in search of a better feeling, while the notion of cosiness and comfort in her housing becomes meaningless during her absence.

Here you stand, in front of your future audience. What do you wear?
I still remember the blissful feeling of that morning. The sun was up and people were sitting outside, in smaller and bigger groups, all so satisfied, having a break from intense dancing in darkness with music we all seemed to love. And I missed school. Despite the delight, I doubted if any possible party could make me feel higher in love than working… I guess that’s what I wear deep inside.
Fashion is inherently about change and my work is a continuos search for improved satisfaction.
#zeitgeist

Aren’t you thinking about the body?
Dress can not be understood without the attention to the body. Either the body in its most abstract form or the body as desire. I guess the soul is glad to forget the connection with its body, but social order functions bodily.
#materialism

Paradise Lost
by John Milton
Excerpt from BOOK IV

Southward through EDEN went a River large,
Nor chang’d his course, but through the shaggie hill
Pass’d underneath ingulft, for God had thrown
That Mountain as his Garden mould high rais’d
Upon the rapid current, which through veins
Of porous Earth with kindly thirst up drawn,
Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill
Waterd the Garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the neather Flood,
Which from his darksom passage now appeers,
And now divided into four main Streams,
Runs divers, wandring many a famous Realme
And Country whereof here needs no account,
But rather to tell how, if Art could tell,
How from that Saphire Fount the crisped Brooks,
Rowling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold,
With mazie error under pendant shades
Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flours worthy of Paradise which not nice Art
In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon
Powrd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine,
Both where the morning Sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierc’t shade
Imbround the noontide Bowrs: Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde
Hung amiable, HESPERIAN Fables true,
If true, here onely, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks
Grasing the tender herb, were interpos’d,
Or palmie hilloc, or the flourie lap
Of som irriguous Valley spread her store,
Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose:
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves
Of coole recess, o’re which the mantling Vine
Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake,
That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crownd,
Her chrystall mirror holds, unite thir streams.
The Birds thir quire apply; aires, vernal aires,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while Universal PAN
Knit with the GRACES and the HOURS in dance
Led on th’ Eternal Spring.

This project has been funded by Fundació Guasch-Coranty, a private art foundation in Spain.

ultra violence. weeds that look like chaos signs. in nature. decomposition. dark/safe places. in your dreams/head/ squat. fucked up hell holes/houses [you need to leave.] places you want to go back to, but cant and shouldn’t (desire). in google documents i write 2 you. constant motion. love is poison. 4 u i will always regress. Red Ferrari car share to Adelaide split the petrol w/ the business man ask why he needs to share says he is saving up for his 8th apartment.

places for roses/weeds to grow/die google doc

0% > purità > Innocence > discovery > imagination > #WOM > standard paths > Objects(Material goods) > basic–self > Torpe > Dolo > Subjects(People) > caring > self-definition > 50% > neutrals > Self-Aware Concept > Comfort > fascination > Body Morph > ideal-self > Human Extended > magnificence > 100%

“Body ExTended, Self-Construal” explores how social platforms can trigger a social comparison and dissemination of ideal images between people, which eventually influence the person’s self-concept and gender identity. Due to several communities that started to become increasingly visible on the internet, the individual began to feel an invulnerable affinity to invest in ego and material goods. This is usually caused by self-induced shifts in consciousness which makes personality malleable and where the body assumes a new identity that starts to incorporate the ideal self.

Ideals of beauty and comfort access the human brain in an infinite number of enigmatic values. The compound set of the organism’s observable traits (its phenotype) is not, as might be intuitively assumed and fully contained within the organism itself, but in fact includes several notions of self extension caused by the dispersion of the actual self across various networks.

Partly, the ideal self is molded by several elements of our culture. Body custom products, plastic surgery and even the projection of the ego through online testimonials and photoshopped imagery can help one reach the ideal self and can be seen as instruments of becoming something more. But if the gap between the real and ideal self is larger than usual, then online connections steps in. Gender-switch communities on facebook; statements of body-morphing and gender (or species) swap fantasies shared on DeviantArt forums and through the easiness of 4chan’s anonymity; exposed intimacy on instagram and tumblr… all of these social online interactions implicitly connect and store the virtual conception of how certain people would like to be to the body’s execrable accuracy. “Body ExTended, Self-Construal” gets inside a person’s trajectory between the loss of innocence to the creation of the ideal self where the body image is a product of various social and cultural forces and it is as immediately mutable as if it was a .psd file.
Video: The ExTended Uman. Nuno Patrício feat. Egle Kulbokaite and Dorota Gaweda, YGRG#4 on BCR, 2015

Together, but apart, independent, but grouped – they stand to withstand. Bound by the air between them, bound by their materiality against the white background, they stand, so fleshy. Flesh and mind/ flesh, no mind – which is it?

They’re the group – so still, no walkers. Whatever leaks, leaks slowly. It is not the rapid and violent rotting of the body, it’s the slow decay of industrial matter.

They stand in a fluid state of being, with apparitions and avatars in various forms. They have digital clones, materialised twins, scaled up/down siblings.

Somewhere during their travels they become flat, lose their physical properties and start to travel faster. But having lost their body, it is unclear what can be expected of them, what kind of a sensory experience they would provide. Oozing, dripping, seeping, exuding frame, carcass, chassis, cast, mold.

But there is something that never translates to images – the smell. What oozes, drips, seeps, exudes from the frame, carcass, chassis, cast, mold smells very delicate, it is a sweet fine-tuned smell, intricate like each of the group.

As a group they are stronger, brought together specifically for this brief moment. And after – together or apart, independent or grouped – they are ready to face the next group show.

Text by Keiu Krikmann

POP (free trial)

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Right after purchasing our product the virtual landscape of your choice will be redesigned according to your wishes. We will completely rebuild and refurbish your office, using specialized software, and turn it into a tropical on-screen-dream. Don’t get too relaxed though, to help you remember the weekend hasn’t come yet and you’re still at work we have included some recognizable office equipment in our digital surroundings. But don’t worry, our team made sure the balance between nature and plastic is refined and optimized, so your Zen-mode won’t be disrupted…

Disclaimer: POP is a high-class production-stimulation / relaxation tool. Our product’s concept is born out of modern progressive business philosophies and strategies, using advanced techniques to help you getting ready for a brighter future.

Konst #10: May 22 – June 22, 2014

Greenovation, ecomagination and ecognotion

We are entering a new period of capitalism. To adapt means to be the fittest in survival. Melting polar caps, warm planet, cold people. To take responsibility and move to the next level means your corporation should think in a bigger frame. Since you wanted to do this anyway, now you can do it in the most rewarding way.

Your consciousness was eventually awakened by your longing for financial growth. The organization of your corporation shifts from the two pillar system – customer base and profit – to meet the triple bottom line, which means your business performs in a social, environmental as well as in a financial dimension. Your company is looking after its carbon footprint already – its corporate identity reflects the caring for environmental issues, your products are appearing environmental friendly. Sure your financial sustainability consultant will be happy with the performance of your corporation.

If our future in this ecosystem is endangered, is there a codex that lets us read what kind of actions people are taking to save this planet and where we are heading?. Is it possible to scan the objects, commodities and corporations that are out there, with the conation to do better than with the common unecological means out on the market and find out where we are heading?

Konst #2: August 12 – September 12, 2013

The Perception of Veracity