LJUBLJANA (SEEcult.org) - New media artist Janez Jansa, founder of Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, started in September intensive international activities, including participation at the group exhibition at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, as well as at the 13th Art Biennial in Pancevo in Serbia, where he presented project DemoKino - Virtual Biopolitical Agora, an anti - entertainment interactive movie.

Related links: www.aksioma.org, www.bijenaleumetnosti.rs, www.a-m-b-e-r.net, www.reakt.org/rendezvous

Artists Janez Jansa took with two other well known artists from Slovenia the name of Slovenia’s economic-liberal, conservative prime minister. Since the summer of 2007, three artists are Janez Jansa officially and with all the papers and stamps required for an official name change. All of their works, their private affairs, in a word their whole life has been conducted under this name ever since.

According to the Aksioma, Janez Jansa is presented at the Ars Electronica in Lentos Art Museum Linz through October 5 at the group exhibition curated by Jurij V. Krpan from Kapelica gallery in Ljubljana. Jansa is participating to this group exhibition with documentation of two performances: Brainscore (co-author: Darij Kreuh, production Forum Ljubljana) and Brainloop, that are exploring a complete fusion between a user and a digital universe by synchronizing an electromagnetic and electric field.

In the Brainscore project two operators act in a virtual reality environment through their avatars. The task is achieved by triggering a command on a console through a system based on the operator's brainwave signals (neurofeedback technology) and an eye movement tracking system.

The Brainloop performance is instead a performance platform that utilises a Brain Computer Interface (BCI), which allows a subject to operate a device merely by imagining specific motor commands. Motor imagery such as "move left hand", "move right hand" or "move feet" become non-muscular communication and control signals that convey messages and commands to the external world.

Jansa’s “DemoKino”, presented at the 13th Art Biennial “Pure Expression” in Pancevo in Parliament of the city of Pancevo from September 13 through October 20, is a virtual biopolitical parliament that through topical film parables provides the audience (voters) the opportunity to decide on issues that are, paradoxically, becoming the essence of modern politics: the questions of life.

It will be presented also at the Italian Experimental Cinema (from Futurism to New Millennium) in Nuovo Cinema Aquila in Rome on November 17, after the last Public Sessions in Sao Paulo and in Buenos Aires.

Jansa will participate also on September 30 at the SmartCity in Paris, organized by Dédale - platform for the promotion production and experimentation in the fields of innovating artworks and new media art, and also at the amber'08 - body-process arts festival in Istanbul from November 7-16, which is largest arts and new media event in Turkey. 

This year's festival theme is "interpassive persona" and approaches today's digitalizing culture from a critical-artistic point of view.

Janez Jansa and two other artists called Janez Jansa on January 28 this year performed Signature Event Context at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, a walking action in the corridors of the Memorial. Each one of them, equipped with a GPS device, covered a different path within the Memorial's structure this way, together assembling a common signature visible only in a virtual space (the internet). During the performance artists continuously repeated "Jaz sem Janez Jansa…” (My name is Janez Jansa). 

Signature Event Context at the Holocaust Memorial puts together three concepts (signature, event and context) from Derrida's essay in complex relation; signature itself is an event which re-contextualizes the site of signature.

Three artists Janez Jansa, one year since they changed their born name into Janez Jansa, will presented themselves at the exhibition “Name Readymade” in Forum Stadtpark at the Steirischer herbst festival in Graz, from October 4-25.

Exhibition curator is Zdenka Badovinac, and it is produced by Aksioma, in cooperation with Maska and Forum Stadtpark.

Thre artists will analyse for the first time the effects of their gesture of changing names in an exhibition. All of the exhibits are immediate products of reality: Jansa, Jansa and Jansa turn the relationship of art and life on its head by means of transformation, translation, representation and mimesis. While above all art was redefined in the past century by a reality, Jansa, Jansa and Jansa want to achieve the exact opposite by penetrating deep into their own real lives and into the life of their immediate environment.

The book “NAME Readymade”, published by Moderna galerija (Museum of Modern Art) in Ljubljana, brings together different essays and documents on name changing and on the recent work by Jansa, Jansa and Jansa.

Authors of essays are Blaz Lukan (The Janez Janša Project), Amelia Jones (Naming Power and the Power of the Name: Janez Jansa Performs the Political in/for the Art World), Zdenka Badovinac (What is the Importance of Being Janez?), Misko Suvakovic (3 x Triglav: Controversies and problems regarding Mount Triglav), Catherine M. Sousloff (In the Name of the Artist), Tadej Kovacic (The Right to (the Change of) Name - A Comparative Judicial Survey), Aldo Milohnic (Ready-Name (Over-identification through Over-multiplication), Antonio Caronia (Identity, Possibility, Rigid Designators: On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Janez Jansa and Concerning Systems), Lev Kreft (Name as Readymade) and Jela Krecic (Janez Jansa as media phenomenon).

Aksioma is member of the Association of NGOs of Slovenia, and it's activities are supported by the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.