Black Market: 6gb ending embodies the concept of a fully automated future. Designed with decentralized IOT networks in mind and imbued with the spirit of the most sophisticated parametric design, this is a highly integrated, self-developing system of differentiated parts enmeshed in circuits and informed by flows beyond our capacities of comprehension. These are automated landscapes that reveal the operations of even our most handy smart devices as human exclusion zones. Keeping things running in the depths of oil wells, on the sea bed, in the walls of our cities and in the exosphere, massive amounts of M2M communication are bypassing binocular-visioned hominids populating the Earth’s surface as they look at images on screens. The more technology resembles ecology and becomes integrated into complex systems of planetary computation, the more invisible its operations become to us. Black Market: 6gb ending’s individual links and the quality of their interconnections are engendered by computer-enabled design and in the end materially treated the same way auto body parts are, with automotive paint, petroleum jelly, silicone. This anonymous technology with yet unknown applications hijacks the logic of the exhibition format to perform its hyperstitional sorcery, exorcising the last anthropomorphic or/and anthropocentric remnants from technological design. Technological innovation has always overhauled its own function. It is as if the driverless autonomous vehicle had been crafting itself into existence ever since the human driver has been becoming obsolete, already “when required to use muscle to operate the trireme”. (A. Leroi-Gourhan) The tendency of technology to bypass and exceed its instrumentality (for humankind) has pervaded and motivated a history of human attempts at stopping the machines or merging with them – both aimed at keeping their hands on the wheel (or at least remain inside the cockpit of a self-driving car) and steer the development of technology towards human-oriented goals and applications. Black Market: 6gb ending takes neither a techno-optimist nor techno-pessimist position, giving in to neither utopian nor dystopian visions of the future. If it points towards integration, we will not enter any future techno-ecological circuits in our present (physical, cognitive, social) form. If it proposes technologically driven emancipation, it is the emancipation of the technologies themselves. Black Market: 6gb ending also reconfigures (or perhaps automates) the avant-garde’s wager on the transformative potential of new technologies; nothing human makes it out of the future Black Market: 6gb ending anticipates. Anticipation here unfolds on the visual and material level, using attention centres trained on sleek images of the digital economy to lure the viewer into a visual engineering situation: “Here, the visual is a placeholder for the not-yet-defined intensified field of activity that will emerge in art’s place. Now art no longer merely interprets the operations of greatest importance – it joins them. Space exploration. The planning of military invasions. The mutation of neuron connections. Transnational covert operations. Corporate structure and hostile takeover consulting. Hedge funds. Research on quantum computers. Processes of self-learning AI. Spaces between words.”
Production: Mednarodni grafični likovni center, Postproduction: Zavod Aksioma