performative situation
In a minor corridor/hallway a hybrid of stage/cat walk is definded by:
A broken line on the floor, a spot light , a small audio set, a surveillance camera with motion sensor, and a remote control.
On top of the corridor, on the floor, one will find a bunch of anonymising clothes.
The parts of the costumes can be freely mixed, used in asignifying ways (trousers as hoods, etc.)
The participants are dressing, activating music and spot light, starting dancing along the line towards the camera on the other end of the corridor. The recording of the camera is triggered by a motion sensor.

clothes – anonymisers
The clothes are multiples of two different costumes: the MacGhillie suit and the „kotomisi“, both in different versions of colours and sizes.
MacGhillie is a camouflage suit, who shows neither the traits of an individual, or even of a person. The socalled MacGhillie Suit’ was originally invented in the 19th century for hunting and that was later also used during the First World War. Its camouflage effects the anonymisation and the neutralisation of the person who wears it in public. MacGhillie, oscillating between the hyperpresence of a mask, and visual redundancy.
kotomisi denotes a traditional piece of clothing of female slaves (before and after liberation) of the former Dutch colony Suriname in the 17th century .Throughout 2 centuries it had been developed further by its wearers. The multi-layered cothing is a complex knitted fabric, encompassed of latent codings. In its manifoldness kotomisi represents a vis a vis to the figuration of MacGhillie. Both figures,due to their erratic surface and opaque historic and cultural connotation, withdraw in its moment of appearance from decipherment.
This withdrawal points towards a failure in the constitution of an „image“.
This interests in the context of a control society which is characterized by individuality, profiles, behaviour patterns and cybernetic presence.
The shells of kotomisi and Macghillie resonate the processes of identification and classification and lead them into a void. Becoming void provides an experimental potential in dealing with indeterminacies and intransparencies.

line-dance
The line is a spatial intervention on the floor, describing a relationship between dancer and audience. The dancer focuses on the relationship towards the audience -in this project a virtual audience, invisible behind a camera. The line opens up an identification with the dancer: In the 70ties version a new proud afro-american self-awareness was performed via clothes, hair style and and black music.

In this version an anonymised dancer approaches the camera/audience – the details of the costumes are resolving, the identity oft he figure is dissolving the nearer he/she/it comes. Parody and travesty are blending with the dance style. The right/fun of/for opacity (Edouard Glissant) is explored through experimental dress and dance codes.

Soul Train – video channel
One week long line-dances are performed, recorded, archived, edited and published on a web tv channel. The channel can be subscribed in order o be informed about new video postings.

sound
7 different sets ( for seven days) of „black“ music, recorded locally could be used for the Soul Train input ( remixes of the 70ties soul music).

workshop
a workshop on questions of camouflage, anonymisation, urban „blindness“, prepares the participants for the staging of their Soul Train.

context
A critical renewal of a form of broadcast, which opened up processes of identification for discriminated parts of society. In the 70ties the optimism of the afro-americans to install towards white american publics different cultural, social, political identities in order to stop racism and discrimination failed . The over-identifications of the afro-americans with soul music, black hair style and funky dress codes enabled new stereotypes, and prepared an easy integration into „white“ consumerism. Similar can be desribed today in Hip Hop, Rap and Pimp culture.
Is it possible to produce a Soul Train which withdraws from identity culture and recognition?
What does it mean not to be recognizable?
To be a non-transparent, opaque, vague, undetermined voyager in a Soul Train?

material
http://kr-soultrain.blogspot.com/

images
http://kr-soultrain.blogspot.com/2011/01/soultrainflur.html

kotomisi – non essential mix Vol 1 is a diagram of ornaments and voices, clothes and foldings, performative inventions , audio pieces, and radio tracks.

link to Performance-videos: kotomisi /as not / MacGhillie

exhibitions
Shedhalle Zürich, “connect”, 14.7.-11.9.2011
Moscow Biennal, “DADA Moscow”, 22.9.-30.10.2011
Museo Maga, Gallarte (I), 25.9.- 29.10.2011

kotomisi denotes a traditional piece of clothing of female slaves (before and after liberation) of the former Dutch colony Suriname in the 17th century .
Througout 2 centuriers it had been developed further by its wearers. The multi-layered cothing is a complex knitted fabric, encompassed of latent codings.
The processed patterned fabrics of the costume passed translocal productions- and distribution processes between Europe,
Africa and America. The fabrics represented the commodities and even the means of payment in an already highly globalised slave trade.
They were often named after news events – thus they became news carriers. They even became media themselves: The way the parts of
the costume: skirt, jacket, headpiece, were worn, informed about the social status and property situation of the slave, and about the
occasion the costume was worn at. Furthermore the foldings of the headpiece expressed feelings of the slaves and enclosed and
communicated clandestine messages.
The ornaments of the fabrics, which were printed in India, Europe (i.a. Switzerland), referenced the African origin of the deported slaves
(mainly Ghana, Nigeria), as well as former European fashion styles. A person wearing a kotomisi transform into an overcoded figuration
which is tricky to decode and highly ambivalent. It refers to slavery and discrimination, as well as to self empowerment and emancipation
from supression and control.
In its manifoldness kotomisi represents a vis a vis to the figuration of MacGhillie, a figur former developed by knowbotiq. Both figures,
due to their erratic surface and opaque historic and cultural connotation, withdraw in its moment of appearance from decipherment.
This withdrawal points towards a failure in the constitution of an „image“ – it cannot evolve due to an intransparent figure ground relationship.
This interests in the context of a control society which is characterized by individuality, profiles, behaviour patterns and cybernetic presence.
The shells of kotomisi and Macghillie resonate the processes of identification and classification and lead them into a void. Becoming void
provides an experimental potential in dealing with indeterminacies and intransparencies.

un/mögliche mediale Präsenzen, historische und aktuelle surinamesische Frauenfiguren, Ornamente und Faltungen virtueller
Stoffmuster,historische und aktuelle “Indiennes”, Textilien, die im 18/19.Jhdt auch in der Schweiz produziert wurden, die
als Geldmittel für den Sklavenhandel und später von den (befreiten) Sklaven selbst als Kleidung für Identitäts/de/konstruktionen benutzt wurden -
in bestimmten Augenblicken wird eine Stimme hörbar , als Moderatorin, Sprecherin eines fiktiven Senders für alltägliche, reale und fiktive Ereignisse -
oft auch schweigt sie.

aus den kolonialen Archiven/Tropenmuseum Amsterdam – clandestine Codes der angisa/Kopftücher:
Nach oben stehende Tuchenden vermittelten z.B. den Gemütszustand der Trägerin,
zum Beispiel Wut, Beschimpfung oder den Mut zum Widerstand gegen die Slavenhalter.
Auch Hinweise auf Forderungen nach dem Rederecht: „Let them Talk“ wurden durch Faltungen kommuniziert.

Ziffern n (2, 3, 4, 6) bezeichnen ein n-zähliges Rotationszentrum.
Ein ∗ steht für eine Spiegelachse.
Ziffern, die vor einem ∗ stehen, liegen abseits der Spiegelachsen
Ziffern, die nach einem ∗ stehen, liegen auf den Spiegelachsen
Ein × steht für eine Gleitspiegelung.
Ein ∘ steht für keine Symmetrien abgesehen von den Translationen
Die in jeder Gruppe vorkommenden Übersetzungen werden /*nicht/ explizit notiert.

link: Re/patterning: Cornered/Adrian Piper, 1988 by knowbotiq, from live performance with Eran Schaerf, Zurich 2011

link to Research Blog

macghillie is roaming around, defying a goal, without intention, withdrawing from purpose, crossing the cybernetic loops. macghillie defies classification, attributions are shifted into the void, no will to communicate. recognition does not help. how long this can last in a postutopian space? are there moments for something that does not want to be anything?

Urban sites are visited by a figure, dressed in a camouflage suit, who shows neither the traits of an individual, or even of a person. The socalled ‘Ghillie Suit’ was originally invented in the 19th century for hunting and that was later also used during the First World War. Its camouflage effects the anonymisation and the neutralisation of the person who wears it in public. macghillie, a -prefer not to- figur, an actor without idenity, transforming past and future into here and now, oscillating between the hyperpresence of a mask, and visual redundancy. It traverses the modern urban environment in which conspicuity holds ambivalent currency, wavering between cumbersome affirmation and visual arbitrariness. It is a variation of types like  ‘Bloom’, ‘Bartleby’, or the ‘man without qualities’, which have transgressed their original literary existence and have become the tropes of philosophical debates around the postmodern politics of subjectivity.

The ongoing project consists of :

• macghillie featured by Cabaret Voltaire Zurich http://macghillie.posterous.com/
• macghillie murmuring, withdrawing from self, re-visiting the history of camouflage and cybernetics. voices materialise and self oscillate in a physical space, the coordinates are real, but unknown. the permanent audio sphere can be accessed live online. http://macghillie.krcf.org/1
• macghillie here, there, anywhere. urban remnants. http://macghillie.krcf.org/2
• free access to macghillie-suits in different towns, don`t become a STAR, become macghillie! http://macghillie.krcf.org/

Share Festival, Turin. 3.-10.11.10
Folkwang Museum Essen, Hacking the city, 16.7.-26.9.10
U- Zentrum für Kunst Dortmund, TRUST 31.7.-5.9.10
Karthause Ittingen, Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Schritte ins Verborgene, 20.6.-12.12.10
Expodium Utrecht, Mind the Bollocks!, 7.5.10-11.6.10
[plug.in] Basel, online project beam me up, January 15th to March 14th 2010
Kunstpassanten Zürich, urban intervention November 2009-June 2010
Cabaret Voltaire Zurich, September 09, clandestine 4 days-Performance

A participative dis/play – Is the voice of the piece renarrating a TV-report about a failed and half way interrupted attack of a Palestinian boy on an Israelian checkpoint, or,  unfolding a fictive imagination  about a hybridisation of the suicide bomber with a military robot and its surrounding security architecture into an undecodable  animated being?

huwwara _ anybody, looking will be set up as an installation consisting of different sets, media and viewing formats (audio piece, single screen computer-animation, double-screen interactive video). The installation is based on a re-enactment of a Youtube archived footage, a report of the Israelian TV Channel 2. It enables the observer – “the third position”, an irritating immersion in his/her ways of looking at and perceiving of extremely overcoded media protagonists aside from a doubled gaze/projection towards an apparently inconspicuous, neutral silhouette of a Palestinian city at night.

Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam, 29.1.-31.1 (preview)
plugin Basel, 4.3.10, live -mix
FACT Liverpool,  March 12 – May 23, opening: march 11
Edith Russ Haus Oldenburg, June 11- Aug 29, 2010
Shedhalle Zurich, Überblendungen, October 9 – end of December 10

link to concept/short
link to concept/long

werde los, Funktion, drucklos

[infected, as not] : infection room + urban project — in development

The [infected, as not] project introduces a new figure, an ephemeral urban border crosser, an infected being, into the grey zone of the human-animal distinction. The [infected, as not] are creatures that intensify the zone of indistinction between human and non-human, that are human by virtue of their non-humaneness. More precisely, the [infected, as not] are humans who give testimony to the non-human with simple non-verbal gestures and means in daily situations. For a short period of time each of these figures suddenly shows unknown body gestures or singular movements, savage imaginations, or animal like behavior.
The project [infected, as not] poses questions regarding the relation between human and animal, essentially concerning the animal as the immanent other of the human. Is the human anything else than animal, anything more than a faceless, subjectless being?
The [infected, as not] are temporarily deserting the community of linguistic beings, immediate gestures of becoming animal in urban surroundings, and risking themselves in entering indefiniteness. The ephemeral experiences and actuali- zations of the [infected, as not] cannot be documented and represented in insightful ways. The boundary between parti- cipant and audience are blurred, the participants become contagious, the audience infected. Are these effects reversible?

knowbotic research receives Werkbeitrag für Digitale Kultur, Basel 2010
interview

Opaque Presence / Manual of Latent Invisibilities
ed.: Andreas Broeckmann , knowbotic research

Hacking the City 05.06 – 26. 09. 2010
Folkwang Museum Essen
Kuratorin: Sabine Schmidt

audio: listen to the pizza

video:   http://www.hacking-the-city.org/artists-and-projects/knowbotic-research.html

FEEDFORWARD. The Angel of History

Cleaning up after the 20th century. What is progress now?
The Angel of History addresses the current moment in history where the wreckage of political conflict and economic inequality is piling up, while globalized forces­largely enabled by the “progress” of digital information technologies ­inexorably feed us forward. The exhibition title references Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus,” which Walter Benjamin famously interpreted as an “angel of history” transfixed  by the wreckage of the past that is piling up in front of him while being propelled backwards into the uncertain future by a storm from paradise(progress).

CURATORS: Christiane Paul & Steve Dietz

ARTISTS: AES+F, Christopher Baker, Stella Brennan, Paul Chan, Nancy Davenport, Nonny de la Peña y Peggy Weil, Hasan Elahi,
Cao Fei, Bárbara Fluxá, Daniel García Andújar, Fernando García-Dory, Goldin + Senneby, Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji,
Knowbotic Research + Peter Sandbichler, Langlands + Bell, Jennifer + Kevin McCoy, Margot Lovejoy, Naeem Mohaiemen,
Ali Momeni + Robin Mandel, Carlos Motta, Trevor Paglen, Rachael Rakena, Fez Fa’anana, Brian Fuata, Stephanie Rothenberg +
Jeff Crouse, System-77CCR Consortium, Piotr Szyhalski, Tamiko Thiel + Teresa Reuter, Carey Young

LABoral Centro de Arte, Gijón, Spain, 22.10.2009 – 05.04.2010

knowbotic research, be prepared! tiger!

In April 2004 video footage appeared on the Internet showing two Tamil Tigers proudly patrolling Sri Lankan waters in a boat retrofitted in the shape of a US Air Force F117 Stealth Bomber. In 2006 Knowbotic Research decided to investigate the juxtaposition of a glaring visibility and technological blindness symbolized by the boat and, with  Peter Sandichler, reconstructed a stealth boat and launched it in the Duisburg harbour. The polygonal contours of the boat were jarringly visible among the local boat traffic, but it proved invisible to quayside radar. While the cloak of such radar invisibility did not ultimately translate into invincibility for the Tamil liberation movement, the boat’s shape is a “negative blueprint of the radar-controlled space” of contemporary surveillance society. be prepared! tiger! publicly performs its countermeasures to panoptic algorithms, visibly parading under the radar.

link to project

BlackBenz Race BBR focuses on the often hidden space of Albanian migrants in Switzerland. BBR is aiming to render temporarily visible the dynamics of the Swiss/Albanian migrational space by conducting a semi-fictional car race from Zurich (CH) via Bari (IT), Tirana (AL) and Tetovo (MAZ) to Pristina (Kosovo, UNMIK controlled) and back to Zurich. A number of Swiss or Albanian participants will be recruited to participate in the race with their black limousines. The race is ‘fictional’ in the sense that the primary goal of the participants is not to get anywhere the fastest. Yet it is a ‘realistic’ race in the sense that a group of drivers will physically drive along the entire route.
By connecting all the different places, the cars act as the central metaphor for the project. They provide the infrastructure for mobility as well as a contested status symbol in all cultures; yet by relocating the cars at each node their symbolic qualities are subsequently transformed.

link to project

A NEWBORN sign was circulating  through the media, i.e. New York Times, Syndey Morning Herald, BBC and Pravda, and had been made visible by hundreds of  internet-postings in blogs, Flickr and  Youtube. The media presence made the sign apparently  hyperprecise and generic: One could get any information about the sign: Produced by the global advertising company Ogilvy, the materiality: 4mm metal, colour:  EU yellow, dimensions: 24m x 3m, 9 tons weight, public presentation at Mother Theresa Square, Pristina, premiered at 17.02.2008, Day of Independence of Kosovo with the soundtrack of Michel Bublé ’s “Feeling Good”. Beside this preciseness, the sign is strongly generic. It points towards a new beginning, so radical without offering with which history it is breaking. A sign which fits into each context, but which is also strongly depending on this context.

In the  “NEWBORN testcase ” of Knowbotic Research a heavy truck was circulating with a copy of the NEWBORN sign through Zurich. The rapper EKI NOX, a Kosovarian migrant in Switzerland, was commenting another reading of the NEWBORN sign: the (im)possibility of becoming newborn  as migrant in Switzerland, to constitute oneself newly  in a political space.

link to project

link to video

A fight broke out in Mishimishimabowei-teri during the anthropologists Chagnon and Asch’s stay in this village in 1971. The conflict developed between the villagers of Mishimishimabowei-teri and their visitors from another village.
Adam Curtis, BBC, re-examined the fight 2001 and asked, “You don’t think a film crew in the middle of a fight in a village has an effect?” Chagnon replied, “No, I don’t,” and immediately walked out of the interview.
knowbotic research re-edited the filmmaterials of the anthropolgists and the TV-material of Adam Curtis.

video from a Macghillie performance at Cabaret Voltaire Zurich 2010

“naked bandit / here, not here / white sovereign” […] addresses places where suspects are held, and where their rights as citizens and their legal status as prisoners of war are suspended. In their participative installation […], knowbotic research have created a setting in which the arbitrariness of anonymous free-floating power can be perceived, but can also be made inoperative. On entering the room, we are surrounded by a floating mass of shiny black helium-filled balloons. A silver zeppelin hovers at head height, humming quietly, fragile and light as a feather. The airship, fitted with an orientation camera, is constantly scanning the room. It is programmed to follow whichever balloon is furthest away, but also reacts […] to people. […] It is easy to dodge the airship’s attacks, though our respect for its fragile technology makes us unwilling to hit back. The indefatigable and faceless latent aggression of the “white sovereign”, as knowbotic research call the airship, triggers a fear that at times becomes whimsical fascination.

In this spatially oppressive situation, an anonymous male voice repeatedly utters the words “naked bandit / here, not here” in a tone of command that is mechanically confirmed by a second voice representing the “naked bandit”. In this way, the sound of the installation specifies the vague status of the prisoner stripped of all rights, who is languishing incarcerated – “here” – in a very real sense. But whose legal existence is denied – “not here”.

There is also a computer monitor in the room […] urging us to intervene. “Press button to escape.” The […] instruction is ambiguous. knowbotic research uses the software code as a creative medium, designing and modelling digital actions instead of forms and figures. Not only can the programme be re-started, but it is coded to change itself and make the control functions of the “white sovereign” process inoperative. If enough visitors take the initiative, the programme is re-fomed until it triggers a third voice that interrupts the monotonous dialogue: “Naked bandit: here, now!” The designation puts an end to the bandit’s linguistic hovering – and the motor of the “white sovereign” stops.

link to naked bandit/installation