09. Dec 2020
Omsk Social Club: Examining the Transmogrifying Panopticon
Talk @ International Festival of Computer Arts
Live stream: Wednesday, 9. Dec 2020, 19:00 / mfru.org/live
Using their own work Real Game Play as a departure point, Omsk Social Club will examine the use of Fiction-Theory in its unabridged living form. Exploring the modes in which terraforming life becomes not only a task of survival but also a task of crafting reality positions for better or worse in our current world and how we could collectively hack these systems to manifest imaginative living, transformative social presence and alternative landscapes before others do it for us.
Zen Flesh <> Zen Blood
Omsk Social Club is a roaming collective, it sprawls and recoils depending on its form or output. It was established in 2016 and performs itself as a facilitator of role-playing environments inside the contemporary art world. The Artist Group works closely with a network of core and public players, everything is unique and unrehearsed. The game designs and installations are created to examine virtual egos, popular experiences and political phenomena. Allowing the works to become a dematerialized hybrid of modern-day culture alongside the participant’s unique personal experiences. In the past Omsk Social Club has introduced landscapes and topics such as the ontology of the avatar, rave culture, survivalism, catfishing, desire&sacrifice, positive trolling, algorithmic strategies and decentralized cryptocurrency.They have exhibited across Europe in various institutions, galleries, theatres and off-sites such as Martin Gropius Bau, House of Electronic Kunst Basel, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, HKW, Berlin, CCCB, Barcelona, Volksbühne, Berlin and Stems Gallery, Brussels. They have been included in 6th Athens Biennale (2018), Transmediale Festival (2019), The Influencers (2018) and Impakt Festival (2018).This year they will co-curate the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah.
The lecture is co-organized by Šum jorunal and MKC Maribor and is part of the main curated program of 26th IFCA – Infrastructure Complex: Altered Earth