Erasure as the Language of the Establishment of Post-human Culture (Deleted in the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb in 2022)

Abstract

Our age of digital culture is an explosion of the language of performance and spectacle, and the circulation of self-regulating meanings in all communicative social channels. The claim that identity is performance is long out of date. We have now turned the identity implementation into a manipulation object. For centuries, artists have used the language of theatricalization, excess, multi-layered meaning, and considered subversion a prerequisite for their performance. Such a register is everyday today. Could that be why the linguistic register of scientific research, the discourse of cold laboratory analysis, can become the artistic language of performance of the new era. Is our present-day subversion of the hallucinatory system of data expansion performed in the language of scientific research? The wild dance of the shaman was translated into the language of programming and analysis. I started such a new possible reality of artistic identity as a scientific research, and ended as an artistic project of polyphonic form performed in the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art. The project was developed with the language codes of a scientific laboratory through which a human performer negotiates with the machine gods to perform a common identity.

Keywords

• erasure
• language of establishment
• post-human culture
• digital culture
• artistic language
• artistic identity
• artistic project
• polyphonic form
• common identity