17/10 2019
Marko Gutić Mižimakov – ”Cruising the Manifold, Disoriented.”
A short review of Summer Sessions 2019 residency
During the two-month Summer Sessions 2019 residency program in V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, Marko Gutić Mižimakov developed the piece ”Cruising the Manifold, Disoriented.” It is a sort of a hybrid between the spoken word recital and visual essay composed of pictures generated by AttnGAN machine learning process which translates the text to image. The piece is presented in V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media on December 6, during the ”Summer Sessions 2019 (Kunstavond XL)” exhibition.
”Cruising the Manifold, Disoriented.” is a spoken word live act manifesting as a meditation on a carpet. A poetry recital set to a backdrop composed of GAN depictions of queer landscapes with the occasional affective clone (3D figure).
A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) trained on an image database of common objects in context (COCO) was made to generate depictions of physical spaces from a simplified textual description. Instead of pointing to the algorithms bias for its inability to offer a plausible representation in the form of a persuasive image, this inability is understood as a queer failure, a failure that allows for these spaces to remain fluid, unfixed by the petrifying forces of the pink market.
Bodies marked by a sexual, gender, race and class differences are compelled to search for spaces of freedom and intimacy away from the gaze of ‘ the rest of the population’. Historically these spaces often took the form of gatherings in parks, beaches and public bathhouses. But ever since the post-Stonewall liberalization in which we got recognized as an assembly of LGBT target groups on the pink market leading to the emergence and proliferation of dating apps, these public spaces progressively deterritorialized into the private sphere, further precarizing queer encounters.
Queer encounters are not exclusively sexual. Encounters queer when one comes in contact with (an)other, a moment of touch past the hetero/homonormative. In this spoken word live act, accounts of searching for such encounters on personal excursions to a park, a beach and a darkroom are molded into poetry. A meditation on sensing, (re)orientating and navigating in these unstable landscapes which take form in painting-like, blurry and almost indistinguishable depictions produced by a text to image algorithm.
Summer Sessions 2019 (Kunstavond XL)
Marko Gutić Mižimakov (1992) is a visual artist, working and living in Zagreb. Driven by his curiosity around questions of and from the body his work takes a hybrid form merging performance, video, film and digital animation. He closely cooperates with a number of dance and theater practitioners both within the frame of his own work as a visual artist as well as collaborating on different projects and productions (mainly with Kik Melone, Vigur Gurdu and Sonja Pregrad). He is also an active member of QueerANarchive (Split). He holds a MA in New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, but has also studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts,Skopje as well as Facultad de Bellas Artes Universidad Compultense, Madrid. Throughout 2019 Marko Gutić Mižimakov will curate a program of experimental art and performance at G-MK, a an independent and non-profit contemporary art platform and gallery, dedicated to artistic and intellectual practices looking into the relation between politics and aesthetics. Since December 2014 he is a close associate of the Best.
Summer Sessions are short-term international residencies for young artists that are organized by a network of cultural organizations all over the world. During the program, artists will work in a highly productive atmosphere in which continuous support, feedback and expert supervision is offered. The main idea of the residencies is to help artists jumpstart their professional practice by offering them support from a local sponsor to go abroad for a production residency at a host institute.
Photo documentation: Magdalena Orellana
