UNTITLED, 2022/2023

Project Untitled, 2022/2023 is based on the project Untitled (Croatian Pavilion), 2022, which was selected by curator Elena Filipović to represent Croatia at the 59th Venice Biennale of Art.

Apart from the performers, his project Untitled, 2022/2023 is unlike his previous projects due to arbitrary links established between physically remote components. These links are no longer created solely by the artist. They are products of orchestrated collaborations (AI programmers, the choreographer, female and male performers and the AI team), leaving the last word to the decisions taken by AI.   

Every day for the duration of seven months of the Venice Biennale five female and male dancers out of a trained troupe of twenty-five performers waited to receive instructions on their smartphones at 8 a.m. Wirelessly transmitted AI guidelines were anchored in the newsfeeds, i.e. daily analyzed textual data from the lead stories of randomly selected global news outlets such as Arab News, Corriere della Sera, El Tiempo, Le Monde, Bangkok Post, The Namibian or New York Times. AI was trained to recognize and classify a predetermined set of topics by predictive algorithms, including climate change, human rights violations, technological development and military activities. As a result, each and every day the performers would receive specific algorithmically-derived instructions that would take a different turn in accordance with the relevant top stories, and determine the venue where they were supposed to appear, the movements they were supposed to perform, as well as the particularities to focus on during their performances.   

The disturbing question raised by the artist in this project regarding the invisible and prominent AI presence in our everyday life will be revisited once again, but this time against the backdrop of the exhibition spaces at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The visitors will be able to find the information about the venue, exact time and daily news to be enacted by the performers in person while the project is running on the website created for the Zagreb project edition.

COLLABORATORS: Curatorial development of Untitled (Croatian Pavilion), 2022: Elena Filipović
CHOREOGRAPHIC PRODUCTION LEAD: Irma Omerzo
TECHNICAL PRODUCTION LEAD: Tomislav Pokrajčić
TECHNICAL PRODUCTION TEAM: Jan Šnajder, Ana Barić i Sara Bakić (AI tim – TakeLab, Fakultet elektrotehnike i računarstva, Sveučilište u Zagrebu)
DATA ANNOTATORS FOR THE AI DEVELOPMENT: Anamarija Brusić, Bruno de Zan, Ela Đimoti, Barbara Geld, Kristijan Grgurić, Gordana Kolanović Roško, Marija Košutić, Vladimira Milić, Jan Osmanović, Darija Oštrić, Tomislav Smrekar, Dorotea Supančić, Mišo Vojnović, Sofija Žagar 
PERFORMERS: Iva Katarinčić, Tessa Ljubić, Valentina Miloš, Margareta Sinković i Eleonora Vrdoljak
VISUAL IDENTITY: Igor Kuduz
MULTIMEDIA DEVELOPMENT: Mihael Giba
CURATORIAL COORDINATOR (MSU): Iva Rada Janković
PROGRAMME COORDINATOR (MSU): Miranda Herceg
PRODUCER: Tena Starčević