Falling Through | three performative lectures
Agnieszka Antkowiak is a Polish artist and researcher associated with the Institute of Network Cultures. She graduated in Cultural Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. She also holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Poznan where she currently is a research and academic assistant
in the Photography in Contexts Studio. In 2022 she started the Art & Performance Research Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She works across a range of media probing the technological impact on human unconscious behaviors and its mobilization within the economies of attention, affect and presence.
She is currently an artist in residency at Casino Luxembourg and has exhibited in the UK, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Netherlands and Poland.
Performative lecture on parareal and paraficional where everything falls apart. Who gets to be the girl online? Who gets to be the real one? The performance plays with the notion of authenticity as the dominant fiction of one's own life. Weird things are going to happen during the presentation: wrong photos will be on display, audio and video will not be in sync, coffee will spill, computer will shut down... The vulnerable performer in a desperate move to make everything work will be stripped of the last shreds of dignity and underneath it a hidden message will be revealed.
Morgane Billuart is a French writer and visual artist. She graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. Currently, she is a researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures and studies at the MA Cross-Disciplinary in Vienna. In the era of digital practices, DIY internet belief, and self-help seminars, her practice aims to display diverse forms of faith or beliefs, and howthey are generated nowadays. Often, she confronts these themes and interests with her gender and experience as a woman in the spaces she investigates, questioning how the forces and fluctuations of bodies can help us rethink and criticize the technocratic and digital spheres surrounding us.
Her previous books, the Cloud Is Just Another Sun, and C++, 40 degrees, a bladder infection were both self published in 2021. Her written work has been published online by the Institute of Network Cultures, Do.Not.Research, Boekie Woekie, Blank Magazine, Amsterdam Alternative, and Lili Magazine. Her visual work and research have been shown in Stedelijk Museum, Cooper Union, Eye Museum, Gerrit Rietveld Academy, and other exhibition spaces in Vienna, Amsterdam, Paris, and New York. Raven Heaven is a performative lecture read by the artist while playing the video Game Fly like a Bird. The character guides the audience in this deserted internet land that used to be a grandiose space for MMO's players in the 2010s. But soon enough, players started hacking other birds flying in the game, therefore replicating human nature and violence within the digital space.
Klara Debeljak is a Slovenian-American multi-disciplinary artist and researcher working across audio-visual and text-based publishing. She has a BA in Psychology from Charles University in Prague, having graduated in 2019, and in 2023 she finished Graphic Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She works in chapters that bleed into each other, mapping out a web of causality. Reflecting upon intimacy and identity in the online sphere, radicalized media chambers, the architecture of the internet and dissecting the reliability of opinion and infrastructure through access and visibility. Her work has been exhibited in the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Senegal, Germany and Georgia and she has published with Kajet, Nero Editions, Institute of Network Cultures and Disenz, translated into Italian, French and Slovenian.
In 2021 she won the Designers Write Awards, and published one collection of essays and an experimental art book titled Textile Tings, co-published by the Institute of Network Cultures.
A two-part performative lecture that blends fact and fiction and it is not always clear to the viewer which parts are fictional and which parts are real research. The first part is presenting a speculative fiction narrative on The Butterfly Select, as a contemporary subversive psychological operation dealing with a power and cyber infrastructure transition. Followed by a short actual lecture on the relevance of intertwining fact and fiction in art and hybrid journalism and the problems of AI incest (AI-producing content based on AI-produced content) in the era where narrative is more important than truth.
