November, 8 - 25, 1999

Introduction: Branko Cerovac; translation: Vesna Hrzak

LOGO-NATURA
Auto-mimesis of the post-humanized Nature
/Operator/camera & digital animation:
Štokelj or Baudrillard’s Automatically Self-recording World

Tour 1997-1999

Bill Graven’s introduction to the W.W.Anger’s exhibition (Headquarter/Import - Export – Freizeit)[1] has encoded an art-historian title: THIS IS NOT LUNCHEON ON THE GRASS. If I were supposed to write the introduction to Bojan Štokelj’s project in dialogue with Graven, I would entitle it with the question/commentary simulation: ISN’T IT?

Congruently to my point of view and my interpretation of the ‘natural’ origin of Štokelj’s titan-like ‘logos’ and 'omina' (from 'omen' - as in religiously understood  BOOK OF NATURE) his artistic testimony of the intended phenomenon ‘behind’ or ‘in front of’ or ‘beyond’ all phenomena of the Fractal Fysis (Natura naturans & Natura naturata!) subverts passively accustomed and ubiquitously established idea of a postmodern theory: image has primacy over Being (Virilio/Grawen). Moreover, it subverts the idea about the ‘LOGO’ (‘stamp’, ‘imprint’) as something that contaminates and degrades the supposedly wild landscapes of freedom to mere labels of ‘IMAGE’, without any mediation or process of reaching up to the fundamental Trans-aesthetic level of doubting the Primary Difference and destroying the ontological status of ‘fissure’ between ‘ the first’ and ‘the second’ nature, as they are denoted. It is the same fissure as the one between the sublime ‘logos’ of so called ‘Nature’, abstracted from Heraclitus, Pitagora, ‘man’, history, culture, industry, tourism, Marx /Gates /Žižek /Strehovac (consequently, the entire TECNOCULTURE)…and ‘on the other side’ – the ‘logos' of multinational companies, parties, ideologies and movements, as something ‘artificial’ in the sense of the extreme separation from the supposed ‘essence of nature’.  This fissure is artistically ‘expressed’ through the beloved LANDSCAPES as a GENRE of painting, photography or even film. 

Štokelj is, actually, doing the artistic aggression on such a concept that differs Nature from History, the form and logic of the Logo from the form and the logic of the naturalistic-metaphysical SIGNATURA RERUM. The cybernetic artist reveals that behind everything lies the same ‘root’, ‘source’, ‘primary cause’ and ‘program’, equally related to Marx’s nonexistent virgin coral islands as well as NATO’s invisible planes.

Namely, the Fractal Geometry of Nature (‘Landscape’) destroys the illusion of mechanical connection/editing of the ‘two’ supposedly impossibly differentiated extremes of our global Landscape (Nature/Civilization); - it is the 'matrix' generating the picture of the world that threatens to crash the naive philanthropic ‘ecological awareness’ of the last twitches of this millennium. 

(See "The Matrix", 1999, Warner bros. and its type of cyber-romance and 'post-humanism')

Was ist Kunst? What is Nature and where are Its borders, ‘edges’?

The Coca-Cola logo is withering under the Štokelj’s digital sun to ancient fossil skeleton, huge like the mountain chain. 

What caused the death of this planetary dinosaur, let’s say in the year 2999?

It is not the simulation of a commercial add-designer marking ‘game’ with the cheap goal to violently conquer ‘designated’ landscape of desire (freedom?) as Hegelian self-alienated ‘Idea', which did not ‘return’ to itself from its Other-Being as Notion, but as degraded blind ‘image’ (as is the Graven’s description of W.W.Anger's IMPORT-EXPORT-FREIZEIT).

Štokelj’s digital restaurant offers something else: the insight into the genesis and evolution of ‘Being-as-picture’; at the same time the description, typology, animated motion of a cyber landscape – generated, I repeat, on the basis of the ‘natural’ transcendental conditions of morpho-genesis of the Nature-as-Landscape. Our GLOBETROTTER'S animated digital pictures are neither graphics, nor paintings, nor sculptures, nor photo/video projections, but still contain and elaborate all the principles of a landscape as the ‘separate genre’, as well as a self-recorded projection of the autochthonous Nature, untouched by human hand. In fact, this Nature is touched only by a foot of this ‘objective’ globetrotter who is so similar to the first human walkers on the Moon during the Apollo missions from the late 60-ties.

THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE is in that case, only accidentally ‘trapped’ in the computer – as a mechanical limb of the ‘nature’s technique’, that turns every scenery into a ‘tech’ landscape.
Computer functions as a generator of ‘nature’ of the new-sprung world of GLOBALIZATION. IT IS the new-sprung LUNCHEON ON McDONALD'S – GRASS.

Branko Cerovac 1999

Ibid. Branko Cerovac: 

- 'Logos, Logo's and Coral Islands', 1998 - cat. Gallery Bežigrajska, 1999, Ljubljana 
- 'Alien's First Day/NATO' - lecture, cat. /CD of the 5. International Festival of
Computer Arts, Maribor; MKC Maribor, 1999.
- 'Borderbrakers', lecture, International Symposium 'Which Side of the Border', Open University Novigrad-Cittanuova/Public University Poreè, 1997

1 W.W.Anger; Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery, Zagreb, 16.2.-9.3.1999