ANNUAL MAGAZINE 2012-2014

KIBLA, MARIBOR, SLOVENIA

The Association for Culture and Education KIBLA invited writers, curators, theorists, art/culture managers and producers, artists, critics and others to participate and publish their contributions in the Folio magazine for contemporary art, culture and the joy of life, which is primarily concerned with art-related theory and practice, i. e. interdisciplinary, fine arts/visual/design/drawing/graphics, audio-visual, web, sound and musical arts, as well as with specific borderline fields of performing arts and film within the contemporary, as well as the historical and future European and global contexts

The Folio platform enables to publish and reproduce visual materials/photographs of up to 578 mm in width and 420 mm in height (double the A3 standard format). Artists and creators were invited to publish their artworks, photographs and visual works. We were prepare to welcome all narrative forms, from articles, commentaries, critiques, essays, contributions to the new vocabulary,drawings, reproductions, photographs…

The Folio magazine is a part of the European project Soft Control between 2012 and 2015, which provides the financial coverage of the quality printing of 1,000 copies and promotion and distribution across Europe. Slovene public tenders haven’t provide the necessary funds to support the contributions, translations, proof reading, editing, design and national promotion and distribution of Folio magazine, which amounts to a 50 % co-financing. In this way collaborators and operators of Folio are in fact volunteers. Folio is intended as a means of promotion of the ideas and aesthetics of contemporary artists; their work and artistic contexts in itself may not be considered as an earning instrument.

Previous editions are available at:
http://www.kibla.org/en/sections/folio/folio-online/

The contents of year 2012 special issue of Folio magazine is intended for current times, with a view of the past and an announcement of the future. Which are the crucial and fundamental questions concerning life and the living; the principles and means to judge the world around us; and what is our perspective on the radical changes and possibilities offered to us by modern technologies, robotics, biology, genetics, transgenetics and other sciences?
Folio 2012 was dedicated entirely to the international exhibition “Soft Control: Art, Science and the

Technological Unconscious” with the accompanying educational program, which was created as a coproduction between the KGLU Art Gallery from Slovenj Gradec and the Association for Culture and Education KIBLA from Maribor, towards the end of 2012. This special issue of Folio presents the curator and the artists collaborating in the exhibition and educational program.

Folio 2013-2014

The questions of memory, the storage of memory, and forgetting, were the central themes of Ars Electronica festival ‘13. This festival is being presented, among numerous other themes, in words and images in this issue of Folio magazine, which is a biannual issue. This is a spring issue. Simultaneously, we are working on another, even hotter issue to be released in May, immediately after the spring one.
As we select and sort the themes, authors, interviewees, events, exhibitions, festivals, images and words and paragraphs… we are inevitably creating an imprint on paper, which we can use at any later time for reading, watching, browsing. We store memory (imprints) in the printed form, like we have for the past five hundred years since printing was invented.

The interim stations of this memory, however, are contemporary, technological and binary: each and every letter is written out by means of a string of zeros and ones, while the pixels reveal colors and shapes. There are in fact 256 permutations of the combination of zeros and ones, with eight yielding one byte. The binary coding has been known since the 3rd century A. D. as a simple and effective way of recording information. This is a byte: 01000001, eight combinations of zeros and ones; this particular one, for example, represents the number 65 and is assigned to the letter A.

Just to read through the text of the twenty-two topics, nearly 120,000 words are written down; 2,400 paragraphs; 750,000 characters – and for each of them a sequence of eight zeros and ones is required. To be able to view some 200 images and read 130 pages of text in Folio magazine, we sent 241.5 of MB of data to the printer’s.

It has been calculated that next year, so many on-line videos will be available that it would take some 6 million years to be able to view them all (the space they occupy is measured in zettabytes).

The time you will need to read Folio, however, depends on your interest, on the attractiveness of the individual theme, on your being wrapped up in it, and on dedicating a certain amount of time to it. 6 MB was the size of the programs written at IBM for the moon landing, and thus the equivalent of two snapshots taken by a modern smartphone. As humans, we need to store a massive amount of data to be able to recall even simple words, thoughts, recordings, memories. Folio is one such memory storage – you can recall it whenever you like. Welcome to Memory.

Folio 2014–2015

The Folio in your hands (or on your computer screen) was created during the hot days of May and the beginning of June, at 30 degrees Celsius. The topics are steaming hot as well – from this year’s Venice biennial, across major art events of the past year, to the historization of the nineties, topped with several interviews: Neven Korda, Saša Nabergoj, Aleksandra Kostič, Hanna Hildebrandt, Tadej Vindiš, Damjan Stepančič, Suzi Bricelj. We write about music, art, photography, illustrations, colors, performances, and female and male artists. Numerous cities and venues have been visited by authors, interviewees, writers and photographers. Their texts and photographs carry us on trips to Venice, Izmir and Ljubljana, Maribor and St Petersburg, Trbovlje, Linz, Berlin, Senožeče, Riga, Prague, London and Vinica … In 1971, Italo Calvino published the book Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili); reading it allows us to drift across the stories of cities visited by Marco Polo during his journeys, which he tells to the emperor of the Tartars Kublai Khan. Marco Polo is a young Venetian (though people from the island of Korčula also claim him as their own), who describes the empire and its cities to the ruler, but leaves one city out.

BOOK SOFT CONTROL

Soft Control is a multi-annual cultural project aimed at actualizing culture phenomena which are emergent when art, science and public awareness are interconnected. Soft Control opens scientific labs and theory to artists and offers different educational entities to a wider audience. One of them is this publication – a book that serves as food for thought and presents the basic ideas and concepts. When science and technology meet art, they inevitably raise questions about our understanding and approaches to the selected topics.

The authors of the articles in this book were selected by Dmitry Bulatov, the curator from Kaliningrad and concept author of the exhibition Soft Control: art, science and the technological unconscious in 2012 in Maribor and Slovenj Gradec. The book is a collection of articles by authors from Australia, Russia, Slovenia, the UK, Italy and Finland – all of whom have been active in their creative efforts in the field of art for a number of years. The articles were written in English and in Russian and translated into Slovene for the purposes of this publication. The sources and literature, as well as the authors’ notes point to the broadness of the stated concept and call for further reading and examination. A translation of the glossary of terms is included. Culture and science as branches can intertwine, constructively sharing cultural models of critical thinking, activism and experimentation with scientific methods, research and knowledge.

Link to online version:
https://issuu.com/kibla/docs/sc_book_isuuu