PERFORMANCE PROGRAMME
a cura di Lýdia Pribišová
ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS AND DESIGN IN BRATISLAVA
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava is a strong and prestigious Slovak university focused on art, devoting much of its efforts to artistic and scientific research, as well as emerging international collaboration within the European education, art, and research areas.
The project To the Rhythm of the Algorithm presents new performative works and explores how algorithms, artificial intelligence, and digital surveillance shape our bodies and our perception of reality.
The students from the Intermedia Department of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia — Tomáš Brichta, Michaela Prablesková, and Julia Pabst — collaborate under the guidance of artist and lecturer Maja Štefančíková and in cooperation with curator Lýdia Pribišová.
Tomáš Brichta: Questions and Answers
The performance investigates the relationship between human beings and algorithms through the risky and repetitive act of throwing a stone above one’s own face. It creates a tension between the desire to maintain control and the constant threat that the stone might fall onto the performer’s face.
Julia Pabst: Just Dance
In this performance, Julia Pabst draws from visual and gestural archives of pop culture and the history of dance, transforming them into an algorithmically generated choreography. What initially appears as a carefree game progressively turns into a demanding algorithmic dictation — the movements become increasingly complex, senseless, and difficult to reproduce. The work explores the limits of the human body within a system that knows neither fatigue nor error.
Michaela Prablesková: Give Me Your Phone And I Will Tell You Who You Are
A performance set in a fortune-telling booth — but instead of cards or a crystal ball, the artist asks the audience to hand over their unlocked phones. From the digital data emerges a prophecy of the future tinged with dark humor, confronting visitors with an absurd choice that could change their destiny.
EXHIBITORS PERFORMANCE
Tao Han: Wrestling With Angels
presented by: ARTRA PROJECTS, Milano
The performance Wrestling With Angels enacts the artist’s entire personal experience of painting, presenting to the audience a non-visual experience within a five-minute period of force and reaction, resistance and contradiction. Gold serves as a metaphor for Tao Han’s so-called traditional and dogmatic system, and the seemingly destructive act is also a satire on materialism. The focus is on the process of transforming the painting’s form, turning the work into a reflection on the intimate relationship between artist and creation, which by the end of the process become one and the same.
Aldo Runfola: Ssuperrationall, Ssupernnaturall
presented by: GAZE – OFF & FRANCO MARINOTTI, Lugano (CH) – Barcellona (ES)
This performative action questions the artist’s current state of health: is he healthy, ill, suffering, or recovering — and from what ailment? Implicitly, Aldo Runfola also seeks to test the intellectual tradition that views the artist or philosopher as a critic and clinician of society, capable of diagnosing its possible pathologies and measuring its degree of malaise — all in view of, if not full recovery, at least a better state of health.
Sara Lovari: A World of words
presented by: SILVIAROSSI | ARTGALLERY, Bibbiena (AR)
Sara Lovari presents a performance that gives meaning to a minimal gesture, free from the filter of technology. The artist invites the audience to draw a letter of the alphabet from a bag, asking in return for a word that begins with that letter. It is a simple, almost childlike act that becomes an act of resistance: a way to place at the center once again our ability to name, imagine, and construct meaning without delegating it to an algorithm. An intimate encounter, in which each collected word becomes a trace, a memory, a relationship.
TIMING
OCTOBER, 30
5.30 – 7.00 pm
AFAD BRATISLAVA
Tomáš Brichta, Questions and Answers
Julia Pabst, Just Dance
Michaela Prablesková, Give Me Your Phone And I Will Tell You Who You Are
OCTOBER, 31st
1.00 pm
Tao Han, Wrestling With Angels
1.30 – 2.30 pm
AFAD BRATISLAVA
Tomáš Brichta, Questions and Answers
Julia Pabst, Just Dance
Michaela Prablesková, Give Me Your Phone And I Will Tell You Who You Are
6.30 pm
Aldo Runfola, Ssuperrationall, Ssupernnaturall
7.00 pm
Sara Lovari, A World of words
NOVEMBER, 1st
6.30 pm
Aldo Runfola, Ssuperrationall, Ssupernnaturall
NOVEMBER, 2nd
1.00 pm
Aldo Runfola, Ssuperrationall, Ssupernnaturall
2.00 pm
Sara Lovari, A World of words