The first from the series “world-improvement-machine” is to be from 4 to 6 August 2020 at Alkatraz Gallery / Ljubljana Metelkova_Mesto / with a focus on concert performance on Tuesday, August 4 / in | at the Alkatraz Gallery – and additional days of video-sound installation situation inside the gallery.

expanded Cirkulacija 2 – Introduction to the “world-improvement-machine”

Boštjan Leskovšek, Ryuzo Fukuhara, Stefan Doepner, Milan Kristl, Borut Savski

Tuesday, August 4, 2020: Concert performance in front of Alcatraz
Wednesday 5th August -> Thursday 6th August 2020: Installation of self-propelled chaotics & self-organizations inside the Alkatraz Gallery

KUD Mreža production & Cirkulacija 2 coproduction

The world improvement machine (-> “weltverbesserungmachine” / -> “world improvement machine”) is a metaphor for the time of Enlightenment desire for a highly organized state (-> at first the empire, then nation states, then democracy / and after that: the social state) – a smoothly running machine. It is often associated with the state of civilization of the society. In the past, the machine often deviated from the path, went to different extremes – but always suggested moving from worse to better. New is good / forward is good / backward is bad / one step back & two steps forward (-> JB Tito)

The vector of development was quite clear until recently. The disintegration of relatively simple world ideologies and the current hiding of the fact that accumulation of resources is the present dominant ideology – caused a moment when the vector randomly oscillates between all extremes: left = right + right = left and down = up + up = down. Right = lie + consumer = king.

The sound-music-visual-movement performance will introduce the principles developed at Cirkulacija 2: non-hierarchical, non-music – as parallel to “civilized” musical flows – with random (musical) encounters as small crystallizations -> improvisation as (non) musical communication. In the following days, these extracts will be presented inside the gallery as physical and media artifacts in the form of self-propelled dynamics / mechanisms (= soft & hard).

The imperial-modern-state-civilization machine was introduced in the 17th and 18th centuries by all (“enlightened”, absolute) monarchs in Europe. In our (then) country such a reformer was the Austrian Empress Maria Theresia – as such she entered into popular proverbs. First was the organization of army, and immediately after that the state apparatus – for taxes. This was followed by various standardizations / universalizations -> population count and property registration /-> the principles of population integration into the Machine mechanics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Theresa

Subsequently, the Machine also included the bourgeois revolutions democratic libertarian principles, which also included the essential role of liberal mechanisms (-> especially the principle of freedom in the form of freedom of entering the market relationships / the trade).

The machine was always in need of new fresh forces, so through the integration of meritorious principles – the vertical (social) mobility increased. A capable individual was allowed to ascend to unimaginable social heights. The condition for this was education and universities – and of course territorial mobility (for the agrarian population).

Emphasizing the role of the individuality of each small wheel in the Machine was often contrasted with the collective principle of denying the value of each building block. The social revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries also often relied on a fairly new principle of national identities.

All of this was easily incorporated into the operation of the Machine.

But how does the Machine work today? Where are the vectors? And why aren’t they clearly in sight?

During covid_19, the machine experiences quite a few jolts when it appears to randomly change direction – and may stabilize in a regression of some past historic moment. The machine doesn’t care, of course. It can also get stuck in the mud. It may however be necessary to pull it out of there as soon as possible – and direct it in a more appropriate direction.

Foto Laszlo Juhasz