FESTIVAL IZIS
VIDEO

The video No to AI, Yes to a Non-fascist Apparatus investigates how socially applied AI is not only directly intertwined with unresolved injustices of our current system, but actually enables a transition towards authoritarianism that is present in the technology industry itself, in the politics of various countries and institutions, and in the rise of far-right political movements. AI is a political technology because it offers greater social efficiency through acts of exclusion and segregation, thus amplifying vulnerabilities stemming from long-standing social policies and sharpening social divisions. These kinds of systems serve existing social hierarchies and accelerate different dimensions of necropolitics. 

The narrator is Dan McQuillan, who authored the text for the video that features animated 3D scans of actual places of resistance. With the use of photogrammetry, the artist constellates different localities and situated testimonies, aligned by the commonality of their struggle for better social conditions. From 56a Infoshop, a DIY and self-managed social centre in South London, through tensegrity structures used in an Amazon warehouses blockade, to Rozbrat, a centre of independent social and cultural activity in Poznan. These grassroots networks of solidarity are forms of counter power that challenge the processes of extraction and exclusion from a perspective that is fundamentally relational.

Sanela Jahić (1980, Kranj) finished her studies of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2008. In 2010, she completed her international post-graduate studies of “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. As an intermedia artist, she is building technologically supported kinetic objects and devices. Her art practice often includes cooperation with experts in the fields of mechanical engineering, automation, software, and electronics. She lives and works in Škofja Loka, and has presented her work in several exhibitions, both in Slovenia and abroad.

CREDITS
Text and voice: Dan McQuillan
Amazon warehouses blockade across the UK: Extinction Rebellion
Camera: Andrej Primožič
Editing: Sanela Jahić
3D animation: Toni Mlakar
Audio post-production: Julij Zornik
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
In the framework of: konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art 
Year of production: 2023