FESTIVAL IZIS

The 12th edition of the IZIS festival with its performative and exhibition program unfolds the theme of control and ponders upon contradictions that the term entails. With the title Just Control the festival captures the dialectics among autonomous and hierarchical control, while with its translations Samo nadzor and Controllo automatico brings in more complexities to the term. Represented artists tackle the notion of (just) control through environmental, meteorological, gaming, mechanical, or data systems and deconstruct its uncertain duality.

In the time of free-floating control, we are being surveilled more than ever before and, surprisingly, we feel quite carefree despite that, evenmore we even feel safe. Perhaps this has to do with the removal of the precise location of control, as we can simultaneously find it everywhere and nowhere. However, if we take a turn into the field of psychology, the site of control becomes crucial for understanding how an individual sees control over the outcome of events in their lives. Locus of control can be internal if the individual believes to have control over their own life. On the other hand, the external locus of control emphasizes a belief that control comes from outside factors, be that environment or other people. Already depending on its location, the feeling of control has a very different power. While internal control gives the impression of taking responsibility for one’s own life, the external one implies helplessness.

Could we understand a digital environment as an internal site of control in the expanded field, as right there an individual often exposes their intimate life, which expands from personal fears to personal data? How is this supported by the pervasiveness of networks that allow the integration of hybrid devices into all spheres of society, into political and economic, equally as cultural, natural, and emotional? As written by theorist Alexander R. Galloway in the book Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (2004), the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom. That is why in order to understand how power works within a society of control it is necessary to understand its protocol, as its political economy is that of management, modulation, and control. In Galloway’s words, “technically and politically the “control society” emerges as much from cybernetics research as it does from a military-industrial imperative toward the “governmentality” of information systems. This historical backdrop sets the stage for the various periodizations and mutations in the life of the protocol.”

Some sort of mutation of a network withholds the term techno-social, defined by theorist Tiziana Terranova in the essay Colonial Infrastructures and Techno-social Networks (2021) as the form of the social that comes after its end. For the author “It is neither a virtual nor a global digital community, but a component of the milieu generated by a new technical being—the digital computational network.” In the same essay, the theorist Ravi Sundaram discusses calculative infrastructures of the current moment, which expose extreme measurability of human life in the wider context of world shifts. It is precisely that kind of infrastructures of measurement that bring in technologies of violence and extraction as particular forms of colonial rule driven by racial and ethnological technologies. Thus, they extend beyond human life, covering the wider environment as well.

Meteorological instruments, hygrometers, barometers, and other measuring instruments that place a sense of control in the environment collect data that could be of vital importance in maneuvering through an uncertain future. At the same time, endless data collecting, and multiplying of instruments only creates an illusion of control over the way out of the crisis, as the knowledge gained does not prevent the melting of glaciers or the extinction of species. The conundrum lies in the fact that today the operation of machines is more and more autonomous, and after all, it affects humans on such a scale that includes their biological regulation, even the body’s control organs. The question is what happens when technology becomes independent, alienated, or simply breaks down? In what way is it possible to oppose the cold regulation of the world in a calculated vector environment?

Irena Borić

The curator of the Festival IZIS