Gordan Savicic - Lat 54.136696 Lon 13.771362 (en) - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

Gordan Savicic - Lat 54.136696 Lon 13.771362

Gordan Savicic, born in Bosnia, graduate of the digital art department of the University for Applied Arts in Vienna, master’s degree from the Piet Zwart Institute for Media Design Art, Design, Hacking, and Leisure in Rotterdam. Self designation: independent electronics specialist, developer, speaker, and RealGamer. In his work, the artist argues, in a playful and sophisticated way, for virtual worlds based on information and communication technologies and their influence on the material world.

The virtual does not only produce consequences in the virtual world. The sociologist Manuell Castells describes this phenomenon in his work on "The Information Age” like this: The terms for space in the virtual world are described as currents and networks of capital. At its hubs, the virtual space in material space introduces frantic cities and desolates entire regions. Within the virtual space, the future is pre-digested in a speculative manner and that which is not appetizing does not arrive in the present. In such a society, those who remain imprisoned in the old conceptions of space lose — living in a world of impalpable chance, subject to injustice and instability, steered by an invisible force which does not make a sense, because it remains intangible, with no email address and no addressee.

When Gordan Savicic roams across a confined city for his project "Constraint City" he visualizes the indefinable power of the virtual in the material which directly assaults our bodies, our paths, our possibilities and alternatives. The infiltration of the virtual world, with its capital and commerce, becomes evident in its restrictions. In the same vein, the artist also relativises —by way of his “hacktivism art”—everything from game consoles to the myths mediated through Second Life of material virtuality as a valid space. The virtual space is real, it thrives on possession, fortune accumulation, exclusion, and the subtle restriction of what is possible in the realm of the economically desirable.

When Savicic enters the virtual world, it is a kind of political and technical experiment in which he disregards the assumed limitations of what is possible, allowing, instead, for the creation of new possibilities. The artist’s objective is realised by utilising every inch of his body, hence his alias: flesh gordo. (wh/jn)

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