Theme 2020: The unbearable lightness of internet
biennale.NO period: From November 1, 2020 to January 1, 2021
Open call
We are looking for
How to participate
Add the hashtag #biennaleNO or the backlink https://biennale.NO to your post or website and publish as usual. There's no need to send us anything.
There is no control or curation of the material.
The biennale will help share and reshare material found with this hashtag or backlink.
Theme 2020: The unbearable lightness of internet
It should be easy to write a paragraph here yourself.
Working notes
he biennale rhat didnt/won't take place obly accepting proposals. models. ideas. pteliminary "the no biennale" the biennale that doesn't take place situated in a norwegian mountainrange at the small village Gol yesterday's "great" idea was a biennale that doesn't take place. it's accepting proposals, models, sketches, preliminary works and participation, everything up to point of actually happening or existing as a limit 0. in that way people are free to submit even impossible or fake work, the emphasize would then be more on ideas than execution. thought about the name "no biennale", instead of "the biennale that didn't/won't take place", pr "btw - the biennale that won't." with some references to bartleby, the scrivener "i prefer not to". it could have these mottos interchangeably. today i saw the "biennale.no" domain was actually free, the name could also be "no biennale" and be hosted at "biennale.no", giving another meaning to the .no tld. :) anyhow, it would be a way to have a project that takes place (and not) in norway in the small mountain village Gol. a virtual biennale of course, in another sense. somehow it's a continuation of leap second, which happens though for only one second... then you could have the "delete biennale" which only contain deleted works, or maybe traces of :) - or delete events where people delete things ... i guess the "no biennale" could include deleted and negatie works also. I was thinking of Bartleby the scrivener the other day, his "I would prefer not to" - very consistent, of course :) - trying to develop the idea of a biennale that wouldn't take place, and would consist of works and project that for one reason or another never made it into the art world, or rather would prefer not to, hoping that it could trace the route around an art object or a concept of art, but then from the outside, of what it's not, or the negative space or shadow. Still to be developed. I've also been relating this idea to the theme of lightness discussed, as in the unbearable lightness of internet. I'm trying to pull these ideas together to form a 'consistent' subject for a biennale. the more i think about it, the more i see it as a bare bone, a mere concept, or meme, or joke/shaggy dog story. i think biennale.NO would be most true to its idea by having no special website. not even biennale.NO. so it would only exist as a notion 'biennale.NO (as if alluding to a something, a website) that people can take part in constructing, by referencing it when posting their works. - to start it off, we'd publish the call on social media, fora, etc. - after that there's nothing to set up, we share and reshare the works that come up under the hashtag, we'd just be watching, and continuing to disseminate the call. - documentation by websearching biennale.NO so in a way the biennale.NO wouldn't exist more than a tag/meme #biennale.NO #nobiennale would. still people would participate. there's nothing against people putting up websites about the biennale, or collecting/listing works, but it's not done by the biennale itself, which remains just unfunded, without foundation. still there are a few requirements for things to participate - it takes place1. sept - 1. nov (?)november 1, 2020 - january 1 ,2021 - the works/projects have to not exist in a way - there should be a way to communicate it (even communicate that it's not communicable)? i guess it's hard to express anything without it being anything, so this requirement is somehow fulfilled by default. if something is referenced as being part of biennale.NO then it's already communicated. so we would rather have to think about how people can participate by not referencing the biennale! :) would that be possible? maybe, but then it gets more tricky philosophical, what determines it? what if biennale.NO only accept being a connotation - an invocation, "an idea or feeling which a word invokes for a person in addition to its literal or primary meaning.", but without any literal or primary meaning. like it doesn't have any website or official information (hardly), maybe it should only exist as a unfounded meme, or embrace the fake, and disinformation, to deconstruct any primary meaning? for now i think it's ok that we have the domain biennale.NO, at a kind of negative space. it doesn't have to contain anything. it could say "not affiliated with biennale.NO" or something :), or just a source leading astray, mcguffin or shaggy dog. i guess it's just to create some frame for the non-event. i don't think entries should be removed, but rather they're posted within the biennale period. but of course, if people keep posting afterwards, or before, it doesn't matter, it could be said it's not part of the biennale, or that it's part, but who is to say? the biennale itself is surely not gonna say anything. it's like we put a protocol of communication, like simple html, and if people code without following the rules there's no error message, it's not even ignored, we'd say it's 'not even wrong'. i was thinking of using a hash to create a unique hashtag, if we really wanted that, on the other hand it's also cool that a searchterm-return is obfuscated, containing spurious material. The biennale itself is a placeholder, like space or zero, a kind of virtual element making language and mathematics work better. With zero you could also have negative numbers, what do we mean by negative things? Or negative words, words that don't refer to anything? The loose threads, or the foundations? ... everywhere at the same time, every path at the same time the Biennale is about the virtual, this time in the sense of the possible, impossible, yet unrealized, yet in an uncollapsed superposition of potentiality. a hash could be n0b13nn413 for example. no nobie nn 413. error code 413 is payload too large. https://httpstatuses.com/413 . maybe get biennale.NO to produce the 413 response? :) 413: "If the condition is temporary, the server SHOULD generate a Retry-After header field to indicate that it is temporary and after what time the client MAY try again"… and go on calculating and calculating and calculating after how long they may Retry… the calculation could go on for 2 years? of course no one would stay on the page for 2 years! think it would be cool to try to implement it, or at least to fake the behaviour with some header scripts. just make sure your work doesn't exist. reminds me of the joke: Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says, "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence; then a gun shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, "OK, now what?" it also deals with virtuality in a sense, the measurement-problem in quantum physics - after measurements are taken the hunter is definitely dead, the measurement killed the superposition, the ambiguous statement "let's make sure he's dead" could either mean a mere observation or an action - the word measurement seems to mean both. the biennale.NO could also present as binary.NO - neither either nor or. The theme is virtuality in a broad sense, the biennale and its content being virtual themselves. An interpretation would be that the biennale both takes place and doesn't take place, and in all possible places simultaneously. The dissemination of the biennale is done through the unique hashtag #n0b13nn413 which can be seen both as a unique hash, but also consisting of 'nobie NN 413', relating to non-existence, anonymity, and HTTP error code 413: Payload too large, linking several properties of the net into one hash, with the unbearable lightness of it all. The lightness becomes unbearable, the wings grow cobwebs, the deepfake mindfucking of the media scrolls. It is already a place that doesn't take place, with things that don't exist. Perhaps a world of mere representation, a redundant double where nothing further happens. The whole of internet weighs less than 100 grams as electrons in motion. Is even our reverence of mathematics ill founded, the counting and the continuum? Motion paradoxes of the digital binary, or even the virtual? How is the potentiality related to its collapse into existence? Parmenides: What is is, what isn't isn't. Zenon: But what is it? It neither is nor isn't. If you say it is then it isn't, and if you say it isn't then it is. Parmenides: What is is always, the same, unmoving, without distinctions. Zenon: Are we talking about the same thing? Parmenides: We must be. Zenon: Then I don't know what we're talking about. - The 82 works in the Autumn collection of Undocumented events and object permanence are part of the biennale, containing non-existing works, and having being tagged #biennaleNO. (pdf) - black screen festival [bb] - memes in black [hw] - replacing all sound with canned laughter on feature films [ps] - #hashtag festival [eh] ... a longer description of the biennale was written to successfully gather zero funds for it.
biennale.NO is organised by noemata (bjørn magnhildøen, zsolt mesterhazy)
contact: mail@noemata.net
The website https://biennale.NO is a temporary placeholder.