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Eda Čufer
A conversation with Marko Peljhan

As a student of theatrical direction you were involved in the Italian and Russian Futurism movements. You began your career staging the Russian futurist Velimir Hlebnikov, while the 1980s, and to an extent also the 1990s were - at least in theory - extremely sceptical about futuristic and utopian projections. Futurism is related to totalitarianism even more than other avant-garde movements. In your opinion, what is happening with the futuristic and utopian concepts today - are they regaining relevance?

What interested me most about Futurism was that it had appeared at a very specific moment: shortly before the First World War. During the war it developed at the same time in Italy and Russia in what we could call a ''tectonic'' moment in 20^th century history. Both divergences built on affiliation, which was related also to nationalism and national spirit. In Russia there was Pan-Slavism, while the Italians accentuated the Italian genius. This cannot be overlooked. However, we must not forget that in both divergences there existed a positive vision of progress, which supported reform of the entire society. At the same time, both the Italians, with their fascism, and the Russians with their proletarian revolution, shared the final destiny of the avant-garde. The social system they conceived in their visions outgrew, devoured and destroyed them. In Russia this was entirely so, while in Italy a very strange union of art and state was born. Of the entire futurist movement, my only real interest was Hlebnikov. Marinetti is interesting as a phenomenon - incidentally, I even translated and completely reworked him - but as a matrix he is not as important as Hlebnikov; in addition, his close relationship to a fascist state deprived him of his visionary aura. Hlebnikov, on the other hand, built a very complex system, which is both autonomous and has a clear foundation and vision. It was this system that interested me. On one hand it is based on historical research, and on the other on the research of language, that is, its material quality and composition. We may safely say that Hlebnikov changed the language; he changed the basic unit of thought and used it in accordance with the system he invented. This is one of the paths I find extremely important, and one which, as such, may also serve as a code, as a matrix for all activity at the end of this century, when we are again facing a fundamental tectonic movement in the social spheres.

You have mentioned Hlebnikov in the context of Macrolab. In what sense is his system applicable to the present-day situation, or systems, if you will?

It is by no means as simple as that. His system comprises, on one hand, a completely deconstructionist approach to language, and on the other a retrospective view of history, of time as a physical and social phenomenon; obviously this is an holistic and objective approach based on calculations, which he referred to as the "plates of fate". This bold conception of his, by which he attempts to redefine history, is, I believe, still significant today, both as a principle and a starting point. I am not speaking of it in terms of direct applicability, but in terms of a starting point, a way of thinking, an approach to reality. There are only a few artists in the history of the avant-garde movement who were involved in creating holistic systems - but only these are truly relevant. Hlebnikov is one of them.

So what is really happening with futuristic and utopian concepts today? Are they regaining value?

They are both regaining and losing it. They are gaining credibility through mediation and on account of the fact that people have such fast access to information and may - if they wish - sink into a media reality, create their own futuristic and utopian pictures or analyses of reality. This is a possibility that did not exist before; however, this picture will, again, be necessarily only a derivative of reality. At the same time, for the first time in history it is possible for individuals, thanks to the existing methods and possibilities of mediation, to become chroniclers of the entire global system. But it is this global view that enables a higher form of reflection. I believe we should distinguish between utopia and vision; for me these are not one and the same matter. I believe that today we miss having a vision; we talk only of contingents, plans, projections, assumptions, complex systems of capital flow. Economic principles have penetrated into all our systems of thinking; economics and capital flow have become the two forces that spin the world. If one attempts to take a utopian approach today, he will be left without an interlocutor. My declarative position in creative work, the ''isolation of isolation'' strategy, or two-fold isolation, is a very utopian position, and every time I present it, I find it has no interlocutors. However, I can always find a suitable justification for this position in a statement by Buckminster Fuller: "The world is now too dangerous for anything less than utopia!" I believe his statement is still relevant today.

The presentation of your central project, Macrolab, at the Kassel Documenta two years ago, and presentations of many other projects, such as UCOG-144, System 7, TRUST-SYSTEM 15, the Wardenclyffe series of performances, the Solar performance, etc., made you an artist whose art seems to offer answers to challenges brought about by globalisation. On the other hand, though, your work, with its extensive experimenting with all kinds of technologies, is causing problems for many people because they simply cannot grasp it. Do you think that technological revolutions lead to a new division of the population into literate and illiterate: those taking into account the dimension that can be seen with the aid of technology, and those who are perfectly happy with the world in a safe haven of three-dimensionality? What would be a realistic response of people to your art?

Nowadays art is defined in this heterogeneity. It seems to me that it is really quite irrelevant what the response is, or who is interested in this or not. What I'm doing is a system of a very deliberate reflection of reality. I believe it is possible that someone will be interested in this irrespective of the fact that we are always in various relationships and in constant interaction at many levels. It is true, however, that most people are simply not interested in reflection, since if they had been, the world would undoubtedly be different. Because they are not, social processes take place by way of inertia. In the last few years, technology has enabled a relatively small elite to take control of over 90% of the world's capital, and through this, to also gain political power.

In the 1990's we are witnessing a restoration of a past situation, or at least a fictitious restoration. There is no Cold War between the Eastern and Western Bloc, but they could still be geographically defined in this way. It is almost ridiculous to talk about this, since the Cold War as we knew it then - the accumulation of giant technological systems for the mutual destruction of both political poles - ended in the 1980s. In the 1990s, which began with the Gulf War, i.e. with the new principle of war and "world order", and later in this region with the chaos in the Balkans, two thought concepts or relationships emerged in relation to industrial production and development. The first were the exclusively new weapons systems: in the West these were actually defence systems or precision weapons systems, and are only defence weapons in theory. On the other hand, in countries such as India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and China, weapons systems of mass destruction were being accumulated. This was a real surprise.

The 1990's began with the slogan "The Cold War is over, the reign of capital shall begin", and then first the Gulf War for oil erupted - it was started by Iraq for this very oil - and later the great capital crises emerged in Asia, when all Asian countries, which drove the economy at the beginning of the 1990s, nearly went bankrupt. This resulted in a total breach in thought patterns. All of a sudden the new world order no longer existed, or was at least not so easily definable, while America's economy prospered. The latter is really no wonder, as America was directly involved in the Asian crisis through the policies of the International Monetary Fund. In short: America is prospering, there is work for all, it has a budget surplus, while the other end of the world, feared by everyone else at the beginning of the 90s - their greatest fear being the domination of the ''tiger economies'' - started collapsing. And then we also have a very specific situation in Russia that requires inspection and analysis. Why did all these economies find themselves in the middle of crisis? Because of the progress that was made in that period, which unfortunately policies did not follow. Not all is as fluid as it may seem. There still exist control mechanisms, and technology only facilitates or even improves this control.

For this reason I believe it is important to look at it from this perspective, from above, from what I call the ''satellite perspective''. It enables one to get a wider, more global picture, while at the same time being able to focus on every single detail. My work attempts to reflect these systems, while I also employ distinctly local systems, such as System 7, and projects which concentrate on a specific area, such as SUNDOWN in Luxembourg, or Macrolab, which covers a very wide spectrum and is determined by the place where it is located. Finally, there is also a series of performances which are constructed in such a way that they materialise the very flow I have been talking about all this time. It seems to me that we live in a time when reflection is not only desirable but necessary; however, what is happening at the same time is that the interlocutor, the recipient, no longer exists. The entire theoretical apparatus is practically shut down, frozen - both in Slovenia and elsewhere. We must only think of the 1980s, when theories and reflections were avant-garde. Every high-school student read and studied current theories. Today they no longer do this - or they at least appear to have lost all interest in it. Why did this happen? Because economic reality simply overflowed into social territory, pressing us all against the wall of the merciless logic of capitalism. This was of course responsible for all these utterly bizarre situations, when the entire system of art, the entire system of representation begins to collapse. We could include here what is going on at the Slovene Museum of Modern Art: this idling in neutral, where things could not go forward any more.

The 1990's have therefore brought a few very insightful visions - by establishing a very good programme, some individuals set a very promising course - but unfortunately, the general artistic direction is not particularly encouraging. Or take, for instance, the Kapelica Gallery, which was brought about by the 1990's. Communications made the Kapelica Gallery a world-class gallery - this is a fact. However, although there is a great lack of reflection in the Kapelica Gallery, people from all over the world still want their projects to be presented in Kapelica - and these are artists from a very powerful artistic structure, the structure Kapelica covers with its programs. Kapelica is a very prestigious exhibition space for one of the current artistic divergences. On the other hand, though, we are again witnessing a total collision of local systems, when relationships and possibilities are falling apart completely and are also very unpromising for the future. These relationships are of course very problematic and allow various forms of manifest or latent violence, which we should go to war with if we want to continue working creatively in what we call "the present-day Ljubljana artistic sphere".

What is abstraction, in your opinion, and what is realism as seen through the prism of new technologies? And what is happening with the avant-garde or modernist techniques such as reproduction, copying, collage, ready-made? In what way are these artistic techniques, which today still form an aesthetic and theoretical basis for contemporary art, being redefined?

Art which employs new media as a tool is something completely different from the new media themselves. Not everything that is made by a computer is 'computer art' or 'new media art'. It is perfectly clear that technology in itself does not redefine artistic techniques. An artistic technique is only defined when it functions within the logic of the technology itself, such as every creative technique of a more complex nature that reflects the medium or tool which it uses. This question is perhaps more interesting from a theoretical standpoint, from the standpoint of art history, whereas in practice it is all very simple. Let us now move to the question of realism and abstraction. In the digital world, for instance, a copy is identical to the original; they are two identical sets of data. In the digital world, at this fundamental level, at the level of the medium, the boundary between realism and abstraction becomes blurred; it no longer exists. In my opinion these questions no longer matter in the digital world; the digital world is an implicitly abstract world when you look at it from the outside, and a very real world when viewed from the inside.

It seems to me that there are two creative techniques that coexist perfectly legitimately in 20^th century art. In the first, the artist, with his inner psychological picture or idea, creates a certain amorphous material in which he materialises this idea. In the second he takes an already existing material and adds something fairly spiritual to it, mentally redefines it; re-spiritualises it, if you will. Which of these two technique do you use?

In my opinion the second technique is the only relevant one. We are facing a given reality, which is the way things are, and in this reality, man - and of course also the artist, someone who creates works of art - appears as a warrior who must first reflect this given reality and then strike back at it. I believe what is left for art is to redefine and develop forms of reading and reflecting the existing, and encode the uncharted territory in all areas: take a rather Renaissance-like approach. Art cannot compete with science and economics in developing new forms, in moulding amorphous materials into new shapes. I think this is perfectly clear; however, the artist can always make the best use of the ''satellite perspective''.

Some of your projects examine the problem of a highly blurred and politically concealed issue of a legislative basis for inspection of the world and of the workings of the electromagnetic spectre, within which the prevailing part of human communication takes place. The current technological expansion is certainly opening the way to new areas of conflict which are today still completely unknown, and which have not yet been regulated by law. What will be, in your opinion, the main areas of conflict in the next 20 years? This problem was tackled in SUNDOWN, a project you presented at Manifesta in Luxembourg.

The greatest battle fought over the next few years in the legislative arena will be the battle for the protection of privacy, for the electronic protection of privacy and individuality, the battle for cryptography at the highest level to be owned by the citizenry. Today every person has a digital body constituting a database, and therefore a key will have to be invented with a tested sufficient legislative and practical reliability that these data will not be available to just anybody. Today the Internet provides us with data on most people who occupy certain social positions. We are already completely dispersed on digital networks. This, of course, means loss of our privacy. There is data available about you that is absolutely beyond your control, that has its own life on a network. Legislative protection of privacy is of course a complex issue, since every country treats individuals as potential criminals, and will therefore probably resist protection of privacy, because in the event of a criminal offence, the state would not be able to use the perpetrator's body of data as quickly as before. This is a conflict between the state system and a sort of civil structure, which is becoming aware of the gigantic potentials for abuse that our "digital bodies" allow. We are completely unaware of the body of data that is available about us in different databases, which already influence decisions taken in our environment. The present course of development is leading to the fusion of these bases, such as the systems of uniform numbers, registration and tax reference numbers which are the typical examples. The goal is to have one number for every citizen, and through this number everything connected to this person may be controlled and influenced.

Or take credit cards, for instance, which are used by large corporations to analyse our shopping patterns and the like. This is why my work speaks of the art of war, that is, of the appropriation of certain systems of power and control and their redefinition and use for civil purposes. TRUST-SYSTEM 15 is an example of this. It takes a guided missile, a weapon of destruction, and turns it into a radio station for a territory in which the existence of a free radio station is not yet possible. SUNDOWN, presented at Manifesta, is a sort of fiction speaking about the incredible vulnerability of all systems of power, and in particular of the transfer of capital, in the event of a physical attack. There was a fabricated attack on Luxembourg, which in a way is a clearing house for the entire European banking economy, from an unforeseeable direction. At the same time, this project is a detailed analysis of the weapons that would be required for this, where one might get them, how much they would cost, the logistics of such an operation ...

Could such an attack realistically be organised?

Only with great difficulty - and it would be a great disaster if this indeed could happen. However, an attack of this kind could be organised by a wild form of a state such as now prosper in the East.

What are your memories of socialism, of the Yugoslavia of the 1980's? What is your main picture of this time that in a way has vanished?

It did not vanish; it was decaying before our eyes for nine years and I do not think at all that it has disappeared. It is a world that is still very present - and will continue to be so. I remember the 1980's as a time when we believed it would be possible to redefine this state, that it would work according to some new, different, more modern principles. And when the state was being forged, this was a unique opportunity for the groups of - let us call them the 'wise men' - to completely redefine the rules for what a modern state should be, what it should look like, how it should function, what institutions it would require. We started off with a very good new constitution, but in my opinion things got complicated later on. However, these groups of ''wise men'' decided to simply copy Western Democracy, the Austro-German model, and transplant it to Slovenia. They had the opportunity to build a more functional state with less bureaucracy - but this would only have been possible if they had built on different ground from the beginning. The same goes for the army; ten years ago there still existed the opportunity for a complete redefinition of the military system, and also for the question of what a modern army in a state of two million people should look like - if we needed one at all. But now we have once again some hybrid whose inadequacy can be seen clearly in the problems relating to the civil service and the paranoia of the system about it.

What does it mean to be a Slovene artist at the end of this millennium?

This millennium is ending for only a part of the world, and from a global perspective it is really nothing special. The fact is that in the past 15 years time has been passing increasingly quickly; we could make calculations about this. The changes, and the speed at which operational systems and processors operate, has indeed speeded up time itself. And in this rapid pace, there is simply very little time for reflection. This creates a very interesting situation: things happen and there is simply too little time for them to leave any more profound traces that could enable a qualitative shift. There is a quantitative accumulation of energy in only one direction. For this reason it is difficult to mobilise society, since in this quickened pace people can only look after their own survival, or think about how to preserve forms of power in existing relationships.

New relationships are incredibly difficult to establish; and to be a Slovene artist in this situation can of course mean nothing good. It means to be dependent, on one hand, on a completely unstructured capital market, which has not yet reached a level where it might be able to support art in any of its forms. It has a strictly market-oriented approach in terms of trade. On the other hand, it means to be directly dependent on the power structures, which may be, to a lesser or greater extent, in favour of art. And finally, in the international sense it means to be completely left to one's own resources and survival systems without any serious institutional support at home.