QUASIKUNST

Quasikunst is systemic-performative research. According to the single project, Quasikunst is a systemic structure, it defines itself as contrast and underground in all directions. Among the increasingly rationally manifested surfaces Quasikunst means: dissociating, superimposed states, diffuse collectives, abstruse connections, other material, simultaneous saying yes and no. Oppositions question contradictions, contexts are extended by more contexts. Quasikunst are projects within an ongoing art/theory research since 2014, with references to the theory of “quasi-objects”.



PUBLICATION Quasikunst / DEEP ART CONTEXTS
STWST New Art Context publication series:
Tanja Brandmayr published a book in 2021, about more than 10 years of art of the art, theory and research Quasikunst. The publication gathers the work until the beginning of 2020, all later projects only online (so far, see below).
Publisher: Stadtwerkstatt, 2021. Author: Tanja Brandmayr
Released in May 2021. 282 pages, many colour illustrations. ISBN: 9783753482361

In german language. Available Online, per bookshop or Stadtwerkstatt.
Best price via STWST, 20 euros, self-collection at the office, pre-registration: office@stwst.at
Preview: publikation_quasikunst_peview_1_kapitel.pdf


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All projects:

2015: The biomechanical ballet, or: I like Trees and Human Rights
In 2015, Quasikunst dedicated itself to trees with “I like Trees and Human Rights”: Collectives of trees as well as living and dead people were formed. In the underground of a forest floor, people are stuck with their heads in the ground, interrogating contexts, among other things to determine the morality of history and the pollution of the world under the cleaned surfaces. More Trees

2016: Fog Ballett
in 2016, as an art and theory research project, the project “Fog Ballett”, addressed the issue of equating actor and network in their reflection, linking them in the form of a nebula onto which a human figure was projected. Furthermore, within this equivocal leveling, a contapointed “dialectic turn” of human assertion was proclaimed. More Fog

2017: Iceberg/The Entity
In 2017, “Iceberg/The Entity” staged a 2-ton ice block in the darkly lit workshop of the Stadtwerkstatt and thus a 'theater of meaning', a theater of contradictions that were not agreed. The project started from the contexts and contradictions inherent in the material ice and showed a 48-hour meltdown that the audience could attend. In textual reflection, the systemic-dynamic definition of negative entropy, namely the “increase of complexity” was turned into an “increase of contradiction”. More Iceberg

2018: Windlines / Movement A / 48 Hour of Drifting / Disapp (50.000)
In 2018 the almost immaterial materials underground, fog, ice were followed by wind. This year's art and context research showed “four blown coordinates between art agens and body movens”. The focus was on air, transparency, and projects that elude implementation. Air and wind stood equally for breathing and thinking, for the physical and the abstract at the same time, for spirit and invisible masses of molecules. The mental approaches dealt with concepts such as disconnectedness, expansiveness, levelling, dissolution, uniformity, totality - and thus mark the critical point of the works. In the critique of totality, they also touch upon a definition of entropy - above all in order to plead for a kind of resource whose preservation is ultimately relevant for nothing less than a dialectic of life/non-life. Announcement Windlines in der VersorgerinText on Quasikunst, windlines and entropy

2019: Deep Drilling for Contracts. Soundhole.
In 2019 and under the title „Deep Drilling for Contracts“, Quasikunst will dig down a sound hole in the basement of STWST. Underground: The knocking out of power/BUSINESS from nature is a core competence of our early industrial/CULTURAL history. 12 seconds of metallic hammering as a looped and stretched sound essence of an early ring mythology that negotiates the transition from pre-modern to modern in the late 19th century: First dig down and knock ore out of the mountain, then use technological voodoo to forge a ring, and this was followed by contracts and capital. Even at the beginning everyone was unhappy. Many years later, now: Smart. Individual. A deeper core. The end of contracts made so far. Business at a turning point. Exploitation as ever. We just keep digging down. Deep Drilling for NEW Contracts.

2019: The Unfinished Language. Neologos text hole.
Broken STWST-linguists work with an unready writing bot. Fed in text editing, the bot review in advance, the medium language or also: language far away. THE QUASI BOT AND THE UNFINISHED LANGUAGE: “In the beginning was the word. But the word no longer has any power“. We are writing into a future.
On the project “Deep Drilling for Contracts” there are also passages within the text reflection on Quasikunst, windlines and entropy. Or rather, as a reflection of the two projects “Deep Drilling for Contracts” and “The Unfinished Language”, the text Language in Antiquasi-mode was created (Sorry, only german version so far).



2020: My brain freezes at minus 273 degrees. Text and context as an abstract high potency project.

My brain freezes at minus 273 degrees is text and context as a high potency project. It talks about the body and continues with thinking about the contradictions at the boundaries of science. “My Brain” deals with physical mechanisms that start in a reduced way, are difficult and become effective at unexplained contact to a “consciousness”: Text and reflection are accompanied by LESS physical activity: What is breathing, imagination or an economy of movement? What is reduction? LITTLE IS JUSTIFIED WITH MUCH.
Extended context 1: This is continued by reduction on the physical level of metabolism. It is about fasting and autophagy: With this autonomous, self-acting mechanism, which has been genetically stored in the cells for hundreds of thousands of years, other “self-eating” cell processes, such as those that stimulate self-healing processes, begin in phases without food.
Extended context 2: Moreover, the body paradox of the less available is reflected far below zero in a quantum theory of consciousness, in which, according to a controversial theory, quantum effects occur in the brain and generate consciousness - although quantum effects, for example in quantum computers, are said to be possible only around minus 273 degrees according to current research.
All these approaches leave usual artistic practices in the direction of their complete dissolution. They are symbolically and quasi-homeopathically diluted and shaken to the point of nothingness as artistic high-potency projects. At dizzying borders, however, they insist on a classical function of art by allowing the unspeakable, the indirect, the irrational, the hidden and the actually “other” to take effect. The body as a media high potency project at your own risk: My brain freezes at minus 273 degrees. This is the text layer of My brain freezes at minus 273 degrees.

Alone in the electric schock room, 2020: Mind, electric schock




2021: Postglow Cinema
Quantum Cinema by Tanja Brandmayr with Astrid Benzer

Post Glow Cinema is research and reflection in which visual content consisting of light, rhythmization and image fragments are projected onto an afterglow surface. Motion sequences and text are explored as prototypical cinema with afterglow properties.
Projection surfaces, interior and exterior relations, questions of consciousness, materiality and media are thematized. It is about screen, light and content in phosphorescent cinema mode. Phosphorescence describes a quantum physical effect in the excitation of light: In the interaction of the components, a quantum cinema is created here, in which the light surfaces in the high-energy mode change back to a low-energy level by emitting the photons previously absorbed. With and in this afterglow, short scenes of body presences are shown in obfuscation, inversion, or as an early chronophotography image quotation. At stake in the digital paradigm shift are fundamental questions about what kinds of form/content even transition into what is often called “immersive” in a technology context. But what does actual immersion mean? with Postglow Cinema we're making the auratic technology shine. Diffusivity instead of hyperreality.

In summer 2021 the Post Glow Cinema was shown as a prototype at electropixel 11 in the Platéforme Intermedia in Nantes/F, on invitation of APO33.
In September 2021 Post Glow Cinema is shown at STWST at STWST48x7 OUT OF MATTER


2021: Quasikunst – Nik, or: Alone in the Electroshock Room
SF exploitation draft and word and sentence fragment scripting, with bot and analogue text creation methods. Clocking perception. Net pulse. Shown on Screen. Nik, oder




2022: Nik, the Sleeper
SF Exploitation / Performative Installation

Under the Conscious Net: A fragmentary perceptual space and body that combines pulsed textual content, diffuse imagery, states of self-forgetfulness, alienating afterglow effects, reduced movement. A connected unconsiousness and observing postglow of mind-mining and self-fracking.
The sleeping body as an organ of thought, a connected consciousness as a network, a sleeping land beneath the waking state, the sleep of the many as an entity: Nik, the Sleeper is a performative installation, a spatial sci-fi exploitation story told in scraps of text. Nik deals with body, consciousness and technology. It engages in historical debris research on electricity, for example, and points to a techno-future as a potentially larger, connective unconscious network. Between algorithmic underground consciousness and self-fracking, however, the installation swallows almost all of its content. A fragmentary perceptual space emerges that combines pulsed textual content, diffuse imagery, states of creativity and self-forgetfulness, elements from regular sleep measurement, alienating afterglow effects, and elements of reduced movement economy.
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Nik, the Sleeper is dreaming of the dead artists.
Manifesto about the Dead Artists:https://stwst.at/nik/#minus8
Nik's Dream of the Manifesto as text panel.
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2022: Ich häng mir die Welt um / I hang the world around me
4 Text Panels & SF-Exploitation on the Net

Four text panels telling in a short SF narrative of the departure from Earth and the failure of terra-forming on the new planet.
In an undefined departure and descent, and with remnants of meaning and textual references we move away from a World as we know it. We breathe in contradictions. The overall context as organ of thought, syntax beyond language, perception as transformed and pulsed rhythm, understanding as a disconnected connection: In a technologized and rationalized world, catastrophes are looming, while people are entangled in pseudo-fights and confronted with EVERYTHING in daily life and also on foreign planets. It becomes more and more difficult to make sense at all. What to do?
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I Hang the World Around me is part of the Science Fiction Exploitation Nik.
A work-in-progress project, created as a pulsed text on the web.
Deep Shit Prelude:
https://stwst.at/nik/#9
Pulsed Texts:
https://stwst.at/nik/#minus2, https://stwst.at/nik/#minus4
https://stwst.at/nik/#minus6, https://stwst.at/nik/#minus8
Text Panels at Quasikunst:
I hang around the world around me


A visual fragment that circles around itself in a residual orbit of self-knowledge.
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Art is Bullshit:
For this text experiment, literary slides are used that are known and recognised in an avant-garde pop-cultural context. Affiched without author identification, they have led to reactions by external anonymous authors who have placed independent messages and statements. Communication beyond accelerated SM oblivion. This notice was later published in perspectives 110 - 111 2022: autistic_rage_ist_ein_scheissdreck.pdf



2023: Minus werden (Become Minus)
Minus Art Installation
A sculpture made of waste is immersively connected to the screens in a laughable way.
Become minus at STWST48x9 COLD HEAVEN
Become minus at Quasikunst



2023: Bloodproof of Life
Collective Art Action with your Lifeblood

The Stadtwerkstatt gives you back your Lifeblood - Come and get it!
At the end of the AI moratorium, in the last summer before the total cloud, STWST transforms your lifeblood into a collective art event. In the middle of a room about the beating humanist heart, professionals sit to draw your blood. Doctors take the small amount of 4 ml of blood from volunteers who still feel obliged. The vial is closed by Stadtwerkstatt. The process is assisted and confirmed by the additional cultural initiative servus.at. You get your vial of lifeblood back in a multiple proof as a transformed and certified blood-to-art object. Then you then sit down in front of a camera that records and confirms the authenticity of your vial of blood, YOUR authenticity and your participation in the collective lifeblood project. The proof of participation in the collective Herzblut-Lifeblood project is also provided by a blockchain, which also provides another PROOF OF LIFE. Your Lifeblood has thus become part of a collective art action and art edition. So anyone can not only be an artist for 15 minutes, but become part of the collective lifeblood blockchain FOREVER.

We invite artists, critical producers, programmers, theorists, colleagues, the audience of STWST48 and the entire Ars Electronica - in other words, every part of the system of art, society and technology - to ask the question of what life is. It is about lifeblood as a resource, about inner operating systems of engagement, about a manifesto against the beating and smashing forces of capitalism, about tempered blood in the midst of the cold-warm turn of the Anthropocene, about a counter-phantasm in cold transhumanism. Or even quite personally: life takes your heart blood every day. Tell us what was taken from you and from whom, from the world, its capers and catastrophes, from your friends, your job, Google, Amazon, Microsoft or even the STWST or your own cultural association itself - everyone wants Herzblut … and WE will give it back to you, at least on these two days. Is your life alive? Come by!
Bloodproof of Life at STWST48x9 COLD HEAVEN
Bloodproof of Life at Quasikunst



All Quasikunst projects: QUASIKUNST
Especially Quasikunst projects: 2015 Trees / 2016 Fog / 2017 Iceberg / 2018 Wind / 2019 Language und Deep Drilling / 2020 Mind, My Brain freezes (no engl version) / 2020 Electric schock / 2021 Postglow Cinema 2022 I hang around the world around me / 2022 Nik, the Sleeper
STWST-projects in Quasikunst mode: Geld / Fassade

Quasikunst curation/projects: STWST48x2/2016 STWSTx3/2017 STWST48x4/2018 STWST48x5/2019 STWST48x6/2020 STWST48x7/2021 STWST48x8/2022 STWST48x8/2022 STWST48x9/2023 STWST48x9/2023

Connection to: New Context Staging
Some Quasi Videos


Quasikunst has been around since 2008 conceptualization and/or artistic work of Tanja Brandmayr. Since 2014 research and projects in the context of Stadtwerkstatt Linz.
Quasikunst is also one of the superordinate structural concepts within the “Showcase Extravanganza” STWST48. This format runs in parallel in September and in co-op with Ars Electronica. Up: STWST48x2, STWST48x3, STWST48x4, STWST 48×5, STWST48x6, STWST48x7, STWST48x8, STWST48x9


All Images: Tanja Brandmayr,
exept Photo at
“The biomechanical Ballet: Sandrik
“Nik, the Sleeper”: Astrid Benzer
“Ich häng mir die Welt um”, the first two: Micha Gerersdorfer