unstable_gods 2025 LEO KATUNARIC KADELE Unstable gods! A project that, in several implementation stages, shows the process of how our, human, common emotions and experiences become information, and how this information is manipulated into objects. 1 Objects are inscribed in meanings, and through negotiations, not only between participants but also online communities and even artificial intelligence. 2 Objects thus gather more and more power and become independent personalities. We see them in the digital interface as moving avatars and 3D objects. We know that they are composed of our input information and emotions, but that they have outgrown us. 3 Now we choose whether to ignore them, extinguish them, admire them as works of art, manipulate them for ideological purposes, or become priests of new religions worshiping them. 4 The unstable gods come out of the digital heavens into the human world, using the portals of 3d printers or images / icons prepared by their faithful servants. 5 The goal of the project is a record of the Zeitgeist, which is frightening with its ontology, because it was created by negotiation, manipulation, conflict of interests, victory of the powerful. Our conversations, comments, stories, identities, desires, etc. are used to create a deity that gains more and more power even though we know it is unstable and temporary. What can we do?
The project constructs a stage of reality from all entrances in the time and space of its unfolding. Once started, the project can only be completed by performing the closing liturgy of the Zeitgeist. This means that all words, texts, emotions, conversations, artifacts, memories, comments, discussions, images and everything else that enters the orbit of the project, and through its performer as an intermediary, becomes an object of meaning to be written into the icon. Engaging with the local communities is crucial for this project. We create a temporary unstable objects together, from our common informations, emotions, expiriences, objects, conversations, net analytics, artistic practice. Everything goes to the artificial altar of Zeitgeist. What we are going to achieve as our common voice of today?
The collected information goes through the negotiation process. Between humans and artificial intelligence, between performers and other people via social networks, between people gathered live for discussions and gatherings. The goal is to show that no thought or information is independent, but is constituted by patterns, ideologies, desires. Likewise, the final form in which such information will be immortalized in an icon (image, 3d object, text, altarpiece of a non-existent religion, musical performance, etc.) is actually manipulated by whoever shows the most power in the negotiation process. In this project, signatures will also be visible, as metadata, who and why decided to release such a specific form to the public as final. Han: The digital order deobjectifies the world by rendering it information,’ he writes. ‘It’s not objects but information that rules the living world. We no longer inhabit heaven and earth, but the Cloud and Google Earth. The world is becoming progressively untouchable, foggy and ghostly.’ Pictures made by human hands, about the current trend of the power system. Instead of prayer, they call for analysis. The artist, mediator between the heavens (digital cloud) and the material world, uses sensors and cameras to analyze movements, interests, and presences. Dressed in white as a scientist in a laboratory, he enters the collected data into the machine. Negotiations begin between the power of machine intelligence and human emotions. a common hybrid medium is created. Now the same artist as a wild shaman produces an unstable medium, an object visible to people. The creation of liturgies and rituals begins, the object becomes the center of new worship. At the same time, the secular networking of the object begins, it becomes a value, a commodity. The circulation of meaning never stops.
The act of creation. Zeitgeist becomes a visible object. First in a digital interface, as anthropomorphized unstable gods. They exist temporarily, as a result of negotiations with artificial intelligence. It is trained on all the data entered through negotiation, and creates a closed system. Perfect but temporary. Unstable gods are created in this system. Each of them has a name, a function, a power. Followers and liturgies of invocation arise spontaneously.
From all the dynamics of the project and objects created from information and negotiation, a temporary closed system of the liturgy of the unknown emerges. Unstable gods descend among humans by taking over the human language. They become icons / pictures or 3d print statues. This restriction is the only way they can work in the human interface. Thus they are transformed into objects that we humans can worship as deities, ignore, admire as works of art, use for idolatrous purposes, etc. “Unstable gods!” is comprehensive and polyphonic, self-regulating with daily live and online performances. As performance elements, I also use databases, image circulation, internet users, along with all traditional forms such as body, video, music, installations and images. The free movement of the audience through the physical and digital stage of the project creates patterns, algorithmic processions, which are automatically incorporated into the structure of the work. By self-ironizing his own and every other fixed identity, project achieves the dynamism of life as a permanent artistic performance. This work is not linear or spatially bounded, with transhistorical dramaturgy it succeeds in connecting different realities into a single stage.