Milos Trakilovic: A Shot In The Arm

A Shot In The Arm uses Chris Burden’s iconic performance from 1971 Shoot as the main motive to reproach the human body under today's digital capitalism. I take up Tiziana Terranova’s formulation that the digital turnover has been marked by a shift from representation into information in order to describe the effects digitization takes on notions of representation. On the level of representation both the image and the body can be understood as embodied containers of information, making them a valuable currency in today's digital economy. Under the conditions of hypermediation these forms of representation are continuously shredded only to be recomposed and recombined on all sorts of levels.

It has therefore become persistently challenging to mediate and make sense of our surrounding as the digital drive diffuses both the image and body to coded content - information. I describe how these processes influence the growth of financial flows and stimulate market liquidity in a data driven economy and how they in turn impact the movement and mobility of bodies. In this presentation I combine elements of game theory with performance art legacies in order to propose possible strategies of resisting the pervasive logics of digitization. I advocated for the notion of play as a vital and viable political strategy in resisting the relentlessness of datafication facing us today.

Bio

Milos Trakilovic is an artist based in Berlin, who holds an MFA from the Berlin University of Arts / New Media Department. His work deals with the politics of digitization, both on screen, off screen an in-between.