SLIME

SLIME hybrid exhibition, curated by Joshua Simon.
On-site: February 16–18, 2024 at Secession (Hauptraum)
On-line: February 16–June 30, 2024 at slime.secession.at

SLIME is a unique hybrid on-line and on-site project about our hybrid realities. Taking place at the Secession as an on-site event and as an on-line program, it includes commissioned and historic artworks, talks and performances, screenings and workshops (including one for making actual slime). Taking its name from the children’s toy—a metastable plasma-like substance that has both unique material and tactile features and a constant presence online through tutorials and documentation of people playing with it—SLIME tackles the social, cultural, political, and sensory operations of digital hybridity.

Where we meet today—at the point of realization, as opposed to the point of production—shifts occur in the ways meaning is organized: from strikes to riots, from working class to surplus populations, from solidarity to conspiracy, from organization to petty sovereignty. Digital hybridity enhances finance’s assault on social reproduction. The belief in the digital as an unmediated mode of operation generates sensory and political frontiers that embody this logic—be it ASMR or extreme right-wing politics. Exploring this social phenomenon and its precursors in art, the program at the Secession looks at our political, economic, and cultural realities stemming from the digital hybridity that is SLIME.

At the center of the iconic main gallery at the Secession, artist Francesco Finizio deploys his newly commissioned installation Tickle Drown Thing (2024), which renders the gallery as a kind of disrupted delivery point for picking up your online shopping. Across from Finizio’s work is Elisa Giardina Papa’s 2022 Leaking Subjects and Bounding Boxes: On Training AI. This book and installation present images collected by the artist while working as a human trainer for various AI vision systems. On the ceiling grid towards the back of the gallery, Ulrich Formann is showing his newly commissioned work Echo-System (2024), a planetarium-like constellation of conspiracy networks the artist has tracked on Telegram. On the wall, an enlarged detail from Albrecht Dürer’s print, The Triumphal Chariot of Maximilian I (1518–1522), features the word “Ratio” circled by an intricate swirling line. In online culture, Dürer’s Ratio (Latin for “reason”) has an opposite meaning: it describes a post getting a lot of bad comments, presenting a discrepancy between high engagement and low approval, which the algorithm reads as popularity.

Participants on-site program: Robert Birchbauer, Albrecht Dürer, Francesco Finizio, Ulrich Formann, Elisa Giardina Papa, Liv Schulman, Steffi Stanković, Sophia Stolz, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Noam Yuran, the shapes of the sculptures of Franz West, and the birthmark of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.

Participants on-line program: Liat Berdugo, Lulo Demarco, Rrose Sélavy/Marcel Duchamp, Eva Egermann and Cordula Thym, Thomas Feuerstein, Pauline Ghersi, Monica Heller, HaYoung, Shachar Freddy Kislev, Alison Nguyen, Bahar Noorizadeh, Ruth Patir, Oliver Payne, Mika Rottenberg, Liv Schulman, and Lior Zalmanson.

SLIME on-site program
February 16–18, 2024

Friday, February 16, 2024
6pm: Opening & greetings
6:30–7pm: Sickness unto Death performance by Liv Schulman
7:30–9pm: Public talk by Noam Yuran

Saturday, February 17, 2024 
6–7pm: Echo System presentation by Ulrich Formann
7:30–10pm: Slime Costume Blowout Cake Extravaganza and Dance Ball

Sunday, February 18, 2024
11am–1pm: Slime workshop
2:30–4pm: Tour in the Exhibition and on Zoom with Francesco Finizio & Joshua Simon
4:30–6pm: Public talk by Ana Teixeira Pinto

Free admission to the entire on-site program.

SLIME on-line program
February 16–June 30, 2024

February 16: Liv Schulman / February 23: Liv Schulman / March 1: Bahar Noorizadeh / March 8: Ruth Patir / March 15: Alison Nguyen / March 22: Liat Berdugo / March 29: HaYoung / April 5: Mónica Heller / April 12: Ana Teixeira Pinto / April 15: Shachar Freddy Kislev / April 19: Lulo Demarco / April 26: Eva Egermann and Cordula Thym / May 3: Pauline Ghersi / May 10: Oliver Payne / May 17: Mika Rottenberg / May 24: Thomas Feuerstein / May 27: Sophia Stolz & Steffi Stanković & Robert Birchbauer / May 31: Lior Zalmanson / June 3: Francesco Finizio & Joshua Simon / June 7: Ulrich Formann / June 14: Noam Yuran / June 17: Rrose Sélavy/Marcel Duchamp / June 21: Liv Schulman.

Exhibition sponsor: Artis. Programmed by the board of the Secession. Curated by Joshua Simon and Christian Lübbert (Secession).

Press contact: presse@secession.at
Press preview: Friday, February 16, 2024, 5pm, press materials here.