Franz Milec's Portfolio

8/18/2019 Franz Milec's Portfolio

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FRANZ MILEC⎍

P O R T

F O L I O

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Regardless of the medium I’m currently working with, you can

definitely call me an essayist. You see, the thing I care about the

most is to uncover the complexities of what we usually perceive

as banal and unimportant; to give a second look to something

that is taken for granted or even designed to go unnoticed.

The visual often appearing in many of my works is that of a city’s

periphery. That’s the environment I grew up in and one where I

feel at home. It both haunts and inspires me; I can’t help but

love the semi-wild landscape permeated by highways and box-

like architecture. Periphery’s air of otherworldliness and being

impossible to escape from are powerful enough for me to makeup for its non-excitement or outright boredom. I would say that

its beauty can seem frustrating and even perverse – and so can

mine.

Thanks to my overly analytical attitude, I’m interested in how

our (peripheral) surroundings and the media we use for

communication shape who we are. In a single breath I can gofrom subtle lyricism to hardcore identity politics – and back

again. With my experience as a social media manager, my

works tend to dissect the acts of how we market and sell

ourselves and how we did so in the past.

I put on masks of many of my heroes, but to name a few: Edward

Hopper, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, David Lynch, JonasMekas, JG Ballard, Harun Farocki.

A r t i s

t S t a t e m e n t


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6 min / HD video installation with stereo sound

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From the beginning of the industrial era, people worriedmachines would replace human labor, basically rendering us

useless. These worries might have seemed crazy up until now.

It seems we are quickly approaching the so-called post-work

society and the futurologists and TED speakers promise us a

kind of utopian freedom from labor. The problem is – what

defines us, if not what we do, what we create on a daily basis?Without work, don't we lose much more than work?

Ad.ventures appropriates the visuals of advertisement and the

language of automation propaganda to tell a story of its own.

A d . v e n t u r e s

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installation / data visualization

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The apocalypse is constantly present in our collective con-sciousness – with all the recent news pointing to it and

Hollywood blockbusters priming us to start rebuilding once it

comes and some of us manage to survive. The End Is Near tries

to tap into this fear we share.

Every time someone tweets the string “the end is near”, the app

gets the user’s current location and finds what the sky abovethem looks like on Google StreetView.

T h e E n d

I s N e a r

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10 min / AV performance with 4-channel sound

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Peripheral blends audio, video, and heart beat recorded at thesame place and reconstructs my own experience of a peri-

phery.

Flows and rhythms of the location and the body merge in a data

visualization / sonification and approach the answer to the

question: How do you find the averages of your perception?

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Performed:Galerie AMU, Prague, February 2016

P e r i p h e r a l

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2 min / HD video installation

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"It was a fairly typical flânerie; I'm looking at the sky overBerlin's Tiergarten – in a slightly different way than Walter

Benjamin used to. Methinks: Do the clouds look like the ones in

America?

As I'm typing 'route66' into the search field, Maps somehow

suggests Interstate 40 instead. I walk up and down the highway,

looking at cars and the desert surrounding them. Suddenly,

everything goes dark."

A documentation of a complex glitch within Google's Street View

service.

L o s t

T i m e ( I n t e r s t a

t e 4 0 )

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10 min / AV performance with 4-channel sound

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"Subversive techniques need not always be directed towards“major” political objectives. They also include small actsenabling people to liberate themselves from their everydayreality of submitting to hegemony. Precisely such acts can befound in the work of Lubomir Durcek, who is one of the best-known Slovak conceptualists."

In collaboration with Lea Petrikova, we reconstucted one ofDurcek´s works, the situation NFRMC – Information abouthands and people, which he performed in 1982.

Four people are blindfolded in the middle of a (virtual) peripheryand the only way they can coommunicate is by touching hands.

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Video, sound & coding:Franz Milec

Direction of performance:Lea Petrikova

Performed:

Czech Center, New York, November 2015

N F R M C 1 5

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generative sound installation

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"Remediation is usually thought of as one medium devouringanother. This, however, is not necessarily correct - we should

think about it as coming from inside of the original medium,

something that was there since its creation."

An old slide projector loses its function and is transformed into

a noise machine, using a RaspberryPi, 4 mics, and a generative

composition written in Pure Data. The listener can focus on the

sonic details of the machine, that were originally unwanted side

effects.

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Exhibited:Galerie AMU, Prague, June 2015

D i a s

y n t h

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5 min / SD video installation

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“I do recognize his face, but not so much his voice. I could tellyou he loved to joke and dance; I could show him as a goodperson or even a film star.”

Fragments III raise serious questions about memories and thetechnical images that carry them. Is home video a medium ofnostalgia or a medium of memory creation? Do we reallynarrate it or are we just characters drowned in its ideology? Inour era of self-marketing and active personality construction on

social media, we should examine the roots of these practices.

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F r a g

m e n t s I I I

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10/13

2 min / SD video installation

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In our lives, there are not many moments when we arecompletely free. This video presents a simple, happy impression

from a time long gone, captured on VHS back in 1996. Maybe a

little nostalgic and naïve, but with a sense of wilderness and

complete lack of restraints only a child can have.

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Exhibited:Galeria Dunaj, Bratislava, December 2014

F r a g

m e n t s I

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analog slideshow with 30 photos

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A tiny virtual world where one can only move forward orbackward, starting trapped in a mundane reality of a rural

periphery, ending with an abstract world created on the

celluloid with bleach and solarization during the development.

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Exhibited:Galeria Dunaj, Bratislava, December 2014

W a l k w i t h M e

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2 min / HD video installation with stereo sound

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Portuguese philosopher Lucio Pinheiro dos Santos wrote aboutrhythm as a tool that can heal a human soul suffering from

apathy, uniformity, and everydayness. This theory is realized as

a video triptych linking to the therapeutical experience that is a

simple train ride.

Three separate landscapes periodically sync and disconnect to

create a pleasant, organized chaos.

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Galeria Dunaj, Bratislava, December 2014

I C o u

l d n ' t H e l p B u t

W o n d e r

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installation / data visualization

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A simple app connecting Conway's Game of Life and itsevolutionary principles with its philosophical and religious

predecessors. It generates a grid of cells that manifest life-like

behavior and at the same time chants and drumming are

generated based on several aspects of the grid (number of living

cells, their postition, ...). It runs in a cycle, starting with chaos

and ending with complete life-like order (both visual and

linguistic), only to be reset once again.

The app is run on a tablet, presented as a sort of an altar.

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Exhibited:

Berlinskej Model Gallery, Prague, February 2014

T h e

M o n o l i t h

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Franz Milec's Portfolio

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