By Frans-Josef Petersson and Robert Stasinski
Stockholm, 20 April 2004

Croatian artist Andreja Kuluncic uses the internet to stage projects with the aim of activating the viewers response to ethical questions relating to, among other things, genetic engineering and the distribution of common goods. Her on-going project "Distributive Justice", was seen at Documenta11 and the 8th Istanbul Biennial, but its multidisciplinary focus has also made it suitable for purposes outside of the art worlds exhibition venues.

Frans-Josef Petersson: Throughout your artistic career you have taken an interest in social issues, and since the mid-nineties you have been working with New Media-projects. Your first web-project to attain international notoriety was "Closed Reality - Embryo", in which you focused on the ethical questions surrounding genetic research. In recent years you have been working on the large-scale web-project "Distributive Justice" , focusing on the question of justice in the distribution of common goods. Can you elaborate on your choice of topics, and how they relate to the social relations particular to the web?

Andreja Kuluncic: It started in 1996 when I received the ArtsLink fellowship by the Soros Foundation. At this time there were limited possibilities for working with computers and New Media in Croatia, but the Fellowship enabled me to go for 6 weeks to a host institution in Minneapolis. There I bought my first computer, and started to work with internet-based projects. The first serious project was the "State-Citizen Communication" in Budapest in 1998. By then Hungary had abolished the totalitarian state, and attained freedom of expression, but the question was if someone was really paying attention. The piece consisted of a voting cabinet placed in a square, a website and a video screen. When you went into the voting cabinet you found the website, where you got the question whether you consider there to be a genuine dialogue between the state and the citizens. You got to choose between the color red and the color green, where red indicated that there is democracy in the sense that you can express an opinion but that no one really takes notice. Green meant that you thought that there is a real communication between you and the decision-makers. On the video screen appeared a text quoted from the Hungarian Constitution, and the color of the text was changing according to the way people were voting. The idea was to put the video screen in the Parliament, which was unfortunately not possible due to technical difficulty.

FJP: In the work you had done prior to this you had already been involved with different political issues. How did the choice of working with Internet projects relate to the political content of your work?

AK: The type of projects I did before were about issues particular to the context I happened to be at the time. For example, "Azraq", which I did in 1994 in Jordan, was about an ecological problem they had there. In 1995, I traveled to Latin America, and in, for example Ecuador and Peru, I focused on issues having to do with the indigenous people. When I got back to east Europe I focused on the social issues that came to the fore in the period of transition from communism to market economy. For me it's not about wanting to do political work, but rather about simply reacting to the circumstances in which you find yourself and take that as a point of departure for your work. The Internet is a medium for communicating with people, and if you work with a project that involved gathering a lot of information the Internet is a suitable medium. If you want to make a clear statement, maybe a billboard project is more suitable, for example. I am certainly not an artist who makes work about the medium, I simply use the medium as a tool to reach different people.

Robert Stasinski: You have produced a variety of games, interactive texts, links, discussions and resources in your project "Distributive Justice". Are there political depths, cultural currents, that you think could only be challenged by the medium of the net?

AK: No, it is a good medium to reach a lot of people all over, but it is not the only one. For me it was a good strategy for this piece in particular.

FJP: Using the Internet gives your work a particular temporality. While "State-Citizen Communication" was a time-limited project, that now exist on the web merely as a documentation, other projects like "Distributive Justice" or "Embryo" have an ongoing existence. Since you point out that your projects are very specifically tied to the context in which they are conceived, how does this relate to their decontextualized existence on the Internet?

AK: Both "Embryo" and "Distributive Justice" are more general than my other projects. They were not conceived for a particular context, but on the contrary deal with issues that everyone can relate to. On the Embryo web site you can read about genetic engineering, view video-documentation of discussions between philosophers, theologians at different universities, and also take part in a game. To play you have to wait for another player to log on, and then you can together "genetically engineer" a baby. The statistics are collected on the web page and you can then compare the "Society of Embryos" created by the players, and statistics of the "Normal Society". This "Normal Society" is a global society. The game is meant to function as a trigger, to make people interested in these ethical issues. It is not a scientific project, but rather it is meant to make people reflect on the fact that a society created with the help of genetic engineering would be quite different from the society we have today. The point of the game is to raise awareness of the fact that by making different choices about your baby, you are at the same time stating what you want for yourself; that you want to be taller, or that you want to be smarter etc. It is really a projection of your vision of the future. The interactive aspect, where you have to play the game together with someone else was important to me to show how our vision of the future is always a result of reciprocity with other individuals.

FJP: So, characteristically, you used the subject of genetic engineering to reflect on social issues, as a point of departure for thinking about society. But why genetics particularly?

AK: I wanted to work with an issue that was interesting in the particular period, but one which wasn't too problematic. At this time there were a lot of discussion around dealing with war, transition and so on, and people just got tired of it! Also people were reluctant to interact, to have dialogue with disciplines outside their own. I felt there was a lack of discussion. The problem with the transition to democracy was to realize that it is not only the society that has to change, but also that you have to change yourself. All this happened over a period of 2- 3 years, and it was, and still is, too fast for a lot of people in our society. So I wanted to talk about something dealing with the future, and that is why I chose the subject of genetic engineering, because in a sense you are talking about yourself - but in a freethinking way since you are dealing with the future. Also, at this time genetic engineering wasn't that well known an issue, either. Another important thing was that it was seen as a topic belonging to the west, or the US, so I wanted to show that it should be a concern for our society too.

FJP: Since we are talking about science and technology, and the great impact these disciplines will have on our future and the way we live our lives I want to ask you how you view the role of art, and your role as an artist, in this overall scheme. Can art make a difference?

AK: Today you cannot believe in art as direct action, the way you could in the 60s and 70s when artist could go out in the street and expect their actions to have an effect. Today all you can hope for is that you can make a difference by influencing people to focus on one particular issue for, say, 5 minutes. Currently, I see no other potential for art. All my works try to educate, to trigger questions by involving the viewer so that they feel that the issue at hand relates to them as well. Regarding genetic engineering, I think it is just important to think about the moral implications of this technology. These things will sooner or later be our reality and we cannot wait until then to consider these issues. It is important that everyone participate in these debates, not just specialists. Another piece, that is not on the web, but is important because it instigated my interest in the concept of justice. This was a billboard project, about these women that during the transition years were working in the NAMA-stores for 6 months without payment. NAMA is a chain of department stores which was particularly successful in Croatia under the Socialist regime. NAMA comes from "NArodni MAgazin", which means "The People's Shop". These shops, which were condemned to bankruptcy by the country's economic development, have been in the following paradoxical situation for the last few years: they have practically ceased all activity, but are kept open by the employees who occupy them. On ten of the best advertising hoardings in central Zagreb, I pasted a portrait of an employee with the title "NAMA - 1908 Employees, 15 Department Stores". Based on the resources, values and places of the advertisement, a public debate was started concerning the economic transition of Croatia. The employee on the poster symbolizes the individual and collective disasters which accompany the changes in the Croatian economy.

FJP: Was this the project that developed into "Distributive Justice"?

AK: Yeah, this project gave me a theme. And then I combined it with the methodology of "Embryo" to make "Distributive Justice".

RS: I have observed and interacted with your projects on different locations, both in Kassel and Istanbul. What struck me was the anxiety of the design contra the compoundness of the theories, interviews and publications involved. How have you been planning the default settings of the physical translation of your online project?

AK: I started to work on "Distributive Justice" in 2000, and I wanted to reflect on social issues and in particular the issue of social justice after the transition to a free market. We sat down with philosophers and sociologists and tried to develop different ideas into one specific project, which I, at that time, envisioned as some kind of game. After a year of brainstorming we came to the conclusion that it would not be possible to narrow down such a complex subject to just be about one thing, so we divided the project into many parts. I was aware that I would have about 10 minutes, at the most, of attention of the viewers in a large exhibition, so the question was how I could involve them without, oversimplifying, or banalizing the subject so the idea was to have different approaches to the same topic within the same project. We put it on the web in 2001, in August, and then we were invited to the biennial for young artists in Torino, 2 or 3 months before Documenta11. There the curators wanted to do something in space, and I was thinking about how to translate this web site into space. I knew there would be a lot of computers in this large space, and the question was how to set myself apart from the rest and at the same time be user-friendly. I invited an architect and we wanted to make something that made sense, that was also moveable for discussions. Another important consideration was hiding all the cords from the computers, since people are still afraid of too much technology. Also, at the installation there was always an assistant to help you out, and give you a sheet of paper where it says what you can do and so on.

RS: So how do you think it has worked out in different contexts? If you compare Istanbul and Kassel with Innsbruck and the Walker Arts Center, for example?

AK: There is a big difference. First of all, when I started the project I was thinking mainly of the Croatian context, so I was thinking about Croatia as a transition country. Altogether, from all of the approximately 10 countries where I have exhibited "Distributive Justice", the audience in Germany, Austria and Northern Italy already had formed opinions on the issue of social justice. They already knew a lot about different societies and different theories, so they were somewhat better prepared to deal with the issues raised by my work. Compared with America or Australia, or some European countries, the general public in these countries were more aware of the issue of social justice, and knew better how to interact with the piece. In other countries, like Turkey and Croatia, where this problem is more pronounced in everyday life, people were less oriented in the theoretical aspects of the issue. Visitors were interested, but not so prone to interact with the piece. I would like to see this project in Argentina or China for example, but the problem is that I am never invited to these countries since there is no money. Turkey is actually the only non-western country were I have exhibited the work. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about it, except talk about this problem in interviews like this and hope someone will raise the money to invite me.

RS: So is this what you are working on right now, or do have some new projects?

AK: Right now we are working on adapting "Distributive Justice" for a round table and presentations in Sofia and Bucharest, trying to construct a network of people to discuss issues around the EU. This is not done for an art context, but we use "Distributive Justice" to connect people who are interested in these issues. The good thing about art exhibitions is that the visitors take the projects seriously and take their time to focus and answer the questions thoroughly. But if it makes sense, I like to work outside of an art context. "Distributive Justice" is, for example, used at some universities for the first year political science students as an introduction to these issues. And also, some of the statistics are use by sociologists. I am also working on a new web-project for an exhibition on cyborgs that will take place in Germany. So this project will deal with cyborgs and it will be an online project. Structurally it will be simpler than "Distributive Justice", and more similar to "Embryo". I am also working on two pieces, which are not online, one with asylum-seekers in Lunenburg, Germany and the other in Liverpool, with the part of the city called Speke, for the upcoming biennial.

Text by By Frans-Josef Petersson and Robert Stasinski