Art and Crisis—Facing Bureaucrat

A satirical art video on automated logic of bureaucracy and their response to economic crisis.

Urtica’s statement:

Shall the art/artist survive? Current environmental situation for art production considers high level of uncertainty, as a result of economic crisis, artists’ precarious working conditions, concentration of scarce resources by a small number of big players, instability or hostility of a surroundings. This usually results in high mortality rate of small art initiatives that fail to adapt to the institutional structure of super-ordinate cultural system. Find out what is bureaucracy doing to relieve effects of the economic crisis?

Storyline: The main characters, an Artist and a bureaucrat Eliza, are entering into a conversation. The Artist is mainly preoccupied with the issue Shall the art/artist survive?^*1 while Eliza is trying to find an answer according to a cultural policy guidelines.^*2 The action is divided into five segments: <identificate keywords> <discover minimal context> <choose appropriate transformation> <generate response in the absence of keywords>, <provide an ending capacity for ELIZA "scripts"> Those actions are also fundamental technical problems when artificial intelligence computer programs are created.^*3

^*1“Shall the artist survive?” A slogan of the poster for US Federal Art Project whose aim was to help unemployed artists, and to relieve effects of the Great Depression, 1935-1943
^*2“Viminacium Declaration on Contemporary Art and Reconciliation in South East Europe”, Serbia, September 2011
^*3“ELIZA - A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine”, paper by Joseph Weizenbaum, 1966