Marko Peljhan

Born in 1969, Sempeter pri Gorici, lives in Los Angeles, Riga and Ljubljana. Marko is the coordinator of 'Project Atol', 'Makrolab', as well as 'Insular Technologies', a high-frequency global radio network initiative. From 2005 he is coordinating the design for the Arctic and Antarctic Makrolab projects in the framework of the Interpolar Transnational Art and Science Consortium I-TASC. In 2000 he received the special Medienkunst prize at the ZKM, in 2001 the Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica together with Carsten Nicolai and in 2004 the second prize of the Unesco Digital Media Art Award.
Source: http://luminousgreen.org/compost/symposium2007/marko_peljhan

"Marko Peljhan is one of the most successful Slovene conceptual artists, critically acclaimed in the international art context and in Slovenia for his complex projects that include tactical use of new technologies and reveal the mechanisms of definitions of the legal and illegal, and the relations between the immaterial power devices and the individual creativity and activity. With his project-in-progress Makrolab and art organisation Projekt Atol that are based upon the accumulation of knowledge, collaboration between the artistic and scientific fields, collective action and performativity, Peljhan is reaching the realization of the dreams of the transgressive utopian legacy. Since 2002 Peljhan teaches at the University of Santa Barbara." Source: http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/001377.php

Projects:
Pact Systems, technological branch of Projekt Atol, founded in 1995
Terminal, installation, 1996
UCOG-144, Urban Colonisation and Orientation Gear - 144, 1996
Makrolab, 1997 - 2007
Wardenclyffe, performance
SOLAR, performance
Insular Technologies initiative, announced in 1998
178 Degrees East — Another Ocean Region, Australia, 1997
PPTU 1999, Portable Programming and Transmitting Unit 1999
TRUST-SYSTEM 15, New York, 1999
POLAR, installation (with Carsten Nicolai), Ars Electronica, Vienna, 2001
S-77CCR, Vienna, 2004

Texts:

Marko Peljhan: INSULATION/ISOLATION PROCEEDINGS
Lecture for the 100 days-100 guests documenta X programme, August 31 1997
http://ellipsetours.free.fr/wikiblog/wakka.php?wiki=Blog-20050131010116-Textes
"Makrolab is a declarative position outside of the spectacle, also outside of society (I stress the wording declarative) and is designed as a closed and isolated space-time, which will in its inner logic and structure function as a communication center and reflective tool. (...) avant-garde strategies, isolation insulation strategies, war, communication strategies, sexuality and urbanity, Hlebnikov laws of time and real history time. Sort of a life setting basis in a way if I look at it now, trying to include everything that my life in the first world at the late 20th century should be consisted of."

Interview of Marko Peljhan by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Orbit #3, 1998:
http://artnode.se/artorbit/issue3/i_peljhan/i_peljhan.html

Marko Peljhan: Strategies of Minimal Resistance - Analysis of Tactical Work in the Surveillance Society, talk at SCCA (Ljubljana Center for Contemporary Arts), 1999:
http://www.worldofart.org/english/99/99peljhantxang.htm
http://www.rezoweb.com/forum/technologie/aaaroskoforum/939.shtml

Transcript of the talk by Marko Peljhan at the Luminous Green Symposium in 2007:
http://luminousgreen.org/compost/symposium2007/marko_peljhan
"In these ten years we have learned a lot and the lab has traveled all over the earth. One of the main theses of the project is that a small group of people are living in isolation. Isolation conditions, as I call them, generate more evolutionary code than larger systems. (...) The project has spawned a lot of initiatives, which have no connection to the lab anymore. But there was the ultimate goal of proving a system that can work in a hostile environment, both for humans and for technology, and to make this as a possible way to survive in future environments."

Related:
Makrolab

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