Secession

Curated by Joshua Simon

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.