The collaborative duo of Demystification Committee are the artists-in-residence for the 2017 Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research in cooperation with the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK). During the residency, they will continue to develop their research into the nebulous power structures of offshore financial networks through the creation of an international corporate structure set up to model and explore offshore finance.
Chaired by Oliver S. and Francesco T., The Demystification Committee is a collaborative framework set up to investigate the globalised, extra-state, covert systems and large-scale networks, processes and technologies that shape our society. The exploration of such fluctuating technology encompasses, but is not limited to, the study of platforms, machines, physical networks, virtual & artificial forces, legal & juridical frameworks. With a focus on these processes the Committee attempts to represent, expose and understand clashing technological and societal trajectories through artistic experimentation. Going beyond the use of specific techniques, tools or technologies, the Demystification Committee experiments with alternative narratives to the dominant myths surrounding technology and society.
Offshore Investigation Vehicle is based on ongoing research into the structures of power embodied in offshore practices and tries to identify means of dislocating these financial systems. Through an interventionist approach, the artists themselves propose to become offshore. But how does one do that when such structures and their perpetrators remain obscure? By the creation of an âOffshore A-Zâ database, the Committee has carried out a first, pre-Panama Papers, data collection on which algorithms operate, mapping and utilising patterns such as recurring tactical mistakes in the naming and legal frameworks of offshore finance. The next phase of the project involves setting up an offshore entity in order to research the subject further from within as well as exploring possible offshore tactics with additional collaborators through a series of workshops.
The political nature of the project, combined with a sensitivity for the aesthetics of offshoring and the provocative nature of the experimental methodology, formulates it as a âresearch threatâ. As the artists themselves write, they are âusing the tools of financial secrecy to create not an offshore investment vehicle, but an offshore investigation vehicle.â
In this vein, the project evokes VilĂ©m Flusserâs concept of âapparatusâ, since:
jury
Kristoffer Gansing, Susanne Kriemann and Maren Hartmann
credits
The residency program is a cooperation between the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and transmediale, festival for art and digital culture Berlin.