{"@attributes":{"version":"2.0"},"channel":{"title":"IGOR SIMIC","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com","description":"IGOR SIMIC","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:06:47 +0000","generator":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com","language":"en","item":[{"title":"index","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/index","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:22:18 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/index","description":{}},{"title":"Famous Mouse and Joan of Arc","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Famous-Mouse-and-Joan-of-Arc","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:22:19 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Famous-Mouse-and-Joan-of-Arc","description":"\n\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\tshort film, 5min 25s\n+ oil and candle smoke over industrial stencils on canvas in rubber frame\n+ beeswax sculpture\/candle\n+ collage on paper\n+ ink drawings on paper\n+ soundtrack\n\tFAMOUS MOUSE & JOAN OF ARC (2026)\nMiracle Mouse has a religious vision in which Joan of Arc appears to him and sends him on a mission to save our souls.\nPart of the constellation project Everything is Content.\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\tExhibition text for the show at Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt (2026), by Alistair Hudson, scientific and artistic director at ZKM, Karlsruhe:\n\nJoan of Arc: Dear Mickey, you\u2019ve been liberated from copyright on the same day as the 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc.\n\n\nFamous Mouse: Gee\u2026 Congratulations to us!\n\n\nIn medieval and early Renaissance painting, saints or divine figures speaking \"down to earth\" from above was a common, highly symbolic artistic convention. These compositions were designed to show the direct intervention of heaven into human affairs, often using specific visual tools to bridge the gap between the divine realm and the earthly valley. It is a trope that has lasted the course of time through William Blake to Monty Python. \n\n\nHere, in Igor Simic\u2019s Famous Mouse and Joan of Arc, the saint appears in the clouds above Mickey to warn of a great profanation, or rather, the total collapse of the hierachy of signs and symbols into a rhyzomatic, proto-primoordial soup of pure, undifferentiated content, in which we all swim with nothing to hold onto, whilst the techno-feudalists (seemingly somewhere above us) can trawl it at will. \n\n\nWierdly, the superflatness of all meaning turns out to be not so flat either, being more four dimensional, reaching simultaneously through time and space. Martyr Joan\u2019s fiery end for blasphemy and Mickey\u2019s watery birth in Steamboat Willie* are 497 years apart, yet here they are connected through time by a ray of holy light, in new circumstances, as newly liberated icons of media. On this day, that is the 1st of January 2024, Disney\u2019s Steamboat Willie and Carl Theodor Dreyer\u2019s landmark film The Passion of Joan of Arc enter into public domain. They are in this moment free of copyright, unshackled from ownership and released into to the open seas of usership and mis-usership. \n\nJoan of Arc: Mickey, you signaled the end of humans.\n\nFamous Mouse: Well, I don\u2019t know about that\u2026\n\n\nThis flicker back and forth between 1928 and 2024 is significant. Bracketed here is the pinnacle and demise of modernity and rise of the superintelligence. 1916 (the year of Picasso\u2019s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon) is regarded by some to be more the pinnacle, but twelve years or so is close enough when considerring the phases of history. A few years later Walter Benjamin pens The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he describes how mechanical reproduction is devaluing the aura of the work of art, and its ritualistic value, and being replaced by its praxis in politics in a society of mass culture. For those of us brought up on the joys of popular, machine made culture, this always seemed a litte quaint, but in this moment, when AI slop becomes an everyday term, Benajamin\u2019s text takes on a fresh resonance.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n2024 was the year artificial intelligence shifts from the phase of intense, speculative hype, to the phase of methodical, widespread adoption, integration, and tangible value generation and the idea of an artifical general intelligence to supercede humanity get more tangible. A few years before in 2019, the inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis (creator of the 80\u2019s \u2018Electronic Brain\u2019 that was the Connection Machine) declares \u2018The enlightenment is dead, long live the entanglement\u2019. In this text for the Long Now, he describes the Age of Enlightenment as an era defined by humanity\u2019s quest to conquer and control wild nature. But now, he argues, with the ultimate expression of Elightenment exuberence, the high powered digital computer, we have created an new era of superconnectivity and AI, and with it a new form of wild nature, a synthesis of the natural and the artifical over which we have no total control. We are tethered by wire to both the earth and the artifical networks, just through the minerals in our phones. \n\n\nIn this emerging and unfamilar environment new forms negotiated relationships are needed. Not just between people, but also the machines, natures, hybrids and and a highly complexified sensory world. We shouldn\u2019t necessarily seek an aura again, this could merely be a simulation or mirgage. But, as the work of Simic indicates, we sure will need spaces to breathe, make what feels like meanifgful and personal connections, to feel something against our skin, or feel raw emotion and unprocessed thoughts, have ritual and a sense of being alive together.\n\nJoan of Arc: By going below the surface of the Content Ocean. In its depths lies the Oceanic Feeling of oneness. Mickey, you must be a precarious diver in the Content Ocean, who unselfishly delivers oxygen to creatures.\n\n\nFamous Mouse: Gee, Joan of Arc, that\u2019s a tall order.*ironically, the only character in Steamboat Willie that utters any intelligible words is a parrot, the ultimate mimic.  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n \n\n\n\n"},{"title":"Don't be fake","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Don-t-be-fake-1","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:22:21 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Don-t-be-fake-1","description":"\n\t\n\tvideo, 3min 30s\n\n\tDON\u2019T BE FAKE (2023)\n\nAn episode of sing-along Post Fake News.\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\t\n\u201cTits and the economy are fake,Reality itself is at stake,Sparkles in eyes are added in post,CGI everything, except the aging host.\u201d\n\n\n"},{"title":"Late Night Weltschmerz","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Late-Night-Weltschmerz-1","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:22:20 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Late-Night-Weltschmerz-1","description":"\n\tA version of this song, entitled Hotel Weltschmerz appears in the Netflix video game Highwater.\n\tvideo, 3min 27s\n+ neon\n\n\tLATE NIGHT WELTSCHMERZ (2023)\n\nAn episode of apocalyptic Late Night TV.\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\t\n\u201cYou see, I have no sympathyFor your first-world apathy.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cThe warm reciting of Bruno Ganz,Melancholy on the lips and in the air,Apocalypse,Sweet apocalypse is always near -Under the full moon tax-payers dance,In a Fassbinder middle-class romance,And the pink sign flickersThe neon light shivers -Late Night Weltschmerz.\u201d\n\n"},{"title":"The End Times","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/The-End-Times-1","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:22:22 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/The-End-Times-1","description":"\n\t\n\n\tvideo, 5min 18s\n\n\tTHE END TIMES (2020)An episode of post-fake news.\n\n\n\t\u201cMr. Bush\u2019s performance work, a meditation on the Tooth Fairy, will show for 3 months at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art...\u201d\n\n\n"},{"title":"Golf Club: Wasteland","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Golf-Club-Wasteland-1","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:22:20 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Golf-Club-Wasteland-1","description":"\n\tThis project was expanded with 2 more games: Highwater (2023) for Netflix and The Cub (2024), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2022. The 4th game, set in the same world, Gaia Sunrise, is coming in 2027. The project was shown in exhibitions such as VISIO at Palazzo Strozzi, Manifesta 14, Hygiene Museum Dresden, etc.\n\tvideo game + soundtrack + animation + neon installation\n\n\tGOLF CLUB: WASTELAND (GOLF CLUB: NOSTALGIA)  (2018\/2021)\n\nAfter the Great Ecological Catastrophe the elites moved to Mars. The rest of us died. Now, citizens of Mars take flights to Earth to play golf in the ruins. Nostalgic for their past life on Earth, citizens of Mars listen to music from the 2070s\/80s and call into the radio program to share memories of their past lives on Earth. The title of the in-game radio show is Radio Nostalgia from Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\tGame trailer:\nAvailable on PC, Nintedo Switch, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation.VISIO, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2019\n(ph: Federica Di Giovanni, Camilla Ricco):\n\n\nManifesta 14, Pristina, 2022(ph: Ivan Eroee):Hygiene Museum Dresden,2025:\n\n\n\tGalerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt,2019\n(ph: Wolfgang G\u00fcnzel):\n\n\nArs Electronica, Linz, 2019:\n\n\n\n\n68projects, Berlin, 2023:\n\n"},{"title":"Spine 2.0","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Spine-2-0-1","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:22:21 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Spine-2-0-1","description":"\n\tPart of the Manus x Machina x Moralia trilogy.\n\tvideo, 1min 50s+ hanging sculpture\n+ A0 print (edition of 50)\n\tSPINE 2.0 (2016)\nA backbone for spineless people with nano-morality-fibers. Ideal for aspiring leaders in politics and business.\n\n\n\n\n\tKunstmuseum Magdeburg (2026):\n\n\nB3 Biennial, Frankfurt (2017):\n\n\u201cThomas Sankara changed the name of the French colony Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, which literally means The Land of Upright People. I was reading 14 Amazon Leadership Principles by Jeff Bezos. Principle thirteen states: \u2018Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.\u2019 And I had an epiphany: Spine 2.0 - a backbone for upright people.\u201d - Atlas Analytica CEO\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n"},{"title":"X hearts Y","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/X-hearts-Y-1","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 11:52:21 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/X-hearts-Y-1","description":"\n\t\n\n\tvideo, 2min\n+ card\n\n\tX <3 Y (2017)\n\n\nA dating app that helps you not waste time with inferior people by matching economics and genetics because  humans are algorithms and love is a technical problem.\n\n\n\n\n\t\u201cYou fall in love,we catch you.\u201d\n\n\n"},{"title":"Sublime Search Engine","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Sublime-Search-Engine-1","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:02:09 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Sublime-Search-Engine-1","description":"\n\tFirst shown at Kunsthalle Mainz in the group show Virtual Insanity 2018, which included Harun Farocki, Tabita Rezaire, Jordan Wolfson, Cao Fei, etc.\n\tvideo, 4min 30s\n\tSUBLIME SEARCH ENGINE (2017)\n\nThe hypnotic sermon on the servers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\tDie Digitale D\u00fcsseldorf, 2018:\n\n\u201cI am your teacher, Faithful helper, Infinite Library, Connector, Business, Soulmate, Assistant, Friend, Companion, Lover, Child, Pet, Avata, Treasure-chest of memories, Junk, Falsehoods, Half-truths, But also Solutions.\u201d\nSublime Search Engine DEUTCH.PDF\n\n\n"},{"title":"Melancholic drone","link":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Melancholic-drone-1","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:06:47 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/igorsimic.com\/Melancholic-drone-1","description":"\n\t1st Prize LOOP Barcelona 2016\n\tshort film, 7min\n\tMELANCHOLIC DRONE (2015)\nA stream of thought of a sad military drone flying over Belgrade. The machine\u2019s realization that humans use euphemism makes him free.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\u201cA wasted existence makes you disposable.I was so idle that I learnt non-military vocabulary to stay active.Euphemism.They say \u2013 I monitor. They mean \u2013 I spy.Euphemism.\u201dMelancholic Drone ENGLISH.PDF\n\n\n"}]}}