NSK - State in Time

The virtual empassy of Neue Slowenische Kunst

The Irwin Group of NSK started in the early 1990s to develop a State concept. The NSK Embassy Moscow (1992) was the first project that tested the real theoretical circumstances and conditions for artists to explore a system of references for communication by the setup of a new infrastructure in a controlled political environment. Their Moscow declaration was completely based on their subjective reflection of post-historic reality and the pro-historic future. As an interactive community-building event, NSK started to issue a series of registered, numbered passports (and a few diplomatic passports) which are extremely close to the "real thing."

Their long time collaborator and media theoretician Marina Grzinic was present in Moscow for the inauguration of the first embassy there. Her pop~AGENT report gives us clear insight into the event. Irwin, who is less exploiting the circumstances for their projections of ideas on a certain place, more so defines the difference of a place, ie: The State in Time from real Embassy sites. Therefore, with their collective activities, NSK determines data in the heterogeneous diagram of the political and artistic social setting. The State in Time project refers to, and discuss the concept of, the soul of claustrophobic geographic conditions in totalitarian regimes. Irwin has established temporary Consulates to issue passports in locations like Geneva, Graz, Umag, Berlin, Amsterdam, Seoul, and Hamburg, usually during art exhibitions. They plan the next step of the project in China, an provocative and challenging territory.

What connects Irwin/NSK to Micronations is their the Electronic Embassy Tokyo, which was established in 1996. It is a variation on the real site, but as property values are extremely high in Tokyo, this was a logical virtual solution. Using the facilities of Ludjmila (Ljubljana Digital Media Lab) NSK took its first steps into Cyberspace with the Electronic Embassy. But, their on-line activities were extended in 1996 by an Internet communication project "Transnacionala: A Journey from the East to the West" a real trip across the USA during the Summer Olympic Games. The Electronic Embassy, unlike the active, socialist encounters that one experiences IRL, is a collection of solidly rendered 3D images, which refer to navigation models used everywhere (in reality as well as in VR). The Electronic Embassy offers a series of hallways, platforms and doors which are somehow strange, uninhabited, and quite unlike the aesthetic of NSK artworks. The space is beautifully designed and one only wishes that it was navigable in VRML.

Computer generated 3D worlds open up a new issue for discussion into the Micronations topic. The aesthetics of computer rendered images, and the associations they bring to commercial advertising, and lately to Virtual Reality and real time on-line 3D Worlds, are problematic discussion points in the art community (and have been for over a decade). The availability in the 1990s of high quality graphic software as a consumer product has bought about a major turnaround in artists interest in the medium. But, computer graphics software (and hardware) and their extended existence into on-line 3D environments, remain a massive corporate structure. The 3D environment is the fastest growing on-line frontier. It is fraught with problems, like: real-time access to the rapidly blossoming 3D worlds, reality reference systems, and inhabitant recognition systems (avatars, etc.).

Karel Dudesek, director of Van Gogh TV, a Austrian/German artists group that developed Worlds Within, a 3D on-line communication environment, introduced during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, said in a recent discussion with pop~TARTS in Vienna on the topic of why most 3D worlds just donŽt work that it is because " ... (most) 3D environments are compromises in terms of technology." Furthermore, he pinpoints the fact that, "there are no applications out there that function for virtual worlds.....the problem is to find an application for 3D and also to find an application (for it) into real life." In this respect, the NSK States in (real) Time are much more compelling than their Electronic environment as a static space suspended in data-space.