Texts

# about the network

SilentCell Network challenges the role of artists as reality-checkers who transgress certain models or boundaries in social relationships and offer an altered view of everyday life. This is achieved through creativity and the potential that lies in small or larger scale interventions in it. As Jaques Ranciere says, “the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought”.

The group’s actions, interventions and performances operate in various physical and geographical locations (Ljubljana, Graz, Venice, Berlin…), as well as in most existing media and distributive contexts. The accidental present audience, unaware of the actual artistic codification and context of these events, as well as the audience later on directed to the documentation of the events, is confronted with the group’s tactical manipulations of the thin line between real-time inserted fictions and constructed realities. The documentation of the events furthermore questions the basic dilemma surrounding the truth and lies spread through various media networks and PR politics.

# by Nataša Petrešin; published in: Collaborate, participate, perform!
(Share Festival Catalogue, Turin / Italy 2006)

# about Ask Not

In this action [they] continue to make room for the individual and to render complex ideas with simplicity. [They] are non-believers in seamless expression. [They] exploit the aspect of transparency of the Internet medium to the maximum in order to convey a healing message and sow a liberating seed. Therefore, the trick and the manipulation in this action are made so obvious: the sentence, “Don’t ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country!” which John F. Kennedy pronounced years ago on his inauguration as President, has been edited and reversed to – “Don’t ask what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you!”

This action is enabling the individual to turn a powerful, imperative sentence into a question. This is how an empty space is created in which human identity can dwell and being can unfold. In this action [they] encrypt the beginnings of the democratic experience in our civilization as Aristotle’s sentence “Man is a political animal” and Socrates’ “Know thyself” carved into the Delphi oracle come to mind and blend into each other. [They] transform the computer into a dwelling of the human inner voice. Then, comes the silence. The message instills an inner revolution, becomes healing, empowering life.

[They] show that imperatives could easily be taken to the absolute and turn into dogmas. Perhaps with this action [they] have the task of preparing the individual for a life in a community capable of understanding a 3rd millennium democracy.

# by Rossitza Daskalova
published in CIAC Electronic Art Magazine
(January, 2001 / N.12; Montreal, Canada)