26.3.-25.4.2025
At one point, Borges took up Lewis Carroll's idea and wrote a short but powerful story about an empire where cartographers were so advanced that they drew a map on a scale of one to one, i.e., the size of the entire territory. In just a few sentences, the author suggests that this empire was doomed to destruction and that today only its remains and fragments of the map are visible. This story has become an important metaphor for semiologists, cartographers, and philosophers of science, and also serves as food for thought about the nation state in the information society. A recent update to the technical standard for PDF files has enabled a theoretical maximum document size exceeding 300x300 kilometers.
The exhibition at Carinarnica premiered a map of Slovenia on a scale of one to one, 160 kilometers high and 250 kilometers wide. This makes Slovenia the first country in the world with such a cartographic achievement. The 1:1 map of Slovenia focuses only on the state border. This emphasizes the implicit paradox of uselessness and offers different interpretations to different audiences. At the customs office, travelers will be able to download the map to their mobile devices upon entering the country.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vuk Ćosić is a classic of internet art, globally canonized as one of the central protagonists of net.art, the last avant-garde of the twentieth century. He is the co-founder of the Ljubljana based digital media laboratory Ljudmila and the international networks Nettime and Syndicate. With his poetic archaeology of media, he creates projects, exhibitions, video works, books, and monuments that explore the relationship between the genesis of media technologies and art, and the consequences of this relationship in society. His education as an archaeologist, combined with his avant-garde ethos, allows him to work simultaneously in the long term and in the fast-paced concepts typical of critical media art. He frequently exhibits in leading galleries and museums, lectures at dozens of art academies and universities around the world, and his works are featured in hundreds of books and included in anthologies, encyclopedias, and museum collections. His work is part of the curriculum at numerous universities and is the subject of academic articles and dissertations.
