Junk Jet n°1 wants to capture and transfer junk’s ambiguities indicating non-function, or at least bad-function implied in the nature of technology, and various forms of mis-use for aesthetic purposes. What could be the aesthetic (non-) function of junk within clean computational aesthetics of electronic media?
Therefore, relevant fields are all sorts of re-use, of wrong-use and non-use, and of tinkering (bricoler, basteln) of forms and found objects, of theories and (small) narratives, of fashions and styles, and of course of computers and other electronic devices. Junk Jet n°1 wants to explore do-it-yourself works of computer culture, accidental outcomes, deviant and normal aesthetic forms that result from misused media, subverted customary tools, and jammed common practices.
For this reason it has collected works from theorists, artists, architects, and musicians who treated in various forms counter use of electronic devices, or who produced counter works (and counter counter works) of counter aesthetics, tunneling mainstream (above all architects’, designers’, and artists’ stream) practices. Processes of deformation and variation are more important than linear chains of formulation and fixation. This includes works and concepts on collage (Holger Lund), on chance, cut up, bootleg and sampling (Jan Jelinek, Rank Sinatra, Mowblind), and on hybrid techniques (Nicole Sudhoff), all of them turning electronic devices, and other forms of computation into machines of indeterminacy. Open experiments in which someone or something may fail are of great importance: Through the lens of failure Junk Jet watches authority falter, methodologies crumble, tests getting tested – until they crash. Failure is regarded a means for confronting the seemingly fixed hierarchies implemented in technologies, but above all in procedures.
Junk Jet n°1 claims itself political, not in that it handles political topics, but in that it goes after medial techniques that show alternatives to the tautological and exploitative practices of our mass culture. Junk Jet n°1 wants to cultivate its anti heart by “introducing noise to signal”: by distorting the digital hype and collapsing the technological seduction, by subverting the computer, and exploring the aesthetics of noise and the beauty of collapse and crash – perhaps the crash of the beauty.
Edited by Mona Mahall and Asli Serbest