Sara Bezovšek
The Influencing Machine
Interactive website
The Influencing Machine is a browser-based artwork by Slovenian artist Sara Bezovšek based on the true story of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA), a network of twenty contemporary art institutions that suddenly appeared throughout the former USSR in the early 1990s at the conclusion of the Cold War. This grand initiative had a brief intensity that radically changed how visual art and culture could be directionalized and purposed. As part of the research project and exhibition organized by Aaron Moulton under the same title, Bezovšek treats the Procedures Manual and the SCCA Network archive like a dataset, resulting in an all-encompassing recursive spiral into the Influencing Machine itself as a cultural phenomenon, a mind map, an epic scroll, a turbofolklore, and a machine pulling the levers that control our hearts and minds. This was initiated through a dialogue between artist Sara Bezovšek and Influencing Machine curator Aaron Moulton as a way to question the vulnerability of the archive as a portrait of reality and a way to turn the information surrounding this research into something sensory and emotional.
Sara Bezovšek is a visual artist working in the fields of internet art, experimental film and graphic design. Her artistic practice is characterized by reappropriation of online and pop cultural materials. Using a dense visual language of references, she taps into the collective imaginarium and constructs engaging narratives that are both a critique and a celebration of the highly saturated online media landscapes we navigate daily.