FRANKFURT.- The exhibition Everything is Content addresses the conditions of contemporary culture in an era of pervasive digital entanglement. It is grounded in the assumption that media have condensed into a rhizomatic network in which narratives lose their differentiation while simultaneously assuming both banal and sacral significance. Within this framework, content emerges as a constitutive force of cultural reality.

The exhibited works are paintings realized in cobalt blue, oil, and candle soot. This material configuration refers to technological, religious, and geopolitical contexts: cobalt as a key raw material for digital devices; oil painting as a historical image technology in dialogue with the digital blue screen; and fire as a foundational element of belief, civilization, and industrial production. Industrial stencils and traces of combustion further interweave the sacred and the everyday.

At the heart of the exhibition is the film Famous Mouse and Joan of Arc, shown on a large LED wall. Here, Disney’s 1928 animation and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc converge, creating a luminous encounter between pop culture and spiritual martyrdom. The work traces the circulation of images, icons, and narratives across time, linking humor, devotion, and media critique in a visually immersive experience.

Through his practice, Igor Simić articulates a contemporary visual language in which material, energy, and meaning are inseparably intertwined, offering an artistic reflection on culture under conditions of ongoing transformation.

On Igor Simic’s Famous Mouse and Joan of Arc

by Alistair Hudson, Artistic Director of ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe

Joan of Arc: Dear Mickey, you’ve been liberated from copyright on the same day as the 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Mickey: Gee… Congratulations to us!

In medieval and early Renaissance painting, saints or divine figures speaking „down to earth“ from above was a common, highly symbolic artistic convention. These compositions were designed to show the direct intervention of heaven into human affairs, often using specific visual tools to bridge the gap between the divine realm and the earthly valley. It is a trope that has lasted the course of time through William Blake to Monty Python.

Here, in Igor Simic’s Famous Mouse and Joan of Arc, the saint appears in the clouds above Mickey to warn of a great profanation, or rather, the total collapse of the hierachy of signs and symbols into a rhyzomatic, proto-primoordial soup of pure, undifferentiated content, in which we all swim with nothing to hold onto, whilst the techno-feudalists (seemingly somewhere above us) can trawl it at will.

Wierdly, the superflatness of all meaning turns out to be not so flat either, being more four dimensional, reaching simultaneously through time and space. Martyr Joan’s fiery end for blasphemy and Mickey’s watery birth in Steamboat Willie* are 497 years apart, yet here they are connected through time by a ray of holy light, in new circumstances, as newly liberated icons of media. On this day, that is the 1st of January 2024, Disney’s Steamboat Willie and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s landmark film The Passion of Joan of Arc enter into public domain. They are in this moment free of copyright, unshackled from ownership and released into to the open seas of usership and mis-usership.

Joan of Arc: Mickey, you signaled the end of humans.

Mickey: Well, I don’t know about that...

This flicker back and forth between 1928 and 2024 is significant. Bracketed here is the pinnacle and demise of modernity and rise of the superintelligence. 1916 (the year of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) is regarded by some to be more the pinnacle, but twelve years or so is close enough when considerring the phases of history. A few years later Walter Benjamin pens The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he describes how mechanical reproduction is devaluing the aura of the work of art, and its ritualistic value, and being replaced by its praxis in politics in a society of mass culture. For those of us brought up on the joys of popular, machine made culture, this always seemed a litte quaint, but in this moment, when AI slop becomes an everyday term, Benajamin’s text takes on a fresh resonance.

2024 was the year artificial intelligence shifts from the phase of intense, speculative hype, to the phase of methodical, widespread adoption, integration, and tangible value generation and the idea of an artifical general intelligence to supercede humanity get more tangible. A few years before in 2019, the inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis (creator of the 80’s ‘Electronic Brain’ that was the Connection Machine) declares ‘The enlightenment is dead, long live the entanglement’. In this text for the Long Now, he describes the Age of

Enlightenment as an era defined by humanity’s quest to conquer and control wild nature. But now, he argues, with the ultimate expression of Elightenment exuberence, the high powered digital computer, we have created an new era of superconnectivity and AI, and with it a new form of wild nature, a synthesis of the natural and the artifical over which we have no total control. We are tethered by wire to both the earth and the artifical networks, just through the minerals in our phones.

In this emerging and unfamilar environment new forms of negotiated relationships are needed. Not just between people, but also the machines, natures, hybrids and and a highly complexified sensory world. We shouldn’t necessarily seek an aura again, this could merely be a simulation or mirgage. But, as the work of Simic indicates, we sure will need spaces to breathe, make what feels like meanifgful and personal connections, to feel something against our skin, or feel raw emotion and unprocessed thoughts, have ritual and a sense of being alive together.

Joan of Arc:

By going below the surface of the Content Ocean. In its depths lies the Oceanic Feeling of

oneness. Mickey, you must be a precarious diver in the Content Ocean, who unselfishly delivers oxygen to creatures.

Mickey:

Gee, Joan of Arc, that’s a tall order.

*ironically, the only character in Steamboat Willie that utters any intelligible words is a parrot, the ultimate mimic.

Igor Simić (*1988 in Belgrade, YU) is an artist, filmmaker, and game designer. In his highly polished short films, which are presented in the context of both film festivals and the visual arts, he takes a satirical look at the hyper-capitalist and digitization-induced signs of decay in our contemporary society. For example, in his films he addresses conditions such as “Weltschmerz” or the youth motto of 2012, “YOLO,” which are additionally staged in exhibition contexts in the form of deliberately striking neon letter installations. Big emotions and attitudes to life such as these, as well as other contemporary themes – like the profit-oriented calculability of love in Cost-Benefit-Love (2014) or technology-based body prostheses in Spine 2.0 (2016) – are explored not only within classic film narratives but also in alternative formats such as video games or songs. At the same time, Simić references familiar aesthetics and formats from television and the internet, while also drawing on art and film history. This results in a multi-layered interplay in which socially explosive topics are reflected cinematically through multi-referential relationships and in an ironic manner.

Igor Simić graduated with a BA in Film Studies and Philosophy from Columbia University in New York. In 2015 and 2017, his short films were presented at the B3 Biennale of the Moving Image in Frankfurt am Main, and in 2021 he was awarded the prize for best video game there. He has also received awards such as the 1st Prize Blooom Award by Art Düsseldorf (2013) and the 1st Prize Discovery Award by LOOP Barcelona (2016). His works have been shown at other national and international institutions and film festivals, including Kunsthalle Mainz, the 40th edition of Ars Electronica in Linz, Manifesta 14 in Pristina, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, the October Salon of Belgrade Biennale, Museum Ulm, Kunsthalle Gießen, and the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. His works can be found in several collections, including the Folker Skulima Art Foundation in Berlin, the Galerija Savremene Umetnosti in Pančevo, and the MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona.

Furthermore, Simić is the creative director of the game development studio Demagog Studio, which he co-founded in 2017, and works as a moderator, tutor, and speaker. For example, he was a tutor for several editions of the Berlinale Talents support program and gave lectures at the Locarno Film Festival, Yale University in New Haven, and Kino der Kunst in Munich.

Simić lives and works between New York and Belgrade.