Aleksandra Domanović

In their own way Worldometers – named after a website that aggregates live tickers for various real-time statistics, including coronavirus data – give form to things that are difficult to imagine. Hybrid image-objects display the R-value, number of positive cases per 100,000 people  and the ICU occupancy rate in Berlin between 30 April and 5 June 2021. Manifesting the fraught encounter between humans and SARS-CoV-2 through spinning, Worldometers show the proximity of life and its absence and act as a kind of capsule from a time defined by the porosity of the boundaries between dream and reality, fact and fiction, statistics and the unconscious.

The ‘Belgrade Hand’, the first functional touch-sensitive controllable prosthesis in the world was invented in 1963 in Yugoslavia by the Serbian scientist Rajko Tomović. Digitally rebuilt as a 3D model and materialized through a process of laser sintering the hand returns to act out various gestures. It is coated with bronze, copper, aluminium and “Soft-Touch” materials, the latter commonly used in car interiors for its seemingly organic, even skin-like surface. The robotic hands in Iskra Delta headquarters point to the history of Yugoslavian technological innovation and the future it anticipated, as well as to other utopian ideas of the time, and intersect them with the figure of the cyborg and early cyberfeminist attempts to imagine an alliance between technology and women. The Relay Runner carrying a baton made of Yugoslav chestnut, Sueño de una Tarde holding a yin-yang symbol, a hand with a cigarette (a torch of freedom), and one gently supporting a tiny bird – they act both as a nostalgic reminder of past promises and hopes and as their technologically engendered heirs, harbingers of a possible different, not-only-human future in times of social, political and ecological uncertainty.