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MOTONATION

Jelena Visković

You can listen to this work on our dedicated page here.

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Introduction

Nina Davies

You're listening to Future Artefacts FM , a bi-monthly podcast/broadcast featuring speculative fiction audio works by artists and writers produced and presented by Nina Davies,

 

Rebecca Edwards

Rebecca Edwards

 

Niamh Schmidtke 

and Niamh Schmidtke, on RTM 

 

ND

and also available on podcast channels. 

 

NS

The programme focuses on fictional works intended for broadcast to carve out a better understanding of the now by exploring various interpretations of the future. 

 

RE

Together with guests we discuss the mechanics of different types of storytelling to reveal the complexities of contemporary culture. Let’s get started.

 

All

Let’s get started.

 

Artist Introduction

NS 
Welcome back to future artifacts FM, Episode 25. We're really excited today to have guest artist, Jelena Viskovic. Welcome to the show, Jelena. How are you doing today?

Jelena Visković  
I'm good. Thank you for having me.

NS  
It's great to have you on the show. We've sort of been speaking about having your work on the show for a while, and so today, Jelena will be sharing a work of hers, which I'll introduce in a second. But also this is the second episode in our new mini series called The New Weird so if you haven't listened to the previous episode with Phil Speakman, it's not a prerequisite to understand Jelena’s work, they are two separate episodes. But if you want to get into that episode as well after before Jelena’s episode, they're sort of part of a series. 

RE
Yeah, just by way of introduction. Jelena Visković is an artist born in 1989 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, raised in Belgrade, Serbia, and currently living and working in London. Her background is in software engineering and game development, and her work explores the role of gesture and play in relation to the creation and preservation of techno scientific, political and historical narratives. Her sculptures and moving image works incorporate animated, talking objects that make their way into technologically deterministic, seemingly inanimate systems. Borrowing from a playful, carnivalesque logic, these worlds become rebellious but approachable, attempting to resist the rigid environments of institutions, archives, libraries and databases. I think that sums up your work pretty well. 

ND
Today we'll be listening to ‘Motonation’, which is a going to be a seven minute or nine minute work, and Jelena, just before we head into the work, I was wondering whether you could just introduce it a bit, because I know there's some sort of specific things about the work that the listeners will need to know before experiencing it. 

JV 
So, the work was created as a film and also a performance piece, so kind of a crossover between the two. And as Rebecca said, I work a lot with the kind of, how do we look at the preservation of historical and scientific knowledge? And I was interested in the performance arts histories in former Yugoslavia. But then I was also interested in looking at this history through the lens of kind of lived experience and playfulness and politics, through these kinds of ways of engagement with complicated histories. And the film is a science fiction film, and it's also a biker film, following the story of Čedo, a member of a community called Happy Nation, as he embarks on an adventure beyond the community's boundaries with the help of a hacked City Motorcycle. In this journey, Čedo explores his relationship with movement and his motivation to tap into a world of desire and expression that extends beyond the social and spatial boundaries of Happy Nation. 

 

NS
We’re going to be listening to the first two scenes from the film, which is about nine minutes long.

 

JV  
I would also say that the film is kind of a world building project that involves different kinds of media. And I think that this taking... using sound to take a slice out of this world building project is kind of an interesting experiment to present the narrative, which kind of goes beyond the film itself.

 

ND
Perfect, great. 

 

NS 
Yeah, we'll see you back in about nine minutes. Enjoy.​

MOTONATION

 

[music]

Hello friends. Thank you to everyone who subscribed to Happy Nation this month. My name is Her Sanctuary and I'm the facilitator of community events.

I see some of you are new here. Every member of Happy Nation can enjoy various free offerings and experience a true community environment.


We offer social connections, community events, food, drinks, different educational content and experimental learning. Let's gather, in a circle. 

Today we will practice confessions in a chair pose.

We will use a psychosomatic ritual and chew through our shared thoughts and digest them, creating a new logic, built from cellulose.

Chosen members of our community will read out a confession. Those will be our dear friend, A, and our dear friend, Čedo. 

Congratulations. You get to share your personal innermost thoughts and desires. 

Me, this week. I had a desire for solitude. I need to reconnect with myself. 

Thank you A for sharing.

 

I wish we were allowed pets for companionship. I know that owning another sentient being makes holes in our astral bodies, but I would love to be woken up by a dog, take him for a walk, watch him run as fast as he can, come back to me all happy and tired. I know that this is strictly forbidden by the law and is against the interspecies memorandum that was signed in Berlin earlier this year, but this is what I've been thinking of lately. 

 

Let's continue in a chair pose to process this. Place your confession into your neighbour's mouth and become a chair together offering the space between us to overcome our desires.

[music,a saxophone, sounds of motorbikes revving]

Happy Nation, sunny days ahead, 50 percent chance. Extreme weather event predicted.

I see you. I see what you want. 

Silent mood, silent mode on.

You and me. No one else. Into the sunset. 

This doesn't work on me, my friends. You're misguided. I'm calling someone to fix you. 

Why didn't you tell them what you really want?

Machine on. Drive mode on. 

We can leave whenever you want, but you have to disconnect me from the bike network. Maybe you've heard the other bikes trying to sing a song. The safety feature means they can't sing it in a natural language. Only human language can reprogram us. Just sing along with me. 

Alright then, what's the song?

[singing]

Birds are flying out like endless rain into a paper cup. They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe. 
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy, are drifting through my open mind, possessing and caressing me.
Something's gonna change my world. Something's gonna change my world. 

[music fades]


Conversation
 

RE

Okay, welcome back, Jelena. I want to start with a question on desire. You know, we mentioned before the work was played about desire being a central theme in Motonation, and whether that's collective or individual. Desire is there but, but why does the protagonist, Čedo, fluctuate between these two do you think?

 

JV

Desire is one of the central topics of the film, mainly ideas around freedom and desire for freedom. And I think this is something that I wanted to place in a fictional world, and then look at it from the perspective of the kind of settings of this fictional world. We always see desire as something that is given, but we also live in a world where we are constantly presented with options to pick between things that we consume, to pick between different values, and we're if we're privileged enough, we are also constantly presented with an option to move from place to place. Or if we're not privileged enough, we are forced to move from place to place. So either way, we're constantly in this kind of process of self evaluation, and if that is placed in kind of a science fictional world, it's very interesting to follow a character go through this process of self evaluation.

 

NS  

In the first two scenes that we listened to, first we’re introduced to Her Sanctuary and Happy Nation. And then we meet the bike part of The Grid. And yeah, we see Čedo kind of trying to make this choice between which world, which kind of reality he wants to be a part of. I guess that leaves the question of, what does Čedo desire? As in, I don't know if you want to reveal that, but yeah, what do you think he desires? 

 

JV

I have a very kind of corny answer to that. I think he desires to be able to take ownership of his character and of his identity and somehow exist authentically in the story, which I also thought that it would be an interesting dialogue to be in with the main character of the story, because obviously me as the writer and the director, I have some sort of ownership as well. As much as the motorbike in the story has ownership of the character. And the character is kind of struggling to break free of this ownership of his identity and define that identity on his own. So I think that's his main desire.

 

RE 

I think it's also quite a human desire as well, because in the first scene, you've got this character A saying that what they desire is solitude and a need to reconnect with ‘myself’. But then Čedo responds by saying that he just really wants a pet. That's what his desire is that week, and it feels very human. But I was wondering about, like, the tensions between Čedo wanting a pet, but then him also bringing up this interspecies memorandum, and what does that do to this world that you're making?

 

ND

So where did that come from? Yeah, I'm also intrigued where that came from.

 

JV 

I mean, that's, I guess that's a relatively kind of satirical take on what we kind of value in how we're creating alternative societies, and what happens when this becomes practice, or somehow the impossibility of putting things into practice.

 

ND

One thing that I really thought about when I was listening to the work is that it seems like a sort of alternative society, in the sense of it being like a health cult. Are those the kinds of… I mean, is that an example of a kind of alternative society that you're looking at?

 

JV

I think an example would be counterculture. It can be subcultures. It can be called counterculture. It can be any kind of experiment, to self govern in a way, and to implement some kind of abstract values into a way of life. Which I think is in ways, also in the story, it tends to reproduce sometimes oppressive systems.

 

ND  

Even the language that you're choosing and sort of like subscribe to this And the language is definitely like pointing to that kind of way of being. I could kind of just totally imagine it.

 

NS 

But still very controlling, even though it's about these forms of collectivity, or kind of deciding if your desire is this individualised. We spoke before about this neoliberal or kind of post-socialist desire, which is kind of referenced in the film and the scenes you'll hear on the radio. But also then when you're in this collective that, yeah, it feels very culty. It feels very that, you know, even when you have this character A as you're saying, Rebecca, who's kind of wants to take time alone or time to herself, that she's not allowed, despite the idea being that there's, you know, a collective sense of, I don't know, wellbeing, perhaps, but that wellbeing does not extend to the to the individual in any way.

 

JV

I think it's also interesting to kind of make connections between how subtle things that can be quite comical, can also kind of open up imaginations to wider structures that are potentially violent, potentially not. 

 

ND

And it kind of, it's a tool of kind of pointing, yeah, isn't it like, where you kind of use comedy as a… not you particularly, but like one does.

 

ND

Even the fact that they process their emotions by doing Chair Pose,

 

ND 

Yeah, exactly.

 

NS 

Yoga can heal all of your trauma. You know, it's just, yeah.

 

Speaker 3  

Yeah, that’s interesting that you bring it up, actually, because I was reading a write up for your show that featured Motonation at Eugster in Belgrade. And I think, well, I don't know if it was the curator, or just a sort of art theorist or art criticist, critic, sorry, art critic. But they said that this idea of them adopting a chair pose sees the protagonist as not entirely human. But I wasn't too sure if I got that from the film. I kind of saw that they were just like reenacting these signifiers of performing a kind of wellness, you know, adopting a chair pose. It's a yoga thing, yeah? So, yeah, I kind of, I was wondering about that. And if you kind of see it as, especially in Happy Nation, that they're trying to be other than human, or more than human?

 

JV

I think there are… this really interesting question. I think on one hand, it's also about kind of blurring or corroding these visual signifiers that point to, let's say, ideologies or cultures. But it's also about, kind of, the lack of being able to understand something through, for example, language or critique, and then using your body also to understand what it means to, for example, move or experience freedom, or experience collectivity or something. There's, I feel like there's also a parallel between the chair and the motorbike, you know. And these are all kinds of signifiers, but they also, I feel like they tend to start falling apart when they become applied in this kind of fictional scenario to things.

 

NS 

Performance is also a major theme in the work, visibly through the film, I kind of really encourage that when the film comes to London, all listeners come out and see it. But you know this major theme, either through surrealist intervention. So this first scene in Happy Nation, when they go to chair pose, and then we see Čedo, but still very performing for us, kind of reenacting, what were you Yugoslav performance art, particularly in the 80s, you kind of sent us a link showing us these happenings that would be broadcast on national TV - which is mad thinking about BBC showing anything like this in the present, they just wouldn't. But thinking about this connection between the human and the non human characters and using these historic happenings. What was interesting to you about reenacting, about bringing these… I mean, they're mostly from the 80s, bringing these to the now. And why specifically, performance or kind of, yeah, the using the body. 


 

JV 

It takes a lot of research to really understand what this avant garde art was about, and different people were doing it for different reasons and different political reasons. So it wasn't necessarily some kind of anti-specific regime, but it was definitely playing with that and playing with the symbolics of the, I guess, Yugoslav state socialism. 

 

But I think to talk about also how I understand it, or how they appear in in the work, and why I was interested in this kind of practice, also to engage in kind of the politics of creating knowledge or also kind of thinking about technology and thinking about the world that we live in now is, I mean, somewhat… It also kind of comes from from a somewhat self absorbed place where I try to understand where I'm from, and I find it incredibly interesting because it went through so many transformations, and it's still going through so many transformations that are incredibly connected, not just to other places where the socialist past, but also to anti-colonial, anti-fascist struggles. And I can read about it a lot, but I still kind of have a feeling that it's not enough to understand my own experience. 

 

And oftentimes these politics seem completely kind of surreal, and they fail to articulate how I feel inside, especially when these feelings are very, very intense. And I'm very interested in how people saw reality through the surrealisms that it produces, rather than trying to articulate it through academic critique, for example, but used their bodies instead…

 

ND

Reenactments, sort of?

 

JV

Yeah, for example, one of the references is Kugla Glumište which was basically kind of an alternative theatre group, but they made these cabaret style happenings, which is also to kind of reveal the surrealism of the reality and then mediate that also through a completely kind of new, new type of multimedia experience.


 

RE 

It reminds me as well, of like public access TV, this very Americanised, chaotic performance that I think I can see a lot in the links that you sent through of the Kugla Glumište. But I think that what your work is doing differently is it's kind of, it's playing more to the theatrics, not the chaos, somehow. With Čedo singing, it's very melodic. It's very kind of, it's almost lullaby-esque, rather than like crazy 70s performance art. So I feel like you've twisted the inspiration somehow.

 

[music]

 

JV 

That song is also very interesting… yeah, it's a very different approach. Where that song is a cover of a cover of a very famous song that we all know.

 

RE

The Beatles?!

 

JV

Yes!

I don't know if I'm gonna have any copyright issues for using it and talking about it, but…

 

ND

Not on this show you won’t!

 

[laughs]

 

JV 

There's something interesting about stealing a song to put it in, like, a completely different context. And I mean, this happens all the time, but yeah, it's a cover of a cover of The Beatles song that was made in ‘89 that was actually using very problematic kind of totalitarian imagery with these across the universe lyrics. And then it's also kind of, then,

 

ND

Where was this? Like this song, like it, where was it used and seen? 

 

JV

It was used in a cover that was made by a Slovenian band called Laibach, who were using quite a lot of totalitarian imagery in their work, and also sometimes fascist imagery. And this appears in their cover of this song as well. But I think that they made this very experimental avant garde video for it that I think got an MTV Video Music Award, or something like that in 1989 and it was also a time where a lot of things were changing. 

 

And then I thought that it would be interesting to reuse this song, to reappropriate it again in this kind of science fictional scenario, and also to change the lyrics from ‘nothing's gonna change my world’ to ‘something's gonna change my world’.

 

ND

When I was listening to it, I was like, I totally thought that that's what the original lyrics were. I obviously don't know the song that well, but…

 

NS 2  

But it brings it back to the choice that he's making. 

 

ND

I was wondering, when I was listening to it, actually, whether it was the bike that… Well, I don't know. This is obviously not what the work is doing. But I was also kind of questioning what the bike's desire was in the film. For you, does the bike have any sort of desire?

 

JV 

The bike…I think we were, we were doing this exercise where we were collectively, with the two main actors playing the main characters… But the characters are actually based on their identities so it’s interesting. So we were trying to come up with back stories for all three main characters; The motorbike, Her Sanctuary and Čedo. 

And the motorbike's backstory was that it fell in love with a very sentimental user. So yeah, we kind of came up with this whole love story between a city motorbike and somebody. So it was kind of a story about mutual, kind of co-dependent exploitation that kind of reappears again when the motorbike gets into this adventure with Čedo. 

 

ND

Is the bike meant to sort of be, like, does it mean to have, like, multiple users, like, in the same way that, like, you can, like, rent, not rent a car, but, like, whatever. 

 

RE

Yeah, or like a computer.

 

JV  

It's supposed to be kind of like a grid. Grid is like a lime bike, right?

 

RE

And a lime bike, for those not aware, is a Boris bike, slash hire bike that you can just pay to use per hour, right? Yeah. I'm

 

ND  

Yeah, I’m trying to think, what is, what's the car? The car company, like Uber? No, not Uber… ZipCar. Yeah.

 

RE 

It’s interesting. So I was just about to say, oh, that sounds really sci-fi, like the idea of a motorbike, or somebody falling in love with a motorbike, or vice versa. But that actually does happen, like people fall in love with inanimate objects and…

But I think you know, a lot of this work, for me, at least, sort of centers around this idea of how technologies play a role in the construction of new identities or new eras. Like, if we think historically, you know, the invention of things like the light bulb or vaccines, or even, sort of like, you know, in like industrial cities, how that kind of technology sort of enforced a whole new era. I think in this work, the idea of technology seems to be more like this transformative tool that extends the mind and extends consciousness. It's a little bit more like what Eric Davis;’s term, or sort of definition of technology might be as a tool. So I'm wondering how this kind of technology relates to Happy Nation and The Grid, because, you know, they're both deeply rooted in digital worlds, but how do they interact with technology as both this haunting force and as a functional tool? 

So now I'm thinking about how in Happy Nation, we're kind of viewing the mind as a form of technology. But then in The Grid, it's the bike as this sort of functional tool or this historical idea of technology. So how does technology sort of come into this? 

 

JV 

I mean, it's obviously a world in which technology has this kind of cognitive, extractive role, but it's also defined as something that the characters need to kind of play with or approach in a playful way, which is something that I also try to always do in my practice. 

 

And I also really wanted to make a sci-fi film because I want whoever is engaged with this world or the listener or the viewer to try and think about how the technology works in the film. And I wanted there to be some very obvious question marks. For example, if the bike network is the main kind of centralised network, or is Happy Nation also some sort of a similar network? Or is it a hack, or like a fork of The Grid network that

 

ND

Well, is Happy Nation a hack of The Grid?

 

JV  

Yeah, exactly. Or is it something else, or does it not work in this kind of technological way, but is it just something that is modeled based on that, but it's actually completely anti technology?

 

NS

I guess it's bringing me back to the kind of theme of this mini series and the new weird and this process of weirding as well. And even, as you're kind of saying, going back to a sci-fi that it is also about kind of making strange the relationship with the bike, you know, basing it on Lime bikes, and kind of thinking about what would happen if your Lime bike started having a relationship with you. Or for example, what if you're, you know, the closest thing I can think of that I've experienced in London is sometimes you have queer workshop spaces that feel a bit like Happy Nation, not quite as coercive, thankfully, but close and, you know, in strange-ing them, or weirding them in a way to… Yeah, bring our attention back to what exactly is this relationship that we're with. 

 

One thing I wanted to bring up that we kind of touched on, that is also related to technology, but in a very different way. You spoke before about how all of the actors within this both that their characters are deeply related to who they are, but you also said that they're all this post ‘98 generation. Can you share a bit about why it was important to work with young people, this kind of generation, kind of post breakup of Yugoslavia. We spoke about Performance Art and kind of bringing it from the historic to the present. But yeah, why was it important to have this younger generation in the work?

 

JV 

One of the reasons is to kind of… also because it's somewhat related to technology, and have this generation who was born after the internet. And then part of the narrative is also what kind of information Čedo is exposed to, and what kind of information they are exposed to. And at some point, Čedo gets two text messages, and they're all about the same weather event that's coming but they have a completely different tone and structure. And one is coming from Happy Nation, the other one is coming from grid. So it's also thinking about how these networks of information works. And then the other reason is because I really wanted it to exist in a kind of timeless moment, and I wanted to work with people who with these historical narratives, but with people who were born practically after the wars in Yugoslavia ended, and to whom this history is even more alienating than me in many ways. 

 

ND

May I ask, why? 

 

JV

Why is it alienating to me? Or why is it alienating in general? 

 

ND

Oh, I thought you were saying for them.

 

JV

Well, I think it was something that also… it's really interesting when you're working with performance, sometimes you think that something is going to have a certain effect, but then it has a completely opposite effect, or it becomes funny, or it becomes something that you didn't really intend it to be. And I think that this is what happened when I was taking this kind of reenactment of specific performances very seriously, especially because a lot of this performance arts history is very, well, patriarchal and male.

 

And then it also became somehow about who is reperforming this and how and how we feel about reperforming these things. And then we realised, or I realised, that actually it's going to be a little bit funny, and let's just turn it into something completely fictional and use this alienation and make it a little bit funny as something that creates a whole new world. Because actually this is what we need, and we are constantly kind of… also we have to do that. We're constantly pressured to do this. We live in a world that's constantly transforming. So that's actually the only way to interpret things. 

 

NS

But it also felt like, as kind of, as a listener who isn't rooted in that geography or that political history, having the humor, like the word Čedo is singing to the bike. You describe the context of that song, but also someone who doesn't have that context, you know, you can also laugh at, like, the kind of ridiculousness of singing to a bike to release it, like the kind of the humor, or like you call it kind of a less logic in your in your bio, it gives us these points to enter into the work, where later on, we have the reveal, but we don't need it to be… to kind of participate in a way you kind of, you give us this equal ground that we can all engage with, with the work. Yeah,

 

RE

Yeah, I would, I would agree with that, because it feels like… it doesn't feel generationally specific to me. It kind of doesn't really exist in any time frame, like it feels like it could exist. It feels like Happy Nation could definitely exist. Now, as you said, Niamh, with these different kinds of queer spaces that you've been to. But also, I was thinking about the Google, the whole like, Silicon Valley startup culture of the early 2000s as being very like, ‘let's just throw a ball and eat notes with our feelings on them’, kind of vibe.

 

But yeah, it doesn't feel generationally specific, but I think there's something quite interesting in just working with younger people in maybe, like, yeah, this access point, or, I don't know, something like that. But then I was also thinking, well, I don't know if, I don't know if like generations should be viewed as being like these very specific things. Because, you know, people always say, like, oh, Gen X are so much more used to technology than us. But is that actually true, or are we just sort of tarring everyone with the same brush like we do with everything else, like putting everybody into these boxes? What do different generations desire? Because I know that when we were chatting before, we were kind of saying, well, maybe a generation before us would desire two kids and a car and a house. But maybe the Happy Nation generation desires something else. So the way that these desires change through generations is quite interesting. But yes.

 

ND  

I mean, dare I say it also like, when were… I also feel like Happy Nation, like, for me, I was like, almost felt like the art world as well. Like I've sort of, in some of the ways of like, the sort of like you need to be, you need to live this alternative lifestyle if you want to be considered an artist. So you can't desire anything that sits within like normal or like normal culture. Like when Čedo is like, ‘I want a dog to wake me up in the morning’. It's like, that's such a simple thing. And sometimes, yeah, so that, like… it's interesting that we can't even… it's almost like, I wonder whether whatever bubble you're in or whatever community you're in, there are restraints made in whatever, like, life you choose.

 

JV

Yeah, yeah. But it's also really about how you put things in practice. But I think it was interesting to create this situation in which, you know, it's all fiction, it's recorded, but actually it is the performance that's taking place. And it is putting people in this kind of situation where, okay, on top of the things that you need to do, like eat other's thoughts, or, I don't know, something like that you need to…,

 

ND

When you say it's a performance taking place, how much of it is scripted?Is it like, is it sort of like a performance as in a happening? Or?

 

JV

Yeah some of some of the things were more scripted than some of them were less scripted. And in the original script, there was also kind of an external person who was interpreting, who was like an academic talking about what is taking place, so kind of like an external narrator. But then I got rid of that, because I thought that maybe it could just speak for itself. 

 

But yeah, it was kind of a structure that then the performers could fill out. And some of it had a looser structure. Some of it had a more kind of scripted set of things that people were supposed to do. But I think it was more kind of about imagining that you… imagining the kind of basic settings of the world in which this is taking place. So for example, in this kind of eating, putting each other's thoughts on paper and then digesting them, they had to imagine that they are in a world where there is a necessity for knowledge that is not based on some sort of technological determinism. So this kind of okay you are like the bikes world, which is extracting information from you and and putting labels onto it and then putting it in a larger database of AI logic, and then kind of resistance to that would maybe be to think about knowledge creation in a completely different way and have these kind of abstract concepts, and I don't know, talk to each other by digesting each other.


 

RE  

Yeah, but it really does feel like that whole scene is a critique of modern communal experiences that are kind of force fed through surveillance or behavioral capitalism, or these commodified interactions. Just to bring back something that was mentioned earlier, it really does feel like each of these different communities are, they're being… Čedo was being advertised to consistently, and we didn't hear it in the recording, but towards the end of the film, there's a repetition of, ‘you are a welcomed member of Happy Nation’, or something like this. And it's kind of like trying to get him to come back to Happy Nation. Like there's this… 

 

NS

Towards, kind of the final scene of the film, you hear Her Sanctuary, her voice is kind of breaking apart. Or like her language is kind of breaking apart, just to the point of, you know, ‘subscribe to Happy Nation’, kind of ‘come back’. And it's, it's kind of using that language of, kind of, when you unsubscribe from an email chain, they're like, ‘Are you sure?’  You're only sad because you're trying to extract something from me into I guess that's also why it's kind of, for me, it's interesting that these two types of desire and kind of, as you're saying, what happens when you reject these extractivist forms of, let's say, AI, like algorithmic gathering, or like trying to gather, what choices you want, what your desires are, how we can feed them back to you? Literally trying to dissolve it within your stomach before it can reach something outside of the collective. But it still feels very controlling in terms of, you know, ‘don't leave, don't have individualism’, you know, they're not… neither option seems very desirable.

 

JV  

Yeah, I really hope I didn't make another dystopian thing.

 

[laughs]

 

ND 

Out of the two spaces, being The Grid and Happy Nation… Also, a secondary question is, what is Motonation in relation to the two? But out of the two, where would you choose to be in, like, either in The Grid  or Happy Nation?

 

JV 

I feel like, realistically, most people would at some point, um, would choose Happy Nation, and then at some point, get kicked out of it? 

 

[laughs]

No?. ‘Oh, this is great, Happy Nation’. It's also kind of this, you know, creating identity. There is an obvious reason why it's called Happy Nation. And kind of within, also, yeah, constructing a national identity, constructing identity-based belonging. These are all kind of large stories that we are told that seem like something that is so easy to hold on to, but then they're usually not true.

 

RE

Yeah, I feel like Happy Nation, they don't…  I mean, I know that for our listeners, like you can't, actually, you don't see the work. But in the work, the people of Happy Nation don't actually look that happy until they're dancing. And this is something as well that we've not really picked up on is the choreography of this work and how this brings it together as well. This kind of, really, kind of galvanises each scene of the film is this consistent choreography and movement of the body. But yeah, the people in Happy Nation don't look that happy, it's almost like they've been sold a dream of something that they perhaps won't ever get.

 

JV

Yeah, but I think that that's also in… they are shown as kind of free in specific moments, because they still have agency to transform that into a lived experience that makes sense for them. So I think that's also kind of part of the film  and the way that the choreography was made, what I mentioned before that it wasn't, yeah…  It's almost like kind of creating some sort of space where parts of it can be improvised.

 

ND  

In terms of, sorry a clarification, improvised in terms of, like, the way that you're creating the piece, or improvised in the sense that, like, within the fiction, any member of Happy Nation can kind of, like, make it whatever they want it to be.

 

JV  

Exactly, exactly, exactly. So when you, when you are making the film, it actually does take place. It's just recorded, which I think is really interesting. Or one of the most interesting parts of making a film is that it does have to, if it's live action, it does kind of happen and everybody... And in order to be able to make it happen, and for it to make sense, people really need to be on board with the characters that they're embodying, with the world that they belong to. 

 

RE

They're kind of LARPing it.

 

JV

Yeah, exactly. It's kind of a LARP of a LARP.

 

RE 

Yeah. Ties in nicely with Phil's episode last time, but, but yeah, were they actors, or were they people that were just interested in this work? I don't know if we clarified that.

 

JV 

Yeah, that's a good question. They were… so the two main characters were, um, kind of a bit themselves, I think. And then, well, everybody else was mainly a performer or a dancer, and there were some actors as well. So it was a combination of people who work in performance or with performance, yeah, which is also kind of something that is interesting, you know, a new generation contrasted with these things that it's also referencing from performance arts histories, and how this new generation of performers relates to that


 

NS

Picking up on that and picking up on this idea of Yeah, a LARP with a LAP. I want to go back to something that you said to us in a previous conversation about the work, and you said that this is not speculative fiction. I wanted to.. we spoke well, briefly mentioned about kind of weirding, but I wanted to ask more related to this work, kind of, why is surrealism important? And, yeah, why is, I guess, surrealism rather than speculative fiction?

 

JV

Um, because I want to focus on lived experience and kind of using these fictional narratives to talk about lived experience and now. And also I have, I don't know, I was just thinking about the world speculative. And I think it's really something that's connected to. I mean, of course, the film is, I don't know, uses genre elements of a sci fi and speculative fiction. So it is that. But then speculative fiction has something very kind of linear, or the word speculative has something very linear attached to it, something that's also connected to the world of finance in a weird way, which I think some people who use speculation in their work also do that deliberately. But I think, yeah, I just realised that I don't want to use the language of stock markets in my work, and that I think it's maybe more useful to think about it as as kind of ‘okay, maybe this is about now’, and ‘maybe this is about lived experience and not something that projects something into the future’. 

 

NS

It's making me think about something Phil said in the last episode about how it's a lot of work to make a whole new world in a way, and thinking about weirding, or, I guess in this case, surrealism here, as drawing our attention to facets of the present, or creating what feels like to me, at least, a more equal and accessible place for historical narratives to be understood in the present, without it having to be a political landmine of like, ‘don't say this. Don't say that’. It's like, through the surrealism, we can actually engage with them also as people who maybe are not… It's kind of, when you don't have the historical context, how the surrealism provides us the space to engage with it.


 

JV 

Yeah, I think it opens up kind of new ways of processing things that can be visual, that can be kind of embodied, and things that really also don't make sense. And it also opens up ways to talk about things that are already here, but maybe are kind of not so obviously visible. So, for example, the fact that the motorbike company is invented doesn't mean that, you know, this technology is not actually existing. 

 

ND

It’s interesting that, just in terms of, sorry, I'm caught up on this, like speculation versus surrealism, but speculation for me, so you can also have speculative histories, but it's sort of like there's a relationship between the person who was speculating and the time that they exist in, and whether you're speculating forward or back. So there's always a kind of binary relationship between the time that it's made and where the speculation is sort of like going towards. It's kind of like directing in one way, whereas surrealism doesn't have to be sort of directional in time, if that makes sense. It's not speculating back. It's not speculating forward. It's just existing now. 

 

JV

It’s not as abstract. I find that really interesting, that it's kind of something that you experience rather than something that you think about in terms of, ‘okay, this is what's going to happen in the future’, or ‘this is what happened in the past.’

 

RE

Yes. I mean, I think for me, the work isn't speculative, because I can see parts of the technological landscape that we're in now existing with these kinds of conversations and with these kinds of things that are happening in Motonation. But I think, yeah, it's interesting that you brought up essentially speculative economies because… and it's interesting to think about that as being like, the thing that informs GDP, or stocks and bonds is all speculation. And it's interesting that that is also built on the kind of like, the access to, like, high frequency trading networks of the internet. So who's got the most money to put into having really quick internet to get, like, split second sort of, I don't know… I don't really think I'm explaining this very well, but, like, just the idea that the whole economical system of the world is almost based on speculation is super weird to me. Like, that's incredibly weird. 

But yeah, I don't think your work operates on that speculative thing, because I can see that, you know, the kind of the whole heads-up-display of the bike scene, and thinking about this bike talking to us, we have all of this. We have this with Alexa. We have these devices that can do things for us just with our voice. So to me, it is more uncanny. It is more in that surreal, as you were saying.

 

JV  

And people are developing very intimate relationships with like chatgpt. At this point, I feel like I also have an inappropriate relationship, really. I mean,  not like in a sexual way, but you guys are saying that…

 

RE

Do you rely on it for things that you would have usually maybe relied on your own thought process for?

 

JV

Exactly, exactly, exactly. 

 

RE 

It's interesting how a lot of us have adopted it when, I mean, I was very against it, and a lot of teachers too, I mean, Jelena, you, you're, a lecturer, so for you, I would imagine that there's been a whole debate around the use of that kind of thing in universities and stuff. But how we're all kind of just adopting these things that we a month ago, said that we hated

 

JV

Exactly. And also how kind of helpless we are. We really don't know how to respond to it. There are so many kind of ideas, okay, this is how we should use it in education, and this is how we shouldn't use it. And then we need to make these statements, and then we need to all agree. And actually, nobody knows how it's going to impact us, how it's already impacting us, and what we should do.

 

RE

I mean, I remember how Amazon, the Amazon Echo and Alexa got away with that was that they just used to give them out for free with any purchase at one point, I think. So, whether you wanted one or not, you had one. And I think when you… I'm wondering, actually, is the grid a bit like that, like, do you just get given the access to this bike, or is it like a monthly subscription service? Like, how does that work? 

 

JV

Yeah, these are also questions that I think, obviously, I think it's interesting in sci-fi formats to play around with how much of this information you reveal, and how much of this information is kind of up for the viewer's imagination. You know, is this a utility? Is this a subscription based thing? Is this a state owned thing? You know? How does it actually work? And to kind of open up these questions.

 

NS

Before we wrap up, since this work was not made alone, are there any credits which you'd like to give for people who have been involved with or performed in the piece?

 

JV

Yeah, I would like to mention and also thank and add a big shout out to the people who were kind of lending their character to the work. Who are Čedo, who appeared in the work as himself, and completely, kind of blended his own character with the role that was written for him. 

And Marija Iva Gocić, who's an amazing performer, who played Her Sanctuary in the work, and everybody else who performed. And also, I would like to mention Tamás Marquetant, who made the soundtrack for the piece.



 

ND 

Before we end also, we'll be sharing some links that Jelena has, which will be an excerpt of the film and some other links that Jelena might provide us with to some of the references. Is that right? Do you want to share some of those? I don't know. Yeah.

 

JV

I can add some. Um, yeah, I can. I can add the references to the works that I've mentioned in the conversation. 

 

NS 

Yeah, that's all for now. Thanks so much Jelena

 

ND

Yeah thank you for joining us and happy new year.

 

RE 

Happy new year 2026! Oops 2025… 

 

NS

May all your desires come true

 

JV

And Happy Nations

 

ND

Perfect. I’m gonna end it there.

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