Baudillard speaks of a postmodern world resting on the idea that simulation precedes reality, not vice versa, where "pornography is more sexual than sexuality," simulation is "more real than reality," leading to the disappearance of the real. Through appropriation, deconstruction, and remake of objets trouvés - such as furniture penetrated with video screens, "immersive" technology - and the use of mass media structures, the author creates new potential experiential worlds. Subsequent simultaneous video-loop projections then examine semantic (speech as institutionalization of symbols, articulated language as symbolic abstraction) and genetic (genetics as a linguistic system of nature) systems and their intertextuality.
Implanted in the worn-out ready-made sofa is a triple-screen projection of intimate (indoor) genre scenes (such as cuddling a child and changing the child's diapers), a kind of reality show of a post-national family: an exogenous bipolar couple (Lévi-Strauss lists three types of products whose circulation creates social wholes: women, energy, information), connected by marriage vows and a child of heterogeneous racial characteristics (according to Bauman, the family is "an uncontractual organic corporation of immediate integration"). There is also a tautological objet trouvé: doll strollers as an imposture - a simulacrum of baby strollers. Three video versions (with soundtracks testifying to the extensive presence of the "associated" family member, programming broadcast of public media): sublimated, as a simulacrum of an archival damaged black-and-white film projected with an "eight" and bluish-toned in chromatic concordance with the furniture color as a simulacrum of bourgeois, middle-class ambiance. In discrepancy with the former is the doubled (on two monitors covered with seaweed, filling taken from the womb of the sofa) omnibus video placed on the bed, sex-files, hardcore illustrative scenes distributed through the internet (a different behavioral situation) and then computer-rendered (the concept of authorship, originality, or personal handwriting of contemporary art, in the spirit of postmodern citation, is rejected as superfluous). Explicit hetero and homoerotic scenes edited like a music video testify to a different mode of sexual awareness, at the level of primal or acquired instincts (except procreative; virtual sex is desirable in times of reproductive redundancy) and with the purpose of commercial exploitation. False flashbacks are imputed into compressed scenes of "dramatic directness" with inarticulate vocalizations of repetitive rhythm, frames of a mummy moving towards the viewer (the author places himself in the position of juxtaposition of indignant "artificial" scenes, simulations) - Mezak's (from the standpoint of self-irony) virtual-reality portrait, computer-generated as part of the offer for the amusement of visitors to the Paris Museum of Science and Industry. Pornography today serves less as a function of social subversion and more as a channeling of human frustrations, with man "yearning for eternity but can only have its substitute: the moment of ecstasy" (M. Kundera). Mezak excursively introduces elements of kitsch, juxtaposes profane and noble materials, anachronistic trivial and utilitarian objects (the bed bordered with brass balls "dynamized" by a luminous frame, low piles of "clots" of holiday lights).
The confrontation of video installations prompts reflection on the meaning of the terms "public" and "private," the relationship of sexuality in marriage and its use for pornographic production, ephemeral and eternal, intimacy and exposure, and the (im)possibility of communication between different semantic systems. In the intermediate space is a living room table with a video monitor on it simulating a "small screen" with a synthetic projection composed of several long television shots where two individuals from different social contexts (artist Frane Rogić and a common French friend in Paris in October as part of the HDLU residency program) attempt to communicate through an ex-libris, using a language learning manual "without pain." They read words belonging to an unknown lexicon (and therefore signs of nonsense) with exclamation and laughter. "To speak means to fight, in the sense of play" (J.-F. Lyotard), and according to Huizinga, "we play and know that we play, therefore we are not only rational beings but more than that, because play is irrational." Adaptation and contact are considered the main regulators of social and cultural development. In the contemporary world where cultures disappear and are replaced by markets and identities - which Proust ironizes by stating he would never want to be a member of a club that accepts everyone as a member (or humorously Groucho Marx who "would never want to be a member of a club that would accept him as a member"), the concept of neighborhood is extremely negotiable; mobility significantly reduces the importance of traditional social groups, tribes, clans, large families, religious sects... (according to F. Fukuyama).
In a society of spectacle, pleasure of consumption, and media-mediated communication, contemporary art is exposed to the entertainment industry and "artistic reproductions." The simulacrum of details of everyday life, decorative household inventory, are three illuminated (glowing) "pictograms" attached to the wall above the sofa (comic mental drawings of its virtual users?), established through a cut-and-paste process as scenographic props of national television "spectacle," establishing the "empire of signs." The supreme of the exhibition is the disco ball, the embodiment of hedonism and popular culture, the kohinoor, a ready-made that simultaneously kaleidoscopically emits (light show) and absorbs (like a supermini supernova) the light of the associated spotlight. Pascal Bruckner speaks of contemporary man as "eternally immature" under the imperative of consumerism and amusement, the cult of happiness and constant excitement hanging over him. "You shall not give up anything" is the imperative principle of this condition. The ball is entirely covered with pieces of mirrors. The immanence in postmodern thought is the subordination of the Subject to the category of the Other as a mirror (as opposed to the Other). According to Baudrillard, the social scene and mirror have been replaced by the screen and network: the mirror as a model is passé, it physically reflects the image and prepares it for transcendence, while the screen is a non-reflective surface where electronically generated operations take place.
Discohome ties together the Symbolic (verbalization), Imaginary (visual representation), Real (everyday objects); i.e., intermedial and interhistorical objects of different levels of reality (including virtuality). The author translates analog recording into digital through post-processing (then discards it as superfluous; this "shift of technologies" is sometimes indicated by the accumulation of worn-out video tape in the exhibition space), or vice versa. He then induces the interaction of space and perception by emphasizing the light component of the exhibition, strategically arranged electronic devices, and lighting fixtures. Despite Groucho Marx, welcome to Discohome!

Silva Kalčić