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MIRKO NIKOLIC – “Games Without Frontiers”
May 25 to June 6, 2009.

ZVONO Gallery
Visnjiceva 5, Belgrade

The colored stripes painted by Mirko Nikolic stretch across the raw-gray canvas discretely, limited by a lazy and capricious will we behold distantly, with a sort of latent, detached sensitivity hi-jacked by their chromatic contrast. As they group in more or less tight, parallel or intertwining bundles, we see them shape complicated grids, overlapping and creating different morphologies. Nikolic’s paintings are maps, and those bundles of colored stripes are territories, flowing on spot along invisible vectors, each figure tense towards the closest one.

We look at those territories from afar, from outer space, with the cold omniscience so familiar to us Google Maps users.
Thanks to the internet, we now own more knowledge than we can possibly absorb, and so the web is more and more about interfaces, about the way we’re served this cognitive over-abundance and the ways we can filter it. Interfaces become the aesthetics of the latest postmodernity, or maybe they testify an emerging post-postmodernity mashing not only aesthetics, but recombining functionalities as well as looks.
When all information is common, to filter, choose and even discard it is an act of elegance, a semiotic gesture more significant than information in itself. And so the explosion of maps, indexes, graphs and charts all over the internet might be the world wide web’s most relevant content right now.
In particular, maps and geo-referenced meta-data are the pulp of the new information aesthetics. With Google Maps, the most famous and invasive of these devices, we’re able to leaf through different interpretation layers – map, terrain, satellite, traffic – each one projecting a different aesthetic rendering on the same geographical structure. I could make many other examples (only the most famous of which standing under the Google banner), but whatever its implications – be it for advertising, blogging, or anything else – the geospatial web (1) is proof the digital, once deemed “virtual” internet sphere is intertwining tighter and tighter with the physical world.
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