The collective BBB_ (Alla Popp and Alex Traka) has existed since 2015. Before founding the collective Alex Traka studied film and was looking for a way to combine visual art and music. Alla studied at the same time media art and dealt with installations, video performances and language. Through the proposal Alex's suggestion to work together on an album production, the first project I'd Rather Be an Iphone was born. Despite the rather fast production of all songs - all in all it took only two weeks to produce all the songs BBB took a total of two years to develop their identity as a collective together with a visual world and to grow into a self-sufficient performance project. The chance to release an album on the Saasfee*-28 BBB_ Video-label, enabled them to visually present the multimedia project project I'd Rather Be an Iphone (2017) also visually in an experimental way: The limited edition includes an artistic booklet that can be scanned with the smartphone to make the embedded content visible.

Anyone who has seen BBB live understands that the reference to the iPhone as an interface to the virtual is reflected on many levels. The technoid sounds are accompanied by a stage presence - BBB as performers who you immediately believe could also be androids or cyborgs. BBB bring a computer-synthesized voice to the stage that can reproduce typed sentences through text to speech, based on a self-built voice database. With a strong media presence, the collective manages to create a space in which everyday technologies and new media can be experienced as art. Works by BBB can be experienced not only in the analog world, but also online. whereby the boundaries of both spaces are deliberately shifted. In their method they work innovative formats and conceptually intertwine new technologies and media.

In doing so, they manage to translate complex content such as transhumanism, posthumanism, artificial intelligence and the effects of the Anthropocene, the age most influenced by humans, into a form that can be experienced visually and auditorily. What is exciting here is that futuristic-looking scenarios and technologies have long since arrived in the present. This can be seen in the possibility to work with augmented reality or to use CGI - computer generated graphics - in a more cost-effective way. But BBB_ is not uncritical of the seemingly easier access to technologies. They see a digital divide, the separation of the world's population into those who have access to technology and those who do not, as a problem for which awareness must be created. In addition to economic inequalities, this is just as much about the question of accessibility in the digital space.

In contrast to the fascination with technological progress and the opportunities it opens up, we are also increasingly surrounded by media dystopias. The technologized form of dystopia is served to us in mainstream productions, such as the film such as in the film ExMachina. Contrary to the cliché-ridden and fear-filled images of androids BBB_ wants to create other images and develop a queer narrative of a future with AI. This includes, technology as something alien to nature. Awareness in this context can create the awareness that that fears about the future exist in connection with technological progress - and how these dynamics influence social coexistence, and how these dynamics can be worked on and transformed. can be done.

In this sense, BBB_s latest project Songs of Cyborgeoisie opens speculative exit strategies, to free the future society from technological-dystopian fears. For this purpose, Songs of Cyborgeoisie includes perspectives of various entities to this end. Behind this is the idea that all living beings, whether plants, bacteria, mammals, insects, or AI, should live in balance and be equally included in the imagined future to be included. "The way to such a future is healing," Alla reveals, giving a hint as to how the appearances of the multiform characters in BBB_'s hybrid live performance are to be interpreted.

Text: Olga Inozemtceva-Appel and Yana Tsegay

The catalog for the exhibition can be ordered via KVTV shop

The creation of Songs of Cyborgoise is funded by Musikfonds e.V. by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.