Janez Janša, Igor Štromajer, Brane Zorman: Ballettikka RealVideo Internettikka, 2003
Ballettikka Internettikka is a series of live streaming tactical art projects by Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman that began in 2001 with the research of ballet dancing the HTML and Java source code. It explores wireless internet performance combined with guerrilla tactics, dancing toy-robots, and mobile internet broadcasting strategies. The ten-year project ended in 2011.
Ballettikka RealVideo Internettikka is a self-contained action in the tactical project Ballettikka Internettikka, which began in 2001 with the exploration of Internet ballet. The second installment, in March 2002, consisted in Stromajer and Zorman carrying out an illegal ballet invasion in Moscow's Bolshoi Theater and transmitting it live on the Internet. Here, Stromajer and Zorman have brought together two Moscow performative acts: the ballet break-in in the Bolshoi and the Chechen terrorist act in the Dubrovka Theater in October 2002.
Moscow, as a juncture of avant-garde movements and political symbolism, unites the two actions: the homicidal-suicidal terrorist act represents the ritual manifestation of the intimate sacrifice of one's own body, as well as of those of others, while ballet represents a strategic sacrifice of the dancer's body as it is honed into a flawlessly functioning machine. "Terrorism is theater," Brian Jenkins tells us, but in the end, all aesthetic norms are abandoned and all that is left is tactics, both in art and terrorism.
Ballettikka RealVideo Internettikka makes a contribution to the misunderstanding of contemporary postmodern terrorism and democracy's fear of fanatic devotion; it represents a fascination with criticism of the system and with appeals to the beauty of dying. Through performative disturbances of the electronic medium, which opens itself up to emotion and the flesh of the body, identity is transformed. "We've come here to die!" proclaimed Barayev, the Chechen terrorist leader, as the group disrupted the Moscow performance of the musical Nord-Ost. "We've come here to dance," wrote Štromajer, as an Internet connection was established with the Bolshoi Theater and the wireless ballet began, seven months before Barayev's dying.
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TV SLO 1, Osmi dan, 18 December 2003 (VHS video); 4th Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia - U3, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, Christine Van Assche; TV premiere of the video Ballettikka RealVideo Internettikka
"We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall fight them on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender."
(W. Churchill)
