My name is Žarko Aleksić, I studied philosophy at the Belgrade University and art and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.  Having worked as a Study Assistant, I introduced a course titled Art and Cognitive Science. When it comes to my political engagement, I worked on the various positions in the Student Union including Counter-culture department (issues around the class struggle, precariat and equality), and the Chair persons team (representation and inclusion of the so called Third country students). Currently, I am working at the department of Artistic Research at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. 

I am interested in various mediums, such are: photography, video, installation and performativity, which could be tracked in my interest in the experience as a synthesis of modernistic techniques of collage and montage I am thematizing in my artistic PhD Consciousness as an Artistic Process.  My art historical starting points include Dada and Surrealism and the Conceptual Avant-garde. 

My post disciplinary artistic practice is based on examination of consciousness, mental processing and AI, in relation to socio-political issues of cognitive capitalism (BOUTANG, 2004), such are acquiring knowledge, education,  dematerialized labor, and surveillance capitalism (ZUBOFF, 2018) elaborating data processing such are biomarkers and correlational data gathered from scientific measuring devices and social media harvesting. By taking into account neurobiological and endeavors within cognitive neurosciences, my practice addresses personalized phenomenology through examining my own states of mind where I myself am both the subject and the object of examination allowing me to firstly shafts trough first and third person. Problems of mind/brain and its processes, its structure and characteristics, are elaborated by the methodical using of knowledge produced within the field of philosophy and results gathered within cognitive science, tackling perception, imagination, language, memory, attention, reasoning and emotion within nervous system.

The relation between these two approaches is reflected in the interconnectedness between psychological and economic states, with synapses as main currency in the age of cognitive capitalism.

I have exhibited at the various solo and group exhibition in Serbia, Austria and abroad.

Living and working on the relation Belgrade – Vienna.

www.zarkoaleksic.com