source: http://www.blueprintit.com/pow/bojan/mc2.html

McDonald's as Nature

Where did Bojan Stokelj place McDonald's logo in his artistic confrontation with it in the computer graphics media, amongst which he includes the most important examples into his Tour Around the World exhibition, fictively set up in the Modern Gallery of Ljubljana, and definitely on the net? (http://www.ljudmila.org/worldtour) It is not alone in the place he put it. One already finds visual presentations of the fascist emblem (the swastika). Coca-Cola and CNN are also there. All these significators are in nature, hence in the world, meaning that the institutions of globalized Americanism by nature function as nature.

In a world under the sign of the synthetic, artificial and techno, in a mediascape of insecurity and changeability, the rhizomatous and fluidal phenomena seizes possession of the individual, his needs, outlooks and enjoyments derived as something supremely self-perceptive and thus natural, precisely through multinational companies such as McDonald's, CNN and Coca Cola (as well as Disney, MTV, Microsoft, Benetton...). These are institutions which, like fomerly Mother Nature, produce a special kind of global individuality with precisely established needs of eating, drinking, dressing, listening, learning, being informed, creating. And the swastika is also here, the Nazi logo that has been in nature for several decades. When big emblems and undertakings are under consideration, it must not be omitted. Especially not today when ethno-fundamentalisms of all varieties are signing pacts with the same persons who, only yesterday, pledged their allegiance to leftist ideals.

Is the artist, through his means of expression (the media), able to wage a struggle with the institutions, and topple them and undermine them? No way. But he can show his awareness of what they are all about; and although the constant changes serve to suggest their being historical, he can extract them from historical times, reveal them as mythical structures and put them in a position where they function as nature. And shape them as phenomena of nature itself. Here _tokelj makes use of fractal graphical modelling, which is significantly grounded in the fractal geometry of nature and likewise in his extraordinarily attractive visualization. In the world of artificiality one finds a naturally beautiful shape in Mandelbrot's equation which has already been demonstrated by H.O. Peitgen and P.H. Richter in their fractal graphics (at the exhibition Borders of Chaos, 1984, and the book The Beauty of Fractals, 1986).

JANEZ STREHOVEC