Gordan Savicic is Media Artist and presents some of his work.
Gordan Savicic: “Hello, I’m Gordan Savicic, I’m here at the symposium of 5uper.net called “Playfulness”. I was presenting my project “PlaySureVeillance”, which is a neologism of “play”, “pleasure” and “surveillance” because I was recently working with a lot of centralized webservices such as myspace or facebook and what really annoyed me was that basically all the things i’m doing there are kind of dragged and stalled, and all my friends-relationships are used for different processes. But on the other side it appeared as a very simplistic and very useful tool in order to stay in contact with your social network. So what I basically wanted to do was to show the background processes which are happening if you are using facebook for example, what semi-automatical messages are produced and which kind of information is stored about you and in which kind of relation you get with other people.
What really strucked me somehow was that most of the people are revealing a of their private data and that this is happening on a wilful basis and also on a playful approach.What I did was that I programmed two games for the Nintendo DS. The games are making secret use of the Wi-Fi function, that is built-in. Once you start the game you’re being asked certain questions, which have real-world outcome on facebook-servers. So all the things you are doing here, automatically are creating a profile of you as a player. To show the discrepancy of the data which is gathered on one way within the game – you are just playing a game, you are answering a few questions in oder to start.
It asks me about my gender, in which persons I am interested in (male, female or both). What I then have to do is to rub on Princess Peach to get her undressed more and more, then you proceed into higher levels where she eventually gets naked. The game sends data to facebook and you will see a completely automated request on facebook. The profile of the player is also getting into a social network of its own because I’m using the IP-adress, you can map that in the geographical location of the player, so each player gets into a social network close to his real life network. You are also asked to search for a person – “Please enter the name of a person you would like to meet” – again it starts an automatic friend-request and sends a request to this person. Your kind of playful doppelgänger is getting its own life within this network.”
Esel: “Is playfulness just a bait or some trap that people fall for? What is playfulness for you?”
Gordan Savicic: “I think that a playful approach is a perfect mechanism to get sensitive things out of people – they think, it’s just a game or just nonsense or bollocks, that it is not serious – but games can have a serious outcome.”
Education
2006-2008: MA Media Design at the Piet Zwart Institute / Rotterdam
2002-2007: MFA Digital Art (Mag. art) at University of Applied Arts / Vienna
1995-2000: School of Communication and Biomedical Engineering / Vienna
Participation
1999-present: Bassist and performer with INDOWA
2005-present: 2nd Lead bassist and guerilla marketing chief @ the handydandy
2004-present: Founding Member of ZugZwangZukunft
2005-present: Socialite of Ludic Society
2007-present: Co-Founder of of moddr_
Work Experience
2008-present: Tutor at Piet Zwart Institute Media Design and at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam
2000-2003: Programmer and designer @ www.scalar.at and www.contentfabrik.com
2003-2005: Setdesigner and setdresser together with Manuela Freigang
2004: Media Producer @ Luzerner Stadttheater / Switzerland
2000-2006 Assistent at furniture designer Bela Eckermann
http://www.yugo.at/processing/