Lecture Performance: Vanja Smiljanić: "Waves of Worship (WOW)"

Waves of Worship (WOW) is the last part of a three-part examination of the relationship between new religious movements and nationalism.
This lecture performance is based on a comparative examination of the Internet-based, religious UFO movement of the Cosmic People and the Flag Nation Society, a Christian community that expresses its faith through the practice of flag worship.

In Waves of Worship (WOW), Vanja Smiljanić once again appears in her position as a Minister of the Cosmic People for the countries of ex-Yugoslavia, Portugal and the former Portuguese colonies. Her perspective changes between a clairvoyant vision of a dystopian future in which the Cosmic People are in a cyber war against their primordial enemies, the saurians, and the present, in which she is a hardware developer establishing a defence system against hacker attacks. During the lecture performance, Vanja Smiljanić introduces various tools, flags and strategies, with which one can produce noise (white noise), encode digital data and occupy Internet space, and she reflects on the process of individualisation in cyberspace.
In order to develop a new, collective dance practice that strengthens the community of the Cosmic People and should lead them to the digital social revolution, the artist subverts the orthodox vocabulary of flag worship and presents the New Alphabet for the Digital Proletariat. (IA/VS)