BILLBOARDS FOR INSTANT RELEASE (memeing)
forms part of an ongoing series of artistic research titled
METANOIA: The Dysfunctional Economy of Forgiveness in Post-Conflict Capitalism.
One channel video with the text next to the work
Duration of the video: 1'43” (played in a continuous loop)
incorporating a 5-second generative sequence created via Kling AI
Sound: Recorded by the artist
Year: 2021, reconsidered in 2026
Presentation: Wall projection (monitor), speakers (headphones)
In an era of global strife, this work interrogates dysfunction as a biological impasse. The view that forgiveness is a native adaptation balanced against revenge is documented in primatology (1) and cognitive science (2). Because activating it requires conscious effort to calm a threat response, researchers view forgiveness as a trainable skill (3)—yet in conflict, this mechanism breaks down.
Intersecting with this science, ancient Hawaiian restorative intuition holds that trapped trauma causes societal violence, but repeating traditional words, even without active belief, can reprogram cellular pathways to release aggression. Implementing this somatic theory directly onto viewers as a public experiment, Šumarac transposes the Ho'oponopono mantra—"I love you, I am sorry, please forgive me, thank you" (4)—onto contemporary minds via a looping highway billboard. [1, 2]
To deepen this psychological impact and further discussion, she simultaneously re-authors the ritual with the disruptive boundaries of "Maybe," "can't," "Yet," and "But," testing whether humanizing tradition makes its heavy demands attainable. When the internal standoff refuses to subside, the video glitches into a meme (5). Ultimately, the message becomes the medium (6).
References
(1) de Waal, F. B. M. (1979). The reconciliation behavior of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) after aggressive interactions. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 5(2), 121–166.
(2) McCullough, M. E. (2008). Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. Jossey-Bass.
(3) Worthington, E. L., Jr. (2006). Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application. Routledge.
(4) Shook, E. V. (1986). Ho'oponopono: Contemporary Uses of a Hawaiian Problem-Solving Process. University of Hawaii Press.
(5) Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press. (Contextualizes the meme as a self-replicating evolutionary unit of culture) [1].
(6) McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill. (Contextualizes the final inversion of 'the medium is the message' within automated communication loops) [1].
(2021 version) Exhibitions:
2021 IT NEVER HAPPENED!, an Exhibition dedicated to the centenary of the publication of
the avant-garde magazine Zenit. Curators: Milica Lapčević, Milos Peskir, Dusan Radovanovic,
Neda Kovinic. Old Cinema Balkan, Belgrade, Serbia.
2021 STATE OF EMERGENCY -The 90th Autumn Exhibition of ULUS Art Pavilion "Cvijeta Zuzorić", Belgrade
Curators: Dr Jelena Stojanović i Dr Dejan Sretenović
2022 Principles. Biennial Technology - Technology is humanity, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy
Curator: Francesca Canfora
2023 I WANT TO BELIEVE curated by LoosenArt, Rome, Italy
2023 Blue Chip Artist Exhibition. Curator Francesca Rossi Artsted Milan
2023 Self as A Service [SAAS], XOR Experimental Research And Artistic Practices pavilion at The Wrong Biennale
(2026 version) Exhibitions:
2026 Dysfunctionalities in Contemporary Art | in Times of Conflict, EKATE, at Limassol Arts Centre – Papadakis Warehouses
METANOIA: The Dysfunctional Economy of Forgiveness in Post-Conflict Capitalism
Research Portfolio & Exhibition Framework
The Conceptual Framework
Feminist researcher Cynthia Cockburn, in her seminal work The Space Between Us (1), raised a critical question regarding how ordinary people arrange to fill the rift of national differences with words instead of bullets—asking what, exactly, we are to “say to each other.” In exploring this human threshold, Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of non-violence offers an enduring message of hope, asserting that true peace requires a quiet, internal transformation where we look inward with compassion to break the cycle of hatred, famously asserting: "There is no path to peace. Peace is the path" (2).
In confronting this dangerous abyss, contemporary conflict resolution and restorative justice theories suggest that individuals from all sides of a conflict must step forward to own a share of political and moral responsibility—what philosopher Karl Jaspers (3) terms "collective liability"—and state plainly: "I am sorry."
This restorative urge introduces a terrifying moral and philosophical crisis: how is forgiveness possible in a time of war? When the violence of conflict claims the innocent, the very act of offering an apology or expecting absolution can feel like a profound violation of the dead. As philosophers of the "unforgivable" like Hannah Arendt (4) and Vladimir Jankélévitch (5) argue, some atrocities break human scales entirely; one cannot grant forgiveness on behalf of a murdered child, making the trauma structurally unpardonable within traditional human scripts.
Contrasting with these rigid ethical boundaries, trauma psychology and emotional-release theorists suggest that true forgiveness does not require a transactional moral exchange with the opposing side. Instead, it is a native biological adaptation—a somatic tool of letting go, heavily documented in primatology (6) and evolutionary psychology (7). It functions as an internal, self-directed mechanism necessary to calm a physiological threat response, release stored cellular trauma, and preserve the organism's capacity to survive. Because activating it requires deliberate cognitive effort, psychology views forgiveness as a flexible, trainable skill (8)—yet in times of conflict, this evolutionary mechanism often completely breaks down into systemic dysfunction.
The Institutionalization of Moral Debt
To understand the contemporary failure of human reconciliation, this research confronts how institutional world religions historically structured forgiveness as a transactional system rather than a biological release. This distortion directly betrays the linguistic origin of repentance, derived from the Greek word metanoia (μετάνοια) (9), which signifies a profound change of mind, a transformative change of heart, and a radical spiritual conversion resulting in a change of action (10). In Abrahamic traditions, however, this fluid internal conversion was explicitly modeled after financial ledger accounting: sins were reframed as moral "debts" (ὀφείλημα) recorded on a ledger, requiring an act of repentance, compensation, or divine mediation to cancel the liability (11).Theology notes that this framework links forgiveness to a strict system of moral exchange, making absolution an administrative act granted by an external authority (12).
Meanwhile, Eastern karmic traditions frame unresolved harm as an inescapable, structural cosmic weight—a causal law of spiritual accounting where every action must be systematically balanced over cycles of time (13). By converting forgiveness into an external ledger of debts and balances, traditional theology moves it out of the human nervous system and turns it into a mechanism for behavioral control.
The Technological Loop & Repetitive Conditioning
To test the psychological limits of this space in-between conflicted sides—which functions more as a deep, unknown abyss of generational trauma—the project examines the mechanics of reconciliation dysfunction through a dual artistic framework that interrogates the ancient precolonial Native Hawaiian restorative practice of Ho'oponopono (14). Precolonial Native Hawaiians believed that holding grudges, harboring anger, and breaking spiritual laws (kapu) disrupted familial harmony, causing physical and spiritual illnesses, conflicts, and wars.
In the contemporary era, New Age movements synthesized these traditional Hawaiian values with ancient Eastern repetitive chanting concepts dating from 1500 BCE (15) and Western psychological frameworks like Émile Coué’s 20th-century autosuggestion (16). Coué explicitly advocated the idea that repeating words without active belief can automatically reprogram the subconscious mind on a cellular level. Through this evolution, the ancient belief took a modern form as a repetitive mantra: “I love you. I am sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.” (14)
This inquiry intentionally refuses any easy idealism, choosing instead to operate within a sharp, multilayered paradox. It is driven by a deep empathy for human suffering and a desire for peace among all living beings, yet it deliberately structures itself as a cold, technological experiment on the public. Science documents that forgiveness is a native biological program built into human nature; however, running it requires an immense, conscious effort to override our evolutionary survival instincts for revenge. Trapped in historical victimhood, human beings are organically blockaded by their own internal warfare (17).
Confronting this impasse, the project acknowledges a terrifying duality: the rhythmic mechanism of repetition is a tool that can cut both ways. Just as ancient lineages used the looping mantra for cellular trauma release (15), modern corporate advertising capitalizes on this exact psychological vulnerability. Early 20th-century pioneers of behavioral conditioning and public relations—such as John B. Watson and Edward Bernays—systematically co-opted these ancient, rhythmic mechanics of repetition (16, 17). By stripping the looping mechanism of its original healing intent, modern consumer systems inverted the tool: using endless, repeating commercial slogans and media campaigns to target human anxieties and condition the mass nervous system into uncritical ideological consumption. By transposing the sacred mantra onto a looping commercial highway billboard, the artwork embodies this profound dysfunction. It acts simultaneously as a pure, empathetic prayer for reconciliation and an aggressive, manipulative act of psychological conditioning—forcing an ancient reprogramming tool onto a public trapped in a system that has weaponized repetition against society.
Consequently, in the interactive sound installation The Peace Mechanism Cleansing Booth (PMCB 2000)—the first work in the series titled METANOIA (18)—the artist encodes the original, unaltered mantra into an automated, AI-like system: a speculative, buyable "smart machine" pitched as a tool that will solve everything. The work exposes the fatal gap between intention and outcome, mirroring how the most idealistic systems—from political ideologies to artificial intelligence—are inevitably vulnerable to distortion and co-option when institutionalized.
The Epistemological Rupture & The Highway Billboard
Today, human consciousness is heavily mediated by algorithmically driven networks and the rapid spread of internet memes. These visual fragments act as a hyper-fast cultural shorthand that can flatten complex geopolitical trauma into rapidly distributed, polarized units. Yet, as media theorist Limor Shifman notes, memes represent a highly volatile, double-edged tool (19); while they offer an accessible, fluid language for artists to reflect on public awareness outside of traditional systems, they are simultaneously driven by automated platform algorithms designed to predict crowd behavior and monetize emotional polarization.
Applying Gaston Bachelard's (20) concept of the "epistemological rupture" (rupture épistémologique), true progress requires a radical tearing down of traditional certainties to formulate entirely new concepts. In the public intervention Billboards for Instant Release, this algorithmic ritual of repetition is set in an endless loop on a video billboard standing on an inter-spatial highway. This site serves as a physical metaphor for Cockburn’s "space between us" (1)—the site of what "meets halfway."
This looping digital space builds directly on the physical scale of Fluxus public peace interventions and Yoko Ono’s 1969 billboard campaigns (26). However, where institutional systems routinely try to govern this raw threshold—suffering from what physicist P.W. Bridgman (21) called a tenacious original-sin-like blindness toward rigid, mechanistic explanations—the project seeks a different path.
By deliberately causing this digital alignment tool to malfunction and inserting the words “Maybe,” “can’t,” “Yet,” and “But,” the project directly disrupts mass-media uniformity. These words act as a sharp somatic pattern-interrupt against algorithmic conditioning, pulling the viewer out of passive numbness to test whether fracturing the rigid ritual can open a space for mutual acknowledgment between conflicted sides.
Text mirrors the fragmented trauma of lived experience:
"Maybe, I can't love you. Yet. / But I am sorry. Please. Forgive me. Thank you..."
When the internal standoff refuses to subside, the video billboard glitches into a meme (19), diving straight into this contemporary vocabulary. Driven by algorithmically induced media frameworks (22), this viral shorthand collapses complex trauma into decentralized political tokens (23).
Within this post-conflict capitalist structure, historical atrocities are stripped of their weight and converted into digital currency (24). The looping billboard stands as a physical monument to an economy that values the endless automated circulation of trauma tokens over real systemic structural repair (24).
Entering the chaotic digital landscape where modern minds process pain, memes—a compromised and predictable media channel—are employed to enact unpredictable poetic ruptures. The act of smashing the watermelon is clearly not arbitrary; yet, the project locates the core of dysfunction not in specific geopolitical casualties, but within the universal "human, all-too-human" (25) condition itself. As humanity is fundamentally characterized by its collective, ongoing failure to manifest an 'ideal' reality of absolute peace. How far are we from even just making things better? By embedding these looping disruptions into a public framework, the project directly challenges this shared limitation. This artwork is far from a conclusion and far from an end; it serves as a continuous initiative to prompt viewers into an open, much-needed confrontation with the overlapping forces of politics, psychological conditioning, institutional corruption, and consumerism that compromise our path to peace—shifting the cycle from a change of action to a change of heart (9). The medium is not only the message (22), but as Ono historically countered, the message itself becomes the medium (26).
References / Βιβλιογραφία
(1) Cockburn, C. (1998). The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict. Zed Books.
(2) Gandhi, M. K. (1949). Non-Violence in Peace and War. Navajivan Publishing House.
(3) Jaspers, K. (1947). The Question of German Guilt. Fordham University Press.
(4) Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.
(5) Jankélévitch, V. (1967). Le Pardon [Forgiveness]. Les Éditions de Minuit.
(6) de Waal, F. B. M. (1979). The reconciliation behavior of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) after aggressive interactions. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 5(2), 121–166.
(7) McCullough, M. E. (2008). Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. Jossey-Bass.
(8) Worthington, E. L., Jr. (2006). Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application. Routledge.
(9) Wikipedia. (2026). "Metanoia (theology)." Wikimedia Foundation.
(10) Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.
(11) Matthew 6:12, New Testament «καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν...»"And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors..."
(12) Okaya, K. (2026). Christian forgiveness as an unconditioned and inalienable gift: beyond the unconditional–conditional binary. Theology, 129(2), 83–91.
(13) Thomas, M. D. (2018). Forgiveness in Religious Traditions. Journal of Dharma Studies, 1(2), 145–159.
(14) Shook, E. V. (1986). Ho'oponopono: Contemporary Uses of a Hawaiian Problem-Solving Process. University of Hawaii Press..
(15) Staal, F. (1989). Rules Without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences. Peter Lang.
(16) Coué, É. (1922). Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion. American Library Service.
(17) Freud, S., & Einstein, A. (1933). Why War? International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation; Krishnamurti, J. (1946). The First and Last Freedom. Harper & Brothers.
(18) Šumarac, N. (2021). METANOIA: The Dysfunctional Economy of Forgiveness in Post-Conflict Capitalism. Artist Exhibition Monograph / Project Documentation
(19) Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.
(20) Bachelard, G. (1938). La formation de l'esprit scientifique [The Formation of the Scientific Mind]. Vrin.
(21) Bridgman, P. W. (1936). The Nature of Physical Theory. Princeton University Press.
(22) McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill.
(23) Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press.
(24) Branch, A. (2011). Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda. Oxford University Press.(25) Nietzsche, F. (1878). Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Verlag von Ernst Schmeitzner.
(26) Ono, Y. (1969). The Plastic Ono Band Peace Campaigns / War Is Over! Billboard Project.
