Autopsia (Greek: to see with your own eyes), in its very name, contains a new protocol of work in art. It is based on two axioms: that every previous culture is a corpse; and that it is permissible to take any part from a corpse and place it in context with all other elements, regardless of the laws of production in art and culture.
It is a depersonalized art project still active today. It began in the late 1970s, first in London, then in the centres of the former Yugoslavia, and since 1990 in Prague. Autopsia works outside any system and believes in separating man from the flesh instead of drowning in it. It shuns publicity and regular channels of artistic communication and distribution. It is an art and music project with a rich discography.
Autopsia was the first in the Central and Eastern Europe region to single out a sample, the basic unit of post-production material, which, in combination with other samples, produces music only from samples, without any original material. Today, the sample is the name for each downloaded material, material that erases every trace of production. It opens up a field of procedures that want to extract samples from the body of culture and make material for new, unexpected constellations and sample relationships.
Autopsia says that its theme is death, the method of repetition, and her speech impersonal. For Autopsia, art is no longer a process that produces objects but emits information through particular serial, programmed rhythms. Its goal is to teach industrial society to find aesthetic experience in everyday practice.
Autopsia uses iconographic visual representations, takes them from the mass media, enlarges, multiplies, and brings them into a relationship with the symbols that people encounter daily. Autopsia also uses scenes of death and destruction because that indicates the process of repetition; death has become visible. Because when a man realizes that he is mortal, the question of what he makes of his life and the weight of the moment become vital to him. In music, Autopsia uses rhythmicity as a mechanical formula that repeats itself to infinity to achieve a hypnotic effect – it wants to bring the consumer of that art into a state of consciousness identified with the thinking intellect.
Autopsia uses multiple languages in papers because the question of language is a question of history. Being a part of history and having an identity means having the right to choose one’s language. It is a demonstration of determination. To deny oneself a language means to deny oneself the world.