In Root

In Root presents four projects, selected through International Computer Arts Festival MFRU31’s international open call for students. Within the bounds of In Root, technology itself isn’t at the forefront – nor new media in the conventional sense. It is rather taken as a point of departure; reshaping existing systems, devices, and logics of digital sociability into a substrate from which emergent phenomena and fictions can sprout.

Underlying much of this is the recognition of technology’s inherent normativity: in responding to systemic demands following the logic of continuous growth, both of human needs and those of the market, technology is ceaselessly bound to its intended functions. The selected projects by Beti Frim, Oskar Kandare, freakygreenfish and Sofia Talanti, expose this normativity by working within its fractures.

Two of the works stem from malfunction; from systems and conditions marked as “defective”, ill, having passed the point of serving their appointed role. Instead of treating dysfunction as failure or an end, the artists reframe it as an opening—a point of departure toward new possibilities, a productive condition from which new phenomena arise. The other two works address the social dimensions of technology from seemingly opposite angles. In one, human experience filtered through algorithmic feeds culminates in a kind of devotional delirium. In the other, an intertwined system of moss and a microcontroller is redirected toward paradoxically human expressions.

Despite these directional differences, a common element can be observed: the works cease to operate within the dogmatic separation of human and machine. Instead, fictions flourish, new bodies are produced, new territories grasped: A camera stabilizer starts anew as a navigator of landscape (Oskar Kandare); a cyborg body is produced upon the hormonal imbalances of a thyroid (Sofia Talanti); a small moss ecosystem is elevated to the status of a blogger (Beti Frim); from the subjective paranoias of a doomscroller, a religion is born (freakygreenfish). Our eyes are drawn to these complex entaglements, where the digital is fused with physical presence. As our gaze meets the pulsating complexity, we are reminded of being only temporary guests in a foreign territory that continues to outgrow the mere conditions of its origin.

➳ Curated by Vid Koprivšek

➳ Featuring works of Beti Frim, Oskar Kandare, Sofia Talanti and freakygreenfish


✹ The exhibition in Cultural Icubator (Koroška cesta 18) will be open from 14:00 to 18:00 on weekdays, and from 10:00 to 18:00 on weekends.

Join the guided tour with curators:

✹ Saturday 4 October, 10:00 (a part of marathon guided tour Co-conspirators)