26^th MFRU Infrastructure Complex: Altered Earth

23.–29. September 2020, Maribor, Slovenia

📢 The recently declared COVID-19 epidemic and related measures, including restrictions of public events in Slovenia, have called for changes in this year's format of the festival programme in order to adapt to the new conditions. More information on the festival programme and dates to follow shortly.

The International Festival of Computer Arts (IFCA) is situated in the post-industrial city of Maribor, Slovenia, where it was first organized in the early 1990s. As computer technologies have played a key role in the broader social, economic and ecological transformations which have steered the city’s development from an industrial past towards a post-industrial future, IFCA is – with its specific focus – a unique platform that addresses the changes and potentials that these technologies bring at the local and planetary level.

Computer technologies today expand into networked and ever more automated systems that not only extend globally but also loop back into the organization of planetary processes. The emergent “technosphere” reframes our position to technology, which is not only an extension or prosthesis of the human, but rather seems to be defined through its own complicity with the planet, where we are but a temporary medium of its transformation, haunted by the image of a world without us. At the same time complex algorithmic operations of “planetary computation” that on many levels escape our comprehension also enable us to model and simulate complex processes that influence our existence in a very material way, to navigate this new terrain, and to develop an awareness of spatialities and temporalities that stretch toward non-human scales. The need to abandon the dualism of the natural and artificial, virtual and material, technological and ecological that such an undertaking entails resonates especially in the context of anthropogenic climate change and pending ecological collapse that marks our time.

In reference to some of the issues raised in the previous edition, the thematic core of the 26^th IFCA will focus on the projects that deal with the infrastructural aspects of the relation between computer technologies and planetary ecologies. Other than the (main) thematic international group exhibition, the programme of the 26th IFCA also features a curated series of projections from the festival’s extensive archive, cooperation with the journal for contemporary art, criticism, and theory Šum, a residency for foreign critics/curators, organized in cooperation with Pekarna Magdalenske mreže and their AiR GuestRoom, a sound intervention into public space done in collaboration with Tonspur, and a special module that presents the activity and projects by the Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art – konS.

26^th MFRU Infrastructure Complex: Altered Earth

Participating

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Web exhibition of the main program is accessible here.

Financing

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