31st MFRU Esoteric Ecotechnics. Irrational Computation and Conspiratorial Networking
26. SEP – 05. OCT 2025, Maribor, Slovenia
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Exhibitions
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26. 09. 2025 – 12. 10. 2025
Esoteric Ecotechnics. Irrational Computation and Conspiratorial Networking
Location: Minorite church
Main exhibition titled Esoteric Ecotechnics. Irrational Computation and Conspiratorial Networking, focuses on underground and secret connections between media technologies, users, knowledge and information circulation. It looks for spaces of non-compliance and resistance to the current climate of warfare and tech authoritarianism, accompanied by the ideologies of artificial intelligence and venture capital. Featured artistic positions are informed by secretive, symbolic, and peer-oriented intentions while conceiving the interplay of society, knowledge and digital technologies.
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26. 09. 2025 – 05. 10. 2025
In Root
Location: Cultural Incubator
In Root presents four projects by Beti Frim, Oskar Kandare, Sofia Talanti, and Luca Mussnig, selected through MFRU’s international open call for students. Within the bounds of In Root, technology itself – neither new media in the conventional sense – isn’t at the forefront. It is rather taken as a point of departure. In reshaping existing systems, devices, and logics of social mediation, they become a substrate, from which emergent phenomena and fictions can sprout.
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26. 09. 2025 – 05. 10. 2025
Tactical Tech
Location: House of Architecture Maribor
With a growing generation relying on the internet for learning, entertainment and socialising, it's crucial to cultivate the capacity of teenagers and youth to ask critical questions about how technology impacts their lives, their communities and the planet. But how can teens learn to understand and navigate the digital world confidently? Everywhere, All the Time is a creative and playful digital literacy intervention, aiming to do just that.
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26. 09. 2025 – 05. 10. 2025
KRES. Kindling Sparks of Slovene Digital Art
Location: Salon+
The lighting of bonfires was symbolically linked to sun worship in pagan tradition, and our ancestors believed in the miraculous and mystical powers of fire to enlighten, connect and awaken new life. This time, we set up a Kres (bonfire) to awaken and bring out the hidden visions of Slovenia's emerging digital art from the underground and to bring together younger artists who have a unique relationship with virtual worlds around the hearth.
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26. 09. 2025 – 18. 10. 2025
IN FOCUS: Stadtwerkstatt (The Fog is the Media)
Location: Media Nox Gallery
The Stadtwerkstatt collective treats fog as material, medium, and network, exploring disoriented works and blurred connections between theory and artistic practice. What happens is a spectacle of reduced foresight, veiled visibility, and condensed unverifiability. The focus is on simulation, synchronisation—and, of course, fog. Exhibition reflects on art after new media, new contexts, and critical production, with selected works marking the house’s artistic constants and subcultural zones of autonomy, forming what Stadtwerkstatt frames as a broken altar of criticism.
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26. 09. 2025 – 05. 10. 2025
Performances
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26. 09. 2025 / 20:00
Federico Poni & Chiara Prodi: Algorismo
Location: Minorite church
Algorismo is a performance for various entities and networked act for smartphones, humans and ancestral gestures. While creating a de facto network between humans, Algorismo creates a network between devices as well. Sacrificing the false attempt of the random, participants celebrate human and non-human languages, real and irrational numbers, anarchist trigonometry, and ongoing chaos.
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26. 09. 2025 / 21:30
Mala roza muca & Pixel Bambi
Location: Cultural Incubator
Welcome to the dynamic universe of mala roza muca. Their music, an electrifying fusion of hyper folk and dark vibes, encapsulates the essence of YOLO. The music draws from breakcore, rave, glitch, spoken-word and metal influences. Their principle of “more is more” is evident in the contrasting elements and rapid changes, disorienting listeners and urging them to shake off expectations. Despite the apparent chaos, there’s a demand for a deadly unseriousness that resonates throughout their work. Collaborations with artist Pixel Bambi on several tracks add a toxic yet enchanting aesthetic, juxtaposing chaos with a subtle gentleness.
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27. 09. 2025 / 17:30
Ioana Vreme Moser: Lipstick Bar
Location: Minorite church
Lipsticks oscillate between bad morale, toxicity, Barbie-centric beauty norms and resistance movements. The Lipstick Bar commences as an interactive beauty salon where lipsticks will be mixed from pigments and waxes and cast in moulds for a collective application. From Rhodopis Serviteur (one of the first lipsticks cast in a bullet shape) to ''The Kiss of Death'' (a KGB agent’s pistol), this cosmetic activation follows a simple historical recipe to re-create classical shades on the public’s lips.
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27. 09. 2025 / 18:00
Pedro del Real Lavergne: Ludd Lives! (The Holliness in the Machine)
Location: Minorite church
In an age of enshittification and fascistoid techno-accelerationism, Ludd Lives offers a moment of unity with our fantastic timeline, a timeline brought to humanity by Great Men™. There has never been a better time to be human than the digital age. To celebrate this moment, Pedro spent the last few years devising a mystical ceremony to awaken the cyborg within the audience, making them embrace technological bliss. Through a series of intricate rituals centered around the most powerful means of communication yet, PowerPoint, he passionately shares the gospel of prosperity in the digital age.
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03. 10. 2025 / 21:00
Algorave with map(h): Toplap Linz
Location: Cultural Incubator
map(h) is a collective formed by Sule Suarez (Colombia) and Gorka Egino (Basque Country), based in Linz, Austria. They experiment and jam together within Live Coding environments, trying to bring new and playful concepts in every performance. Together they founded Toplap Linz to explore the possibilities of collaborative jamming and knowledge exchange, leveraging technologies as Flok.
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Talks
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27. 09. 2025 / 13:30
Anna Kraher: We’re All in This Together (Big Tech and the Politics of Isolation)
Location: Cultural Incubator
Anna Kraher's talk explores how Big Tech’s vision of the future – from privatized cities and space colonization to doomsday bunkers – reflects a growing ‘Politics of Isolation’. These projects signal the tech elite’s departure from a shared common ground: corporate-run territories as retreat from legal and regulatory frameworks, bunkers as escape from ecological limits, and space colonization as detachment from Earth itself. In this worldview, freedom is imagined as an escape from responsibility and the collective. Yet, these isolationist strategies rely on global systems of labor and environmental extraction. What appears as isolation is, in fact, an exploitative relationship.
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27. 09. 2025 / 14:30
Arianna Forte: Casting a Spell in Computational Regimes
Location: Cultural Incubator
Curator Arianna Forte will reflect on the cultural and existential transformations shaped by data and computational systems—phenomena that have redefined our global presence and revealed new forms of domination. Forte’s research investigates how these phenomena are imagined, processed, and resisted—particularly through artistic practices that employ witchcraft and magical thinking as tools to confront and subvert techno-scientific paradigms. From cyberwitches to biohacker covens, artists today reclaim ritual as an anti-capitalist gesture—embodying feminist, ecological, and communal struggles. Within this context, Forte introduces the concept of Magic Materialism: a proposal for a new trans*feminist epistemology grounded in incantation, agency, and interspecies connection.
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28. 09. 2025 / 11:00
REINCANTAMENTO in conversation with Šum: Uncovering Lost Futures (The Story of PROGRAMMA 101)
Location: Minorite church
In Uncovering lost futures: the story of PROGRAMMA 101 the artist collective REINCANTAMENTO intervenes in the context of MFRU to discuss publicly the research behind their work PROGRAMMA 101. The collective starts with a central inquiry: how can an entire vision of the future disappear almost overnight? In conversation with REINCANTAMENTO, local collective for art-theory-fiction ŠUM will expand on the disappearance of the Slovenian computer manufacturer Iskra Delta (1974-1988), the firm coextensive with the resolution of the Cold War on the side of the West, which can be taken as a paradigmatic example of a lost future. Yet, if “now is not the time for any (Yugo)nostalgic longing after lost pasts or, arguably worse, futures” (Tisa Troha, Šum #16), all lament over lost futures overlooks that a greater and more clandestine dynamic may be at work, eliminating possible futures: a sign that a concept of the future is not equivalent to unlimited possibility, but rather that the number of possible futures is radically finite, if not only one. Lost futures are not post-factum laments over lost possibilities – instead, every lost future is a sigil of the actual and only necessary future that is in the process of being realized.
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03. 10. 2025 / 19:00
Ljubljana Games Club in Maribor
Location: Cultural Incubator
Ljubljana Games Club is coming to Maribor. It's like a book club, only instead of reading books, participants play games. At the meetings, they treat games as an artistic and social medium worthy of admiration, respect, and critique. This time in Maribor, they’ll be discussing 𝐵𝑒𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑦𝑎𝑙 𝑎𝑡 𝐶𝑙𝑢𝑏 𝐿𝑜𝑤, an esoteric cRPG that takes us into the underground scene of the fictional city New Kroy, where you play as an agent on a mission to rescue a comrade – and try to be cool enough to survive.
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04. 10. 2025 / 15:30
Lucile Haute & Institute of Diagram Studies: Sigil Séance Against Space Billionaires
Location: Minorite church
Lucile Haute & Institute of Diagram Studies will expose the space-billionaire future as a radical ideology of acceleration at a time when all attention should be on planetary limits. They present the practice of collective sigil drawing and magic ritual as an activist action. Finally, they report on the collective activation process of the Sigil Séance Against Space Billionaires project and outline their future plans.
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05. 10. 2025 / 14:00
Technologie und Unheimliche: The Tele-Evangelical Transmission of SIRIUS.EXE 2.0
Location: Minorite church
Conceived as both critical exposition and performative supplement, the talk merges theoretical discourse with the aesthetics of tele-evangelist broadcasting. The duo – poet and critic Márió Z. Nemes and art writer-curator Zsolt Miklósvölgyi – situates the project within philosophical and cultural constellations – from Gnostic cosmologies and cybernetic eschatologies to debates on mythopoesis and post-digital ritual – asking how digital imaginaries, through code and networked infrastructures, revive transcendental narratives. Drawing on speculative realism, media theory, and esoteric thought, they highlight software’s dual role as rational apparatus and generator of belief. Performed in the cadence of evangelist address, their lecture conflates academic analysis with prophetic proclamation, reframing inquiry as ritual and enacting the logic of executable faith at the core of SIRIUS.EXE 2.0.
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05. 10. 2025 / 16:30
Stadtwerkstatt: Talking about the Fog
Location: Media Nox Gallery
In a conversation together with members of the Stadtwerkstatt collective we will discuss the THE FOG IS THE MEDIA work, exhibited in Media Nox Gallery. The talk centers on current artistic production of the Stadtwerkstatt as well as its critical continuities and artistic constants. A staged exchange on the performance NEBELKEGELN (Fog Bowling) game offers the grounds for exploring the practice of simulating and synchronizing themes, media and information.
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26. 09. 2025 – 05. 10. 2025
Workshops
