International Festival
of Computer Arts
26. SEP – 05. OCT 2025, Maribor, Slovenia
Platform Workshippers is a research-based project that maps the blurred boundaries between labor, control, and visibility within centralized social media platforms. It explores how users become both subjects and agents of participatory control, alternating between an active peer interaction and subject of wider systemic surveillance, and engage in invisible forms of free labor while navigating the tension between exposure and self-preservation.
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.
Stadtwerkstatt is bringing exhibits that relate to its art format STWST84x11 FOG MANIFESTO, which was presented in Linz in September 2025. Seeing itself as a critical antidote, Stadtwerkstatt addresses fog as a material, medium, and network. It is about disoriented works and clouded continuities between theory and artistic practice.
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.
Sigil Séance Against Space Billionaires is a protection ritual against "New Space" colonizing overlords and an exploration of peer-to-peer online gathering. The sigil-making collaborative ritual in the form of an online call opens up the space to discuss and negotiate the formula they want to load and launch. The meetings present opportunities to think and exchange about current exploitation projects and colonial behaviors, to formulate collectively what bothers us and to express a clear desire for change.
The installation, involving plasma TV screens and the images that, through over-exposure over time, are “burned” in the same display, connects images from our current world with symbols of the decayed world of the Etruscans, native populations to Petrozzi’s land of birth. Reflecting on the temporality of cultural symbols, the work aims at constructing the ground for a future ruin, a fragment intended for use or interpretation by worlds that may arise after the disintegration of our own.
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.
Wanting to practice a modicum of ritual magic, the microsystems were generated by inhaling burning belladonna leaves, but I won't say more. The perpetual externalization of the unconscious through digital artifacts cannot help but impact the imagination as well—indeed, this is the discipline most affected.
PROGRAMMA 101 gives hints, interpretations, and further provocations to the visitors in order for them to interpret the story. Rather than presenting a singular truth, the work engages with an evidentiary paradigm, shifting between absences, suggestions, and fleeting impressions. Its truth is not a whole, but a fragmented mosaic to be reassembled.
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.
SIRIUS.EXE 2.0 is the latest iteration of Technologie und das Unheimliche’s inquiry into digital culture, myth-making, and the aesthetics of belief, extending its speculative framework where cultic imaginaries, eschatological narratives, and computational infrastructures intertwine.
Arsenic Ballerinas takes an excursion from mineral toxicities found in cosmetics and their properties to catch radio, all the way to YL (Young Lady) Operators and their friendship cards, lipsticks in war and morals of paint and powder.
In the Thresholds Breached system, electronic-sculptural units establish a cybernetic loop through mutual perception, responsiveness, and altruist circulation of energy. Powered by solar energy and responding through light pulses and movements, the units adapt their behaviour to access sufficient energy supply – light –, operating in conjunction with each other – through signals and rhythm of transmission. By simply observing the work, however, visitors introduce new signals and energy and disrupt the previously settled state of equilibrium, which has then to be established anew.