Student Award presentation, sonic revival of the Tonšpur passage and start of Kons modul

The first act of this year’s festival was the student exhibition featuring the winners of the award for inter-media art at the Media Nox gallery. Unfortunately the awards could not be presented before a live audience and were therefore handed out in person as the exhibition closed. The main award was presented to Matej Mihevc, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. The commission noted his “conceptionally very well thought out and executed proposition” Latent space walk. “His approach to researching computer/machine vision technology is critical, consistent and radical. The distinctiveness of visual stimuli is used as a method, and the project’s openness in various elements of the work indicates the vivacity of the idea. Judging by his work the student is serious and systematic in his approach to artistic production, which is very important in the field of inter-media art,” wrote the members of the commission Ida Hiršenfelder, Igor Štromajer, Miha Horvat, Tjaša Pogačar and Živa Brglez. The IFCA award, designed by Jaka Neon and fabricated by Lovrenc Košenina, was also presented to two other students from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Edina Muftić for her work Botanica and Pavle Banović for his work The difference between what it is and what it claims to be. The IFCA Student Award was made possible by the financial support of the Youth Cultural Centre Maribor and the Sonda Foundation.

The second act of the festival is currently underway in the Tonspur Passage between the Main Square and the Rotovž Square every day from 10:00 to 20:00, where visitors can listen to the installation Yamamayu by the Maribor artist Petra Kapš, alias OR poesis, which will be broadcast on Tonspur’s 8 speakers until Thursday, 5 November. The works presents audio recordings of the Japanese oak silkmoth, a moth that in the 19th century has become successfully assimilated in Slovenian deciduous forests. Next Thursday at 17:00 the installation will be replaced by Private dots and public clouds, a group work where a number of international artists under the guidance of George Weckweth, who first established Tonspur in Vienna, recorded the sounds of their virtual spaces during video conferences, which in the days of quarantine and restrictions on movement have replaced meetings and other work performed in person. The Tonspur Passage Maribor has been featured as part of the International Festival of Computer Arts for the last five years on the initiative of and in cooperation with the Sonda foundation and Tonspur.at, and with the financial support of the Municipality of Maribor.

The Slovenian inter-media platform Kons, of which IFCA is a part, has also launched its online festival-related activities this week. The lecture We need to talk AI took place at Aksioma on Monday (the video is available here), and coming up are an online broadcast of the short film kons DP2 and an online panel discussion Investing in the future: lifelong improvement of STEAM competences in practice and public policies, both of which will take place on Tuesday, 3 November, at 18:00. The discussion will attempt to shed light on how some of the leading policymakers and providers of extracurricular activities attempt to develop the capacities for future challenges, as well as the current and future developments in the field of hybrid and trans-disciplinary approaches on the level of public policies.