Revealing best student intermedia projects of MFRU30 Festival

The winners are known – these are the authors of the best student intermedia projects of the MFRU festival 2024!

As part of 30th International Festival of Computer Arts (MFRU30), Youth Cultural Centre Maribor hosted an open call for student intermedia art projects for the Student Award of MFRU 2024.

Fourteen students applied to the open call with eleven projects.

The expert jury members, Maja Burja, Simon Streljaj Gmajner and Lara Mejač, decided unanimously to present:

1st Award to Senka Milutinović: Momentary Lapse in Memory,

2nd Award to Lazar Mihajlović: Dreamer in

3rd Award to Ana Evtić: Time Continuum.

All receive monetary awards and have the opportunity to present their projects in October as part of the MFRU30 festival. Congratulations to all the winners!

1ST AWARD

Senka Milutinović: Momentary Lapse in Memory

The jury awards the main Student Award of MFRU 2024 to Senka Milutinović for her complex multimedia research project Momentary Lapse in Memory.

The work sheds light on the personal stories and experiences of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. The retaliatory response to the ethnic cleansing of Albanians and the oppressive regime of Slobodan Milošević left deep marks on the environment and social fabric of Belgrade, the city where Milutinović was born a few weeks before. This event of recent history is at once part of their personal and collective past, but also an obscure period of which they have no memories of their own.

As a visitor in a region at once familiar and foreign, through a series of interviews, they recorded the accounts of friends and family members who were in the worst affected area during the bombing. Based on oral testimonies punctured by time, forgetfulness, the constant return to the past and trauma, the fragmented objects of memories are reconstructed in the form of memory spaces in which excerpts of conversations, images and sounds are placed. In the process of carefully archiving fragments and details that are not part of grand narratives, they have become an active part of people’s storytelling, and new scenes of memory are constructed by taking into account the fragility, non-linearity and collectivity of memory. In doing so, Milutinović critically insists on the importance of community-based and intergenerational archiving practices that are shaped outside of institutional frameworks.

The collected narratives and memories have been materialised in an original and technologically skilful way in the form of an interactive digital environment on the web. The exploration of this space takes place differently each time and allows the resistance to the hierarchisation, linearisation and instrumentalisation of narratives. The project, which can also be experienced as a spatial installation and is accompanied by a critical autobiographical essay, is carried out in a coherent and thoughtful way that addresses the roles of researchers and narrators of history. The authors address political themes in a profound and careful manner, proposing a multiplication of perspectives and a firm rejection of all forms of violence – including narrative – rather than relativisation or polarisation in remembering.

2ND AWARD

Lazar Mihajlović: Dreamer

The jury awards the second Student Award of MFRU 2024 to Lazar Mihajlović for his work Dreamer, which explores the subconscious in the exchange between the performer and the audience in an open performative situation through live coding and artificial intelligence.

Among the applications received, the work stood out for its conceptual and technical coherence, interweaving the visual and the sonic in an innovative way, using synthetic and improvisational technological approaches and highlighting the technological processes that are usually in the background. Due to the dynamic nature of the work, which builds and changes with each implementation, the jury sees the second award and the possibility of exhibiting as an opportunity to re-contextualise the work and encourage further conceptual and technical development.

3RD PRIZE

Ana Evtić: Time Continuum

The third Student Award of MFRU 2024 goes to Ana Evtić for her artistic intervention Time Continuum, which explores the many dimensions and understandings of temporality. In her work, she uses personal archival materials to construct a hypnotic and branched flow of time and space in constant transformation, which changes the palimpsest of the everyday into a meditative and speculative journey.

The jury views Ana Jevtić’s submission as a promising project, which in the form of a spatial installation successfully transforms personal shots into dynamic images that try to escape the limitations of time and space. The jury is convinced the work has the distinct potential to further develop its immersive environment in dialogue with the new exhibition venue and context.