The conclusion of the festival featuring the ŠUM journal, film projections and Heklab

The coming days will be marked by the collaboration with the ŠUM journal, which is about to publish its 15^th issue that focuses on infrastructure as criticism and broadens some of the contributions from the series šumXvideo that was created as part of our main curated programme Infrastructural Complex: Alter(ed) Earth. The šumXvideo series was prepared by Maks Valenčič and includes two lectures and an interview where guests discuss – with a great deal of speculation – radical markets, the future of management and the new role of the economist-as-engineer, and address the need for institutional changes. On Tuesday (15 December) at 19:00 the interview with the founder of the RadicalxChange foundation Glen Weyl will be broadcast live on our webpage. On Wednesday (16 December) at the same hour Zoë Hitzig, poet and doctoral student of economy at Harvard, will give a lecture entitled The Cost of Existence that will shed light on the increasingly important techno-political dimension of political decisions taken today. The following day (17 December) we will have a double programme that will begin at 19:00. First we will host the managing editor of the Palladium Magazine Ash Milton who will give a lecture entitled Harnessing the Market on how countries and large corporations methodically create markets to gain access to otherwise inaccessible information and, in centralised instances, establish an economically sound and competition-centred dynamics. The programme of ŠUM’s video content will conclude with an introduction given by Maks Valenčič. You can tune in live at: https://www.mfru.org/live or https://www.facebook.com/mfru....

As part of the accompanying programme selected by Miha Horvat we will host a presentation of the Heklab team from GT22, represented by Monika Pocrnjić, Aphra Tesla, Matej Modrinjak, Marko Gutman, Rob Canning and guests Mark Lük and Gregor Jaklin. On the last evening, that is, Friday, 18 December, at 19:00 the group will present a stereo online broadcast of a selection of its performances on Slovenian festivals in the last two years. The selection from the 2019/2020 archive represents as a pleasant conclusion to the 26^th IFCA festival and announces a peaceful transition into 2021. The varied online activity will be accompanied by (at least) two interventions into the public space. The first is a sound composition that is also part of the Heklab archive and is already playing in the Tonšpur passage between the Main and Rotovž squares in Maribor, where it will be featured until 4 January 2021, when it will be once more replaced by the international composition Private Dots and Public Clouds. The project Land 2.0, created by strtgm, can also be viewed on the online display developed by Marko Damiš (www.mfru.org/display2020). Land 2.0 is a modular system that connects the fields of distributed production, circular economies and copyright. The connections between these systems encourage a reflection on their general co-dependence and bring up the question of how they co-create our natural and social environments, for they deal both with the problem of environmental impact and the future of labour.

The main festival programme Infrastructural Complex: Alter(ed) Earth will conclude with a projection of two films. Making of Earths by the Geocinema collective focuses on film from the perspective of technologies and infrastructures of planetary sensor networks – mobile telephones, surveillance cameras, satellites, geosensors. These are considered as a cinematic apparatus – as a planetary camera that makes it possible to develop the practice of “planetary film” which in the context of global economic processes and ecological/climate crisis explores the methods, tools and power relations by which representations and concepts of the Earth are formed. And the documentary-fiction film White Mountain by artist Emma Charles that focuses on the underground data centre Pionen. Should the restrictive measures change to allow for such events, the film projections will take place on 19 December at the Moderna galerija auditorium. If not, the films will be available on our webpage on that day.

You are kindly welcome to attend.