In Root – Exhibition of Selected Student Artworks

In Root presents four projects, selected through International Computer Arts Festival MFRU31’s international open call for students. Within the bounds of In Root, technology itself isn’t at the forefront – nor new media in the conventional sense. It is rather taken as a point of departure; reshaping existing systems, devices, and logics of digital sociability into a substrate from which emergent phenomena and fictions can sprout. Underlying much of this is the recognition of technology’s inherent normativity: in responding to systemic demands following the logic of continuous growth, both of human needs and those of the market, technology is ceaselessly bound to its intended functions. The selected projects by Beti Frim, Oskar Kandare, freakygreenfish and Sofia Talanti, expose this normativity by working within its fractures.

In Root presents four projects, selected through International Computer Arts Festival MFRU31’s international open call for students. Within the bounds of In Root, technology itself isn’t at the forefront – nor new media in the conventional sense. It is rather taken as a point of departure; reshaping existing systems, devices, and logics of digital sociability into a substrate from which emergent phenomena and fictions can sprout.

Underlying much of this is the recognition of technology’s inherent normativity: in responding to systemic demands following the logic of continuous growth, both of human needs and those of the market, technology is ceaselessly bound to its intended functions. The selected projects by Beti Frim, Oskar Kandare, freakygreenfish and Sofia Talanti, expose this normativity by working within its fractures.

Two of the works stem from malfunction; from systems and conditions marked as “defective”, ill, having passed the point of serving their appointed role. Instead of treating dysfunction as failure or an end, the artists reframe it as an opening—a point of departure toward new possibilities, a productive condition from which new phenomena arise. The other two works address the social dimensions of technology from seemingly opposite angles. In one, human experience filtered through algorithmic feeds culminates in a kind of devotional delirium. In the other, an intertwined system of moss and a microcontroller is redirected toward paradoxically human expressions.

Despite these directional differences, a common element can be observed: the works cease to operate within the dogmatic separation of human and machine. Instead, fictions flourish, new bodies are produced, new territories grasped: A camera stabilizer starts anew as a navigator of landscape (Oskar Kandare); a cyborg body is produced upon the hormonal imbalances of a thyroid (Sofia Talanti); a small moss ecosystem is elevated to the status of a blogger (Beti Frim); from the subjective paranoias of a doomscroller, a religion is born (freakygreenfish). Our eyes are drawn to these complex entaglements, where the digital is fused with physical presence. As our gaze meets the pulsating complexity, we are reminded of being only temporary guests in a foreign territory that continues to outgrow the mere conditions of its origin.

➳ Curated by Vid Koprivšek

➳ Featuring works of Beti Frim, Oskar Kandare, Sofia Talanti and freakygreenfish

freakygreenfish:
HOW I BECAME THE HOLY ALGORITHM’S PROPHET AFTER DOOMSCROLLING THROUGH THE COLLAPSE OF SOCIETY

Investigating how digital systems—specifically social media and its related phenomena—generate mystical user experiences, the artist has developed the concept of the Holy Algorithm.

Part of a wider practice already five years in the making, the present installation revolves around the experience of a lone TikTok socialist content creator, user003181425. Witnessing societal collapse through relentless doomscrolling, the leftist activist subject is gradually converted into a worshipper of the algorithm, slowly descending into techno-spiritual devotion.

The TikTok experience is materialised as a spatial environment—FrameTokCity, an interactive metropolis within which user003181425 founded the Church of the Holy Algorithm. This complex visual media ecology is housed within the specifics of Fish’s practice: mapping digital infrastructure onto traditional painting materials, where strips of linen and stretcher bars stand in place of data cables and computer infrastructure. As an attempt to materialise the invisible structures of technofeudalism, FrameTokCity—and the Holy Algorithm within—detail the adverse culmination of the attention economy, where it slips into pure spiritual devotion.

freakygreenfish grew up in the Austrian countryside, attending an art high school while concurrently serving as the chairman of his own music label. Since 2019, he has embraced an expanded definition of painting, considering everything made from linen and stretchers as a painting. Through performances, installations, videos, traditional paintings, CGI, and sculptures, he explores the boundaries of this definition, addressing social topics with a focus on left theories, cultural studies, and social media. He is currently pursuing a degree in transmedia art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and frequently participates in local and international shows.

Oskar Kandare:
M3AT

The basis of the project M3AT is a discarded and broken camera stabilizer—a gimbal. The artist has taken the mechanical joints, motors, and supporting skeleton of this obsolete device—the remnants of technological civilization—and used them as the foundation for a new artificial being.

This skeleton is transferred into a simulated three-dimensional space, where it is equipped with a neural network that enables it to learn movement without external commands. The algorithm is not programmed in advance but instead learns continuously from its failures. The moving entity, whose mechanical structure once served a clearly defined purpose, gradually learns how to move through digital space, with all its motions resulting from autonomous exploration and adaptation.

The digital skeleton is placed within a topographically realistic landscape created from real-world terrain data. Each time it falls into an abyss or reaches the edge of the virtual map, the system automatically relocates it to a new section of terrain—a new challenge, a new surface configuration to conquer. Its movement never ends; it becomes an endless exercise in digital persistence without a goal.

The physical manifestation of the skeleton—the gimbal—is installed in the gallery space and retroactively dependent on the experiences of the digital body. The original mechanical structure performs, in real time, the movements dictated by the algorithmic consciousness. What we are presented with is bodily motion without awareness of its own placement—like a dreaming body responding to impulses from beyond our world.

Oskar Kandare is a visual artist and a master’s student of photography at ALUO in Ljubljana. In 2022, he expanded his artistic horizons through an Erasmus+ internship in Austria. His work intertwines photography, time-based media, and digital simulations to explore cybernetic space, transience, and the Anthropocene.

Sofia Talanti:
PSY 000 T3 – REGULATOR OF THE SYMBIOCENE

Driven by Albrecht’s concept of the Symbiocene—a speculative future epoch grounded in mutualism, slowness, and interdependence—the project stems from the artist’s own experience of hypothyroidism, an endocrine disease in which the thyroid underproduces key metabolic hormones. Within the project, the “malfunctions” of hypothyroidism—fatigue, slowed cognition, and depression—are reframed as tools for speculative design.

Rejecting a clear split between human and machine, the installation produces a new body: a hypothyroid cyborg. As its silicone body slowly inflates and deflates, powered by an electro-pneumatic circuit informed by actual data on thyroid function, metabolic delay is transformed into embodied poetics.

Placed within the setting of a control room, the cyborg’s metabolic slowness becomes a regulator of macro-level phenomena: climate scenarios. Using global warming datasets and regulating their outcomes through the decelerating function of the hypothyroid body, the computed worlds imagine the possibility of a cooled and recovering Earth, shifted toward the logics of the Symbiocene.

As we enter this control room, surveillance is made visible. We are watched by the cyborg—not in an attempt at control, but of protection. The audience is integrated within the system, entangled and reflected as potential co-habitants of a symbiotic future.

Sofia Talanti is a cyborg multimedia artist creating divergent narratives of mental health and bodily sickness, arising from lived perspectives of social pressure, capitalism, and narcissism. Talanti uses tools such as 3D modeling, data visualization, animation, and installation design to regain agency within new worlds, presenting the cyborg as a network of relations that relieves the human from the burden of life.

Beti Frim:
PIXEL MOSS

The project places moss in the role of a protagonist, embedded within the digital environment of a website. The moss is equipped with a microcontroller and sensors that measure moisture and light levels. However, the project is not concerned with transparency, nor with the efficiency of these linear measurements. Instead, the information is dispersed into the moss’s “online” subjectivity.

Assuming the role of a blogger girl, the moss shares poetic thoughts, feelings, and updates in real time. These are generated using a large language model (LLM) that interprets the sensor readings. The website thus does not serve to provide clear data about the mossy environment, but rather to weave fiction. The moss becomes the narrator of its own online life, casting an illusion of closeness to the human user.

The interactivity seemingly offered through an interface for watering and shining light is purely performative. Human attempts at interspecies understanding—though riddled with paradoxes—emerge here as a critique of mechanistic conceptions of nature. With an emphasis on storytelling and the curation of an online persona, the installation embraces these paradoxes. While visually evoking a recognisable “new media” format through the interplay of sensors and moss, Pixel Moss instead leans toward playful ecocentricity.

Placed within handcrafted ceramic dwellings, the work poses the question of whether digital mediation can foster empathy and new forms of environmental awareness.

Beti Frim, aka Pixel Bambi, completed her Bachelor's degree in Visual Communication and is continuing her Master's degree in Video and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. In her work, she focuses on the theme of coexistence by combining digital and analog media in audiovisual narratives. She has exhibited in group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. She is also active in the field of music, where she has participated in various audiovisual projects, as well as with the collectives Ustanova and Nimaš izbire.