ARTISTS | Saša Spačal (SI), Ida Hiršenfelder (SI), media-art installation, 2015
Welcome to the Anthropocene, the geological era of industrial societies. The era is marked by disruptions in the Earth’s system on a planetary scale. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, land, air and water pollution, exploitation of natural resources and severe soil depletion are all signs of a planet in crisis. A crisis of the planet is a crisis of the system.
Global capitalism is preventing humans from acting pro-planetary, or even from standing up to the planetary crisis, which is self-induced by means of inevitable consumption. Speedy obsolescence is inscribed in every product. Non-renewable energy resources are the driving force of globalism. They are also a cause of seismic activity: the exhaustion of fossil fuels creates empty spaces inside the lithosphere, dams apply pressure upon it, and nuclear reactor accidents cause tectonic motion.
Earth, a sonoseismic instrument, enables an entrance into the planetary perspective, a sensual and haptic relation between a human and the planet. Pumping out fossil fuels from the earth’s crust causes tectonic cracks. The globe’s crust is pierced with seismographic cuts, which are becoming deeper with the increasing presence and closeness of humans. The planet emits an infrasonic sound of earthquakes, submerging the visitor inside a ubiquitous acoustic zone of no recognizable origin. The human being is trapped inside a drama of endless circulation of the capital from a planetary perspective.
technical support | Mirjan Švagelj
production | Aksioma Projekct Space
exhibited at | Aksioma Project Space, 22 February – 10 March 2017
technical support | Mirjan Švagelj, Anil Podgornik, Blaž Berdnik
production | KIBLA 2015
exhibited at | Kiblix Festival 2015
Saša Spačal is a media artist with a background in humanities, who is currently working at the intersection of living systems research and media art. Her work focuses primarily on the posthuman period, when human beings exist and act as one of many elements in the ecosystem and not as sovereigns, therefore abandoning the Cartesian system of classification and accepting the fact that the field of technology expanded not only from hardware to software but also to wetware resulting in hybrid phenomena inscribed in mechanical, digital and organic logic. Her works were presented at numerous exhibitions and venues such as Ars Electronica CyberArts Exhibition 2015, Austria; Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Srbija; ThingWorld – Triennial of New Media Art 2014, China; Cynetart 2014, Germany; Soft Control: Tomorrow Festival, Serbia; Sonica Festival, Slovenia; Močvara Gallery, Croatia; Kiblix 2014, Slovenia; Kapelica Gallery, Slovenia; Gallery of Contemporary Art Celje, Slovenia; MFRU – Kiblix 2013 – Slovenia; Enter 6: Biopolis – Prague, Czech; Device_art 4.013 – Czech; Device_art 4.012. – Croatia. For the work Myconnect Saša Spačal, Mirjan Švagelj and Anil Podgornik received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica Prix 2015.
Ida Hiršenfelder (1977) is a Ljubljana, Slovenia-based media art critic and curator. Her focus research areas include media history, archives and their disappearance, and media archaeology. She is a collaborator of Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MUSM on projects related to digital archives and works as an online editor of contemporary art archives. From 2007 to 2013 she was an archivist at Digital Video Art Archive, DIVA Station, SCCA Ljubljana. From 2010 to 2014 she was curator at Ljudmila, Ljubljana Art and Science Laboratory. She is also an advocate and user of free and open-source software. Since 2011 she has been a member of the Theremidi Orchestra experimental DIY noise collective, creating DIY electronics and noise soundscapes. She collaborates with media artist Saša Spačal on a series of sonoseismic installations produced by Kibla.
Group shows
Device art 6.018, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (HR) 2018
Futurology, City Gallery of Nova Gorica, Nova Gorica (SI), 2018
Speculum Artium Festival, Trbovlje (SI) 2017
Festival MFRU & Kiblix 2015: Lift Me Up, Maribor (SI) 2015
Solo show Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana (SI) 2017