Croatian selection
The selection of artists from Croatia featured in the Biennale Quadrilaterale spans several generations of artists who are all showing recent works and a variety of approaches within the field of media art. All of the Croatian artworks are presented to the public for the first time.
Artist Vlatko Čerić has a background in natural sciences and mathematics and over 30 years of experience in computer-generated graphic art. His ASCII graphic works from 1976 were written in the Fortran IV programming language. Čerić started exhibiting late, in 2005, but since then has had significant presence at international digital art exhibitions. His works belong into the category of computer-generated abstract, mostly geometrical art. Čerić's algorithmic art problematizes the dichotomies of determinism and randomness, linearity and non-linearity, simplicity and complexity, as well as their influence on art. In his work Pulsation (2009), an abstract animation represents a pulsing rhythm—like the pulsation of a heart or a series of breaths—slowing down for the final part of the pulsation cycle and then accelerating in the beginning of the next one, reminiscent of a sinusoidal change of speed. In the transition stage between two pulses, the image degrades and transforms into an animated network of black and red rectangles arranged in the pattern of a chessboard. The varying sizes of the animated rectangles are the product of two programmatic functions; each of rectangles has different periodic functions with different arguments attached to them. Arguments in the first function determine the time frame of the animation, while arguments in the second one establish the values of the rectangle coordinates and position within the network; periodic functions set the required acceleration / deceleration behavior. The animation falls into the category of algorithmic art, being generated through the execution of the previously described algorithms, which were coded in the Mathematica programming system. Čerić's oeuvre ranges from computer graphics programmed in the 1970s to recent algorithmic animations—also accessible on the Web—showing the continuum of software and algorithmic art over the decades, and as such questioning and challenging what Lev Manovich referred to as "Generation Flash" (2002).
Dalibor Martinis, another pioneer of media art, has a background in conceptual visual art and started making video art in 1974. His new project Global Picture - Sensor of Human Condition derives from a concept he developed in 2007 and has been designed as a site-specific installation for the city of Rijeka. The logo of the Transadria company (Rijeka)—a big three-dimensional globe on the roof of a building in Rijeka harbor—serves as an interface for the visualization of changes in the "global picture of humanity": daily reports on the global economy, stock markets, disasters, health, international relations and conflicts, civil freedoms, ecology, and media provide data for measuring the current state of humanity, which, by means of a software application, is translated into changes in the color of the globe. The globe is lit by LED scanners and changes in the color of the LEDs are dependent on a set of parameters that reflects the global "feel-good factor."At any given moment, the "state of humanity" will reveal itself to passers-by at the physical site, visitors to the museum (where an installation consisting of another set of LED scanners will change its color in real-time), as well as to an international audience visiting the project website. The project could potentially be extended to other locations by connecting with media facades and similar screens and displays around the world.
Telephoning 2, by multimedia artist Ivan Marušić Klif, is the latest and most complex manifestation of his project Telephoning, which he started in 2007. It is an open communication project establishing a (automatically dialed) open connection between two public telephone booths located in Croatia and the museum. The gallery installation takes the form of a "stage" with 2 microphones. A computer dials the number of the phone booths, alternating between the two, so that the phones will ring one after another, and creating a large-scale, temporary outdoor sound sculpture in the city of Rijeka and beyond. The installation in the gallery makes use of the web-based mapping system of a Croatian telephone provider to create a real-time visualization of the location of the public telephones. The maps projected on the gallery wall provide an additional real-time locative experience to the museum visitor. The notion of a "private" telephone conversation—randomly established (or not) between individuals in the public space of the gallery and in telephone booths in public spaces of the city—creates an intersection of public and private communication within the new social context generated by a pervasive cell phone culture and web-based social networks; a context that entails the disappearance of the increasingly obsolete network of public phone booths and their service.
Helena Bulaja's Mechanical Figures - twentythousandcycles.NET is the first gallery presentation of her project, which has been in progress for three years and was inspired by inventor and mechanical and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla (1856, Croatia – 1943, USA) and his work. The gallery installation consists of 5 screens embedded in a large-scale photo collage and networked with iPhones and the project website. Numerous short video animations guide the viewer through Tesla's creative process on a journey around the world, from Zagreb through London, Paris, Budapest, New York, Tokyo and New Zealand. Capturing the present, future, and past of technological and social developments initiated by some of Tesla's major inventions—from alternating currents to radio—the film questions the synergy of creation and sustainability through a story about art, science, and technology featuring interviews with Laurie Anderson, Terry Gilliam, Marina Abramović, Andy Serkis, and Hiroshi Matsumoto, among others. The multimedia project is designed primarily for screening and exploration on the iPhone, enabled by applications that are specifically designed for the piece and consist of a collection of short video clips interconnected with content culled from the Internet (from Wikipedia, Youtube to Facebook). The displayed material fuses personal and objective statements on Tesla's (eccentric) life and the importance of his work on the global scene. The blurring of boundaries between the private and public worlds of the public figures participating in the project is further enhanced by the individualized approach and non-linear narration experienced by the individual gallery visitor or Web user. The life and work of Croatian-born world citizen Tesla intersects in form and content bouncing back and forth between the locative and global.
The four projects included in the Croatian selection use different tools from the dynamic and ever-changing toolbox of (new) media art when it comes to both means of production and content. Networks are approached from various angles, surfacing in elements of the artwork itself (Čerić), as local (Marušić) or global social ones, as well as the intersection of both (Bulaja, Martinis). Further intersections of the local and global level occur if one takes the international character of the Biennial and its institutional placement into consideration. A questioning of the changing position of public space, its media technologies, and the ways in which individuals participate in it, unfolds in different forms in the works by Bulaja, Marušić, and Martinis. In each of those three projects "real," physical public space is positioned in relation to "electronically mediated" public space. In Bulaja's project those mediated public spaces are state- and corporately funded—in terms of telephone services and international news media—and created by both artists and participants of web-based social networks. The four artworks also involve different kinds of databases: a database within the software in Čerić’s work; the local telephone database in Marušić’s; global news media databases (and their dynamic feeds) in Martinis’; and video-streaming databases from both the artist's server and social networks in Bulaja’s. The last three projects also involve different analog and digital interfaces and varying approaches to multidirectional user interaction. The different generations of media artists, and consequently diverse aesthetic approaches, trace the continuum of Croatian electronic and digital media art and its rich spectrum of expressions over decades, despite the fact that the number of artists engaged in the (inter)disciplinary field of "media art" is relatively small.
