KIBLIX 2025: Artistic Intelligence

KIBLIX 2025: Artistic Intelligence
International Festival of Arts, Technology and Science
13 November 2025–17 January 2026
MMC KIBLA, KiBela, artKIT and KIBLA PORTAL

The KIBLIX International Festival of Arts, Technology and Science in 2025 explores a world shaped by nature, humanity, tools, technology, research, science, and art. Seven propositions of creation and evolution, seven elements of action, and seven sensibilities of art-making are presented, with thought serving as a transversal line – a river into which streams converge and where we direct the currents that carry us toward the seas.

KIBLIX 2025 will once again unfold step by step, with exhibitions and events across our three venues in Maribor: MMC KIBLA and KiBela, artKIT, and KIBLA PORTAL, from 13 November until the end of 2025.

The festival program will also include themed discussions through the end of December, providing a space for reflection, exchange of viewpoints, consideration, and speculation related to the festival's thematic focuses. This year, Irena Borić will guide participants through the theme of art in the digital environment.

The events will feature AV performances that combine live visualizations, experimental music, dance-electronic rhythms, explorations of the body, elemental environments, and more. Featured performers include Petra Kapš, Blaž Božič, Beam Team, Dmitry Morozov, and Boris Shershenkov.

As part of the festival, we will hold five workshops on using digital tools in performance art. Through methodologies and tutorials, we aim to provide participants with both theoretical and practical knowledge for applying advanced technologies in their performance practices.

As with the workshops, participants will also need a healthy dose of curiosity for the reading sessions, which will take place in November and December. The readings and discussions will focus on the work of Hito Steyerl.

PROGRAM

13 November–13 December 2025; artKIT
Monika Pocrnjić: Epipremnum Aureum Machina Transcendens
Opening: Thursday, 13 November 2025 at 6 p.m.

14 November–6 December 2025; MMC KIBLA/KiBela
Matej Stupica: Toplice/Topless
Opening: Friday, 14 November 2025 at 7 p.m.

15 November–13 December, 2025, at 10 a.m.; MMC KIBLA
Reading Sessions: Medium Hot – Images in the Age of Heat
(five sessions: 15 November, 22 November, 29 November, 6 December and 13 December 2025)

20 November–30 December 2025; KIBLA PORTAL
Artistic Intelligence, group exhibition
Maria Alves (Portugal), Paul Destieu (France), Jiyun Park (Korea/Germany), Lilit Stepanyan (Armenia), Arpi Voskanyan (Armenia), Brianna Leatherbury (USA/Netherlands), Dora Ramljak (Croatia), P L A T E AU R E S I D U E, Zoran Srdić Janežič, Vlado Repnik, Egon March Institute and Aleksij Kobal (Slovenia)
Opening: Thursday, 20 November 2025 at 7 p.m.

20 November 2025, at 8 p.m.; KIBLA PORTAL
MIGAV Music Cycle: Petra Kapš (alias OR poiesis)

27 November 2025, at 6 p.m.; KIBLA PORTAL
Panel discussion: Do It with Others

27 November 2025, at 8 p.m.; KIBLA PORTAL
MIGAV Music Cycle: TERRANIGMA x BubblesFractals (BEAM TEAM)

2 December 2025, at 4 p.m.; KIBLA PORTAL
Presentation of the project Integrating Children and Families in the Use of New Technologies

2 December 2025, at 5 p.m.; KIBLA PORTAL
AI Imagination Workshop for Children

3 December 2025, at 6 p.m.; MMC KIBLA
hEXPO, documentary about the festival

9 December 2025, at 7 p.m.; MMC KIBLA
Re_humanizacija XII.
.abeceda

11 December 2025, at 6 p.m.; MMC KIBLA
MIGAV Music Cycle: Blaž Božič

12 December 2025–17 January 2026; MMC KIBLA/KiBela
Nika Oblak & Primož Novak: And Now for Something Completely Different 18
Opening: Friday, 12 December 2025 at 7 p.m.

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We originate in water, are formed in air, and breathe and dwell on Earth, which serves as a general signifier of the surface and a broad definition of the material beneath us. It is more accurate to say that we live on a planet that is both elemental and diverse, rich in the finest nuances of thought and vibrant with the subtlest feelings. We carry the ancient within us to understand history, live in the here and now, and look to the future.

We understand and remember. We turn to tools whose creation relies on ancient engineering; we continue tradition and wager on space-time to create our own worlds for journeys both inward and outward, across landscapes that reveal pathways through gorges and allow us to gaze beyond them, as if enchanted by the web of our own presence at the scene of the “crime.” We use and exhaust, exploit and destroy, enrich and deplete ourselves, yet we also expand and continue, even if regressively and passively. We are actors and passors, observers and companions – beings and material.

The analog and digital intertwine in human and media reality as a unified organism. In art and digital media across all artistic fields – visual and fine art, (audiovisual) performance and theater, music and literature – they draw on an original, personal ascent. Through sensory engagement with sound and vision, interactivity, audience involvement, and collaborative artistic practices, artists working individually or collectively can rely on their own “personal poetics” to address audiences and local communities, using available means and drawing inspiration from people and the environment, as well as its natural and cultural heritage.

Artificial intelligence and nature. Sound and electronics. Sensors and interaction. Camera and surveillance, observation and distortion, data and parameters, screen and image. Digital and analog reality. The computer and the Paleozoic. From nature into the human, and from the human back into nature. From nature to nature. The analog as the primordial source. The digital as artificial, as simulation and simulacrum. Artificial intelligence as mechanical memory and recapitulation of remembrance, regeneration of life. As a remnant of collective consciousness we carry within. As the thought that we exist. As the conviction that we can. As the fact that things will work out.

Nature is both analog and discrete, as quantum physics or quantum mechanics shows that the smallest particles of nature – smaller than atoms, the so-called elementary particles or quanta – can exist in multiple places at once. Quanta appear either as matter, divided into quarks and leptons, or as force carriers, called gluons, bosons, photons, and gravitons. All elementary particles are either bosons, which carry fundamental interactions, or fermions, the building blocks of matter.

Artistic intelligence as thought and meaning. Metaphysics in the physical body. As analog fact and discrete action. Nature as technology, and technology as nature within digital environments. The human being as interface, mediator, and medium between environments and tools. Programmer and designer. And user. A conglomerate of nature and its outgrowths and extensions. Coexistence and collaboration. Interaction in all directions. Even in harmful and primarily self-serving intentions, disregarding consequences. Yet it could be different if we internalized our actions as responsible toward everything: ourselves, others, nature, the world, the universe, the cosmos, or the multiverse.

To paraphrase Galileo: “Everything moves!” Even earlier, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus observed that the natural world is in constant motion and claimed that “change is the only constant” and is central to the universe. He also said, “You cannot step into the same river twice – even the rocks change with time under the elements.”

– Peter Tomaž Dobrila