DIGITARS - Maribor-Beograd 2007

Digitars: from historical notions of the image to acoustic and visual experiences
The range of the chosen art works establishes criteria from monitored reality to constructed reality, from sacralization of art to democratisation of art, from accentuating the author, to renouncing the author, from the autonomous mind to divided consciousness, from hermeticality to communicativity, from materialistic to ecological, from national to pan national, from autonomous content to contextual content, from objectivization to processuality, from linearity to hypertextuality.

Multimedia exhibition Digitars
son:DA, Martin Bricelj, Marko Ornik, Alenka Pirman and Jaša
Digitars exhibition unites various approaches towards the image. Digitars is a collector of various marginalized approaches of the artistic mission. The exhibition encloses gobelin usages (Martin Bricelj), computer mouse (son:DA), electronic perpetuum mobile (Marko Ornik), "power point" program on old computer monitors (Alenka Pirman) and tactile visual material (Jaša). Different aesthetics of the authors choose adequate media.

Digital commune
Aleksandra Kostič: concept
Ana Pečar and Dino Schreilechner: video
Cameron Bobro: sound, sound and voice processing
Marko Gutman: sound design
Mojca Kasjak: dance and theremin
David Orešič: light
Uroš Čučkovič: digital advisory
Jure Vekjet: technician
A group of Maribor artists creates in various fields: video, internet, sensors, sound, light. They have characterized their creative artistic upgrade as: "We widen the perception of space dimensions with subtle interventions. We invite the spectator to experience virtual and real situations simultaneously. Video, sound, noise and light are fellow dancers of the only real dancer. There is no hierarchy. Technology and human perception: boundaries of both determine stochastic or blurred movement and interactions- it is therefore not possible or wished for to create a strictly synchronized "show". We explore the technology and its boundaries. Mistakes are not excluded. We experiment, move around, turn over. We go beyond the rational, definable world. There is no leader in a creative group. Knowledge, experience, discoveries and feelings simply flow."

Cameron Bobro: Bizantyne Cadillac
Video: Ana Pečar and Dino Schreilechner
Byzantine cadillac unites musical approaches of the East and the West. Bobro's music is of a totally special origin that does not yield to popular trends. His voice unites the physical ability of pre-opera Italian and Russian opera singing technics and singing musical basis of the contemporary artist Scott Walker.

Jaša: Nowhere To Be Seen
Jaša’s works cannot be placed among artworks with clear messages that are just echoes of revolutionary propaganda. Paintings, installations, videos and performances created by him are inscribed into the contemporary art sphere that is not based on a linear story or clear, obvious concept so adored by superficial critics and where the visual part is just a story illustration.

After years of dominion of conceptually planned and anecdotic visual art, sensory stimulus is stepping forward. If the exhibited works that originate in various spheres – media, everyday life, illusions and history of the visual - charm us to seek out a simple story, than we have fallen in the artist’s trap. Jaša’s installation is not just a group of transparent elements. The artwork is not translucent despite being constituted regarding the realities of the world that resides beyond it.

Jaša’s installation is visual, acoustic and meant to be touched. Only considering all this levels the viewer/visitor/user gets the chance to decipher the meanings of the open part which are not simple and cannot be defined in one sentence, which are not high concept or a simple statement.

Jaša’s works hover between the real world and an illusion which is only possible in art. But apparent reality – the feeling of "kind of real" – is not what it seems to be in the artwork. One of the possibilities how to transfer"the open part" into language is a reflection of the world of imagination, a deliberation on existing representations of the world we live in.

The urban space of our lives is becoming simplified, it can be described in words such as: beautiful/disgusting, love/hate, happy/sad… This simplified duality, the empty surplus doesn’t exist in an artwork. Jaša’s work is not a mimesis and not an essence of the modern world. Nowhere to be seen project is a unique intervention into Kontekst gallery space. It creates new reality that is only possible in the world of contemporary art. In it the sensory elements net a web of meaning connections and short circuits between them.