ARIA (ISkRA) artist and writer residencies
Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly (ARIA; renamed from ISkRA) intensive by Zavod Projekt Atol took the form of a summer school in Ljubljana (SI). In doing so, it has created an environment for establishing new alliances and connections and sparking new ideas related to planetary futures. Besides its educational aspect, the purpose of the intensive was also to shape a concrete set of questions that served as the guidelines for other activities of Projekt Atol within the More-than-Planet project and a dedicated issue of Šum Journal.
The intensive was accompanied by two four-week residencies. First, the artist-in-residence was dedicated to development of a new project informed by the worldbuilding mindset, infrastructural and ecosystemic questions and practices of planetary 'reimageenering' (re-imagining and re-engineering).
Second, the writer-in-residence was a counterpart of the AiR and hosts authors that work within a theory-fiction genre. Here, writing is understood as practice of articulating descriptions of the world yet to come, and fiction as a tool of proposing new planetary imaginaries that might inform actual political, economic, technological, ecological interventions.
ARIA in 2023
The first edition of the intensive happened under the title of Algo-Rhytmic Ideation Academy between 21-26 August 2023 and is curated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth.
First ARIA residents were Subash Thebe Limbu (artist, eastern Nepal), and Ondřej Trhoň (theorist and game developer, Prague).
Subash Thebe Limbu is an Indigenous Yakthung (Limbu) artist from what is currently known as eastern Nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting, and podcasts. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance, and science/speculative fiction, featuring recurring themes of migration, climate change, and indigeneity, which he calls Adivasi Futurism. As part of his residency, Subash Thebe Limbu developed a workshop titled “Yangdang Phongma: Blessings of the Future,” designed for 16 participants of the ARIA summer school. The workshop “Yangdang Phongma” used time-based media and Indigenous worldview to explore possible futures that would transcend generations and spacetime.
Ondrej Trhon is a writer, critic, teacher, and a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He is interested in all things related to virtual worlds, video games, and the intersection of the digital and political. His residency with Projekt Atol and osmo/za in Ljubljana was dedicated to researching and writing about digital visual culture, its relation to new planetary imaginaries and how we are rearticulated as planetary objects/subjects by the latter. Among the residency activities, Trhoň was working on an essay draft exploring the ways planetary becoming is addressed through new simulation technologies and video games.
ARIA in 2024
The second edition took place in April and August 2024, including public events:
The Abyss Between Our Hands & ŠUM#21 launch on 11 April, 17:00, MGLC Ljubljana and 12 April / Workshop: Mysticism and Touch praxis session as part of ARIA, Worlds’ End Hackathon programme:
18 August, 5 pm, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana / Talk all the world’s polygons
19 – 23 August, Krušče / Closed-door workshop for the participants of ARIA Real Game Play
Second ARIA residents were Alice Bucknell (artist and writer, London/LA), Áron Birtalan (artist, musician, and student of theology).
During the residency in Ljubljana, Alice Bucknell continued developing Earth Engine, a video game and research project exploring planetary play. The game uses real-time climate data to respawn a speculative Earth every time it is played. It builds on the emerging lore of EVEs (Earth Virtualization Engines), digital Earth twins put forward as the future of climate research. Rejecting the idea of more data = more reality, Earth Engine triangulates ideas of posthuman play, ecological reworlding, and planet as player. Inverting typical game mechanics and distinction between player and environment, here the Earth becomes the player, and the human an NPC.
Taking notes from mystical theology, ecology, and romantic love songs, Birtalan's project explored how languages of intimacy erased and birthed bodies and relationships. A World on the End of a Reed treated intimate relationships between human and nonhuman bodies as sentient entities of their own – a third voice that blooms to utterance or collapses to silence when two bodies touch. How can such a third voice be heard, felt, communed with? And what if it remains forever silent? The project adapted Birtalan’s earlier guided experience in conversation with a heretical religious movement from the Middle Ages called The Heresy of Free Spirit. Birtalan is interested in how the Free Spirit heresy’s tenants and language address the ecstatic as a quantum leap that renders the body permeable.
More info? Listen to Šum Pod - a podcast by Šum Journal
Šum Pod#3 consists of an interview with Alice Bucknell on worldbuilding, narratives framing space exploration, speculative fiction as descriptive practice, magic and unravelling human language structures with the help of AI systems.
Šum Pod#5 discusses comparative planetology, geopolitics of “spectral Earth”, post-anthropocentric design practice, fashion, role of art institutions - together with Lukaš Likavčan (Slovak philosopher and More-than-Planet working group coordinator).