Exhibition of student projects
Gaia Radić, Academy of Applied Arts, Rijeka, APURI; Marko Mrvoš, Academy of Applied Arts, Rijeka, APURI; Anastasia Marčelja, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, NABA
Emergency Exit is a project that was held in the academic year 2021/2022 within the Center for Innovative Media, Academy of Applied Arts in collaboration with the Faculty of Mathematics and the Faculty of Informatics and Digital Technology, with the support of the University of Rijeka. The purpose of the art project was to connect the consequences left by the Covid-19 pandemic on social and personal levels with artistic creation. The pandemic affected all social aspects, many processes related to the development and use of digital technology became visible and widely applicable in practice. The focus of social events, including education and the arts, suddenly and quickly shifted to the digital space, without the ability to reflect on the consequences. Precisely because of this, the goals of the course were to raise awareness and explore the intertwining of artistic and scientific, public, and private, the phenomenon of misinformation, censorship, algorithmic populism, related to art education, work and presentation, while the goal was an exhibition of student works related to the search for the necessary exit.
During two semesters, the course was held by Tomislav Brajnović, Ingeborg Fülepp and Dijana Protić, who then mentored the students' artistic works. The lectures within the course were designed with guest appearances by foreign and domestic artists and scientists, who presented their own works of art and thus contributed to the search for a necessary way out. Guest lecturers were Ana Meštrović, Maurice Benayoun, Vladislav Knežević, Joanna Hoffmann, Mechthild Schmidt Feist, Michael Saup and Aleksandar Vejnović. The project partners from the Faculty of Mathematics were Vedrana Mikulić-Crnković and Bojan Crnković, while Ana Meštrović from the Faculty of Informatics and Digital Technology submitted the research results for artistic interpretation. The project resulted in an exhibition by students Marko Mrvoš, Gaia Radić, Anastasie Marčelja, which took place in July 2022 at the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka, and an exhibition of digital prints in September 2022 on the University campus. Marko Mrvoš presented the work Comments, an author's digital visualization created based on research on pandemic-related comments on social networks using artificial intelligence. Gaia Radić exhibited a multimedia installation Hanging gardens of Babylon, created according to the motif of the biblical story about the construction of a utopian tower. Anastasia Marčelja set up the Ars Memoriae art project, which investigates brain frequencies and possible influences on them. Although Emergency Exit was written as a response to the pandemic crisis, at the end of the project, a new, even more dramatic, war crisis opened, the threat of which is greater, more far-reaching, and builds on the first one. Crises go beyond the task and intention of a project that opened questions but ended without a clear way out because one necessity is followed by another. This reality confirms the extraordinary situation that we recognized with this project and through which we searched for an artistic exit, something that we will have to continue to search for in the future.
Tomislav Brajnović, Ingeborg Fülepp, Dijana Protić