Research day
Research day.
Visited Masks: From Ritual to Carnival at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum.
Humans have always invented new beings.
Long before avatars and filters, people were already building new identities from wood, hair, textiles, pigment and imagination. Today we have polygons, synthetic skin and image models.
Different materials. Same impulse.
Field notes
Field notes from recent days.
From the hills of Floating Castle to the coastline of Portorož.
A village transformed into a temporary universe.
Small stages hidden between houses, forests and hills.
Music appearing in unexpected places.
Seaside architecture, changing atmospheres, different ways of constructing environments.
It made me think about my own virtual worlds: spaces built from digital matter, populated by artificial beings, waiting for visitors and encounters.
Different landscapes.
Different materials.
The same urge to create places that did not exist before.
Places begin to feel alive when they gather memories, encounters and inhabitants.
ONENESS, HYPERMASK and BLOOM at the Fluviale festival
Synthetic portraits, composite beings and speculative forms of life.
Installation views from STREAM.fields 2026 at ODEON im Spitzer, Vienna.
Featuring ONENESS, HYPERMASK and BLOOM from the ongoing AVANTGARDEN project.
Photos: eSeLat – Joanna Pianka
AVANTGARDEN at STREAM.fields 2026, Vienna
A selection of works from AVANTGARDEN was presented as part of STREAM.fields 2026 at ODEON im Spitzer in Vienna.
The presentation included the moving image works ONENESS, HYPERMASK and BLOOM, shown within the exhibition and screening program alongside artists, filmmakers, musicians and researchers participating in this year's edition of the festival.
AVANTGARDEN is an ongoing series of virtual environments, moving image works and synthetic lifeforms. Across videos, virtual worlds and image series, the project develops parallel habitats populated by artificial organisms, composite beings and speculative forms of life.
The works presented in Vienna focused on synthetic portraits and evolving entities assembled from biological references, cosmetic materials, digital skins, ornamental structures and artificial ecologies. Together they explore organisms that exist somewhere between portrait, species and environment.
The images document the installation and screening at ODEON im Spitzer, Vienna.
guided expedition through virtual worlds.
CODED LANDSCAPES
Gallery Wechselstrom, Vienna
Tonight I will open a few portals and take visitors on a guided expedition through my virtual worlds.
From Sphere 4 to ProtoMachines Lab, we will travel through habitats populated by proto-machines, artificial organisms, fractal structures, ancient plants, communal gathering spaces and various forms of synthetic life.
Some of these environments have existed for years. Others continue to mutate.
All of them ask the same question:
What happens when virtual spaces stop behaving like simulations and start behaving like places?
Part of the Fluviale Festival.
Discussion moderated by Thomas J. Jelinek.
With Reante Pittroff, Christoph Theiler, Darko Fritz and guests.
