SOURCE
Audiovisual works, digital images, watercolor drawings, 2026.
SOURCE, Audio-Visual Artwork, 4K video, 16×9 (3:39 minutes), 2026.
SOURCE, Audio-Visual Artwork, 4K video, 9x16 (4:03 minutes), 2026.
3D sculpting and rendering, AI generative image processing, sound compositions: Tanja Vujinovic
Production: Tanja Vujinovic / Ultramono
Consulting: Jan Kusej, Barbra Smrekar, Cecilia Zang, Ultramono community

SOURCE is a project developed as the concluding phase of SYNTHSPA.

SYNTHSPA began as an investigation into ways of recalibrating life inside increasingly artificial environments. It moved through synthetic wellness, digital spaces, avatars, sound, artificial substances, virtual gardening, optimization and replication.

SOURCE arrives at something much simpler: a day outside.

Water, sunlight, air, plants, animals, movement and leisure become the starting material. The project is about being an Earthling and experiencing the world directly, while remaining aware that contemporary experience is constantly mediated through technical images, screens, networks and computational systems.

The work brings together two interconnected forms: vertical portraits and horizontal environments. The portraits are shifting composite beings assembled from biological forms, human features, animals, plants, textures and fragments of memory. The environments extend these encounters into open spaces of water, forest, sky, flowers, insects, branches, reflections and light. The two forms can appear separately or overlap as moving image collages.
The masks also acknowledge the layers that make being outside possible: clothing, shade, shelter, sunscreen, insect protection and other forms of care. Even a simple day in nature is mediated through materials and technologies that protect the body while allowing it to remain in contact with the world.

A dragonfly becomes a study in fragility, agility and resilience. A deer encountered in the forest becomes an unexpected mirror, its features reappearing within the faces of synthetic beings. Flowers, insects, water reflections and fragments of landscape leave visual imprints on bodies and spaces.

The project looks at the threads connecting the human body to the environments around it: evolutionary leftovers, instinct, perception, memory, attraction, fear, pleasure and the traces that natural forms leave on the psyche. Older structures of the human brain exist alongside newer cognitive systems, just as biological memory exists alongside technological culture.

SOURCE is also connected to what Vilém Flusser described as the “world of technical images,” in which our experience of reality increasingly passes through images produced, transmitted and manipulated by technical systems. The project does not attempt to escape this condition. It places digital images, artificial beings and computational forms back into contact with the physical world.

Its visual language moves between ideas of the Earthling, Solar Punk, forest bathing, meditation and cornucopia. It is interested in leisure as a legitimate state of being: sitting beside water, watching insects, observing animals, feeling sunlight, noticing reflections, walking through trees, doing nothing particularly productive.

Nature is not presented as an untouched opposite to technology. It is the material world we already inhabit, perceive, remember and transform through culture.

The synthetic and the natural therefore remain entangled. Flowers can become architecture. Animal features can become portraits. Water can become a surface, a structure or an image. Artificial materials can behave like living matter. Digital beings can carry physical memories.

SOURCE is a celebration of one beautiful day.

A moment of being present.

A small series of digital image artworks extends SOURCE into a more intimate format, combining shifting portraits with abstract fields of botanical, aquatic and synthetic forms. Dragonflies are the recurring recognizable element, observed through their movement around water, plants and light. Their rapid trajectories become lines, threads and liquid paths running through the compositions, connecting forms that might otherwise remain separate.

The dragonfly also brings a particularly fitting biological transition into the work. Much of its life is spent underwater before it emerges into an aerial form, moving between radically different conditions of existence. In these images, this movement becomes a way of connecting water, vegetation, synthetic materials and the human figure. Natural forms appear as imprints on the portraits, while small glitches and futuristic details place these encounters within the contemporary world of computation and technical images.

The series continues a thread already present in LABORATORIES AND PLAYGROUNDS, earlier bodies of work built around close observation of nature, abstract forms and proto-machines. Those works were developed as high-resolution Blender compositions, and SOURCE extends this visual language through AI image systems trained on elements from those earlier renders.

The resulting images combine observation, construction and transformation. They return to a primal impulse to look closely at the world, but also to what looking does to us. Natural forms leave traces in perception, memory and affect; a dragonfly, a particular plant, the reflection of light on water can remain as an afterimage long after the encounter itself has ended. The synthetic portraits carry these traces forward, turning fragments of observed nature into shifting features, associations and emotional residues. Computation becomes another layer through which these impressions are processed, transformed and returned as images.