13th Festival of Contemporary and Intermedia Art IZIS: END OF MESSAGE |
October 17 – November 2, 2025, Gallery Loža Koper;
Opening: October 17, 7:00 p.m. |
Artists: Sara Bezovšek and Dorijan Šiško, Sanela Jahić, PlateauResidue + Samo Kutin and Ena Grabjan, Špela Petrič, Maja Smrekar |
Curator: Irena Borić.
Maja Smrekar fotografgija: navedba: SPASM by Maja Smrekar and A/POLITICAL, 3D scan and rendering: FBFX Digital, 2024.
PlateauResidue + Samo Kutin in Enja Grabrijan: Anima Spirare: Eolova harfa, 2025.
Sanela Jahić: Ne umetni inteligenci, Da nefašističnemu aparatu, 2023.
The thirteenth edition of the IZIS Festival explores informational noise and examines the (im)possibilities of communication in the age of communication capitalism. It asks what happens to a message in the mass of post-truths, misinformation, fake news, and the hyperinflation of images and content generated by machines—“bots” or artificial intelligence. Does the message even have a recipient? How, in times of broken and meaningless circulation of information, can we address urgent questions and communicate differently?
The 2025 festival program extends across several venues in Koper – Gallery Loža, Gravisi-Buttorai Palace Gallery, Bastion Fortress, and two standalone containers. This spatially fragmented edition, running from October 17 to November 3, connects various segments of the festival program – intermedia, music, and performance – emphasizing their conceptual interconnectedness.
At Gallery Loža, visitors can see the festival’s central exhibition, End of Message, featuring works by Sara Bezovšek and Dorijan Šiško, Sanela Jahić, PlateauResidue + Samo Kutin and Ena Grabjan, Špela Petrič, and Maja Smrekar. The standard email abbreviation “EOM” (“end of message”), which signals that no reply is expected, here functions as a metaphor for the broken and senseless circulation of information. The space of dialogue becomes blurred by the ever-growing background noise of communication; the exhibition thus addresses different facets of (mis)understanding between human and more-than-human worlds.
Sara Bezovšek and Dorijan Šiško, in their work Black Box, illustrate the ideological and identity-conditioned nature of communication in the digital sphere. The video game format offers insight into a memetic landscape one can navigate only through the choice of various “pills”—except that the choice may not entirely be one’s own. The black box represents a fragment of a system where ideological and identity-based inputs determine output reactions.
In the age of artificial intelligence, a message is no longer necessarily human, nor is a guided conversation necessarily inter-human. Yet, as Sanela Jahić reveals in her video work No to Artificial Intelligence, Yes to the Anti-Fascist Apparatus, the ways AI is used as a technological tool accelerate “a shift toward authoritarianism present within the technology industry itself, in state politics and institutions, and in the rise of far-right political movements.” Thus, AI is not a neutral technology—it is again conditioned by ideological and identity-based power positions.
Maja Smrekar’s photo-performance Spasm depicts her body in a convulsive embrace with a machine. While we observe the sharp contrasts between skin and gleaming metal, we might not realize that we are not looking at the artist herself. Smrekar was scanned by 234 cameras to produce her hyper-detailed digital version. The work is a fragment of a video in progress that addresses themes of death and the illusion of overcoming it through technological means. Highlighting both human and technological uncertainty, the piece reveals how artificial intelligence can hallucinate us.
With a touch of humor, Špela Petrič speculatively explores the possibility of conversation between plants and humans. Starting from an anthropocentric position, she interprets thousands of stomata on a ficus leaf as “mouths,” and their opening and closing are analyzed with the help of a lip-reading expert and artificial intelligence. The absurdity of this interpretation illustrates the limitations of human perspective for such understanding.
The work Anima Spirare, a collaboration between PlateauResidue, Samo Kutin, and Ena Grabjan, addresses the human inability to grasp the message that has always been present in the environment. Anima spirare means “to breathe out,” pointing to an end that is not merely linguistic. The Aeolian harp, whose resonant board is made from a 6,500-year-old fir tree, performs the message of the wind—a message that remains beyond human time and form, one we can only listen to.
Supported by: PiNA, HEKA, Stran22, Municipality of Koper, Ministry of Culture, JSKD – Public Fund of the Republic of Slovenia for Cultural Activities, Coastal Galleries of Piran, Italian Community “Santorio Santorio” Koper, Koper Regional Museum, University of Primorska, Faculty of Education – Visual Arts and Design, KUD Format, STARTS4WATERII, and V2.
Sara Bezovšek, Dorijan Šiško: Črna škatla, 2025.
Špela Petrič, Institut za nezaznavne jezike: branje ustnic, 2025.
END OF MESSAGE
“The most powerful media organizations of the twenty-first century will be thermal. The circulation of images, sounds, videos, and texts will depend on an extensive regime of heating and cooling. Data and networks, like the people they connect, will become increasingly fragile. If it’s too hot or too cold, platforms will collapse. Digital infrastructure—data centers, network hubs, and fiber-optic cables—will drain the planet’s energy to maintain a stable thermal environment—not for people, but for information.”
— Nicole Starosielski, Media Hot and Cold, 2022
The thirteenth edition of the IZIS Festival explores informational noise and the (im)possibilities of communication in the age of communication capitalism. It asks what happens to a message amidst post-truths, misinformation, fake news, the hyperinflation of images, and machine-generated content such as bots or artificial intelligence. How do gossip, advertisements, recommendations, viral videos, private and public footage from war zones, or disaster images affect messages circulating within the same communicative space? Perhaps it depends on whose perspective we adopt.
From a human viewpoint, the content of a message is shaped by cultural, linguistic, and other factors; for machines, it is purely a matter of calculation. In the Shannon–Weaver communication model, background noise contextualizes information, and information requires noise for successful transmission—in other words, without noise, there is no information. Yet, receiving information is not the same as understanding the external world. As artist and writer Trevor Paglen notes, “the gap between what we sense and what we perceive can be filled with all kinds of direct injections and contradictory hallucinations. Reality thus becomes a complex entanglement of the material, the imaginary, the perceptible, and the imperceptible—all of which can be manipulated.”
So what happens to meaning when messages circulate in an environment where, as Paglen writes, “new forms of media produce and persuade, modulate and manipulate, shape worldviews and actions, to make us believe what they want us to believe, and to extract value and influence from us”?
“End of message” (EOM) is a standard marker used in email correspondence to indicate that no reply is expected. Within this year’s IZIS, it becomes a metaphor for broken, meaningless, and interrupted communication, which neither sustains dialogue nor requires a recipient for its existence. The endless proliferation of content that may never reach its recipient illustrates the subordination of communication to economic logic: quantity overwhelms quality. In this mechanical theater, everyone participates—from humans to bots and generative AI—each mimicking the other without knowing who is speaking to whom.
In this hyper-profitable environment, one can sense the rot of the internet’s corpse adapting to the priorities of individual platforms that, in turn, shape digital subjectivity. Thus, even though we are acutely aware of the images and reports of genocide in Palestine, political action to prevent it remains paralyzed—the information simply is. It expects no response. As James Bridle writes in New Dark Age: “Information and violence are entirely and inextricably linked; the technologies designed to control the world accelerate the use of information as a weapon. Although the consequences are visible everywhere, we continue to overvalue information, locking ourselves into recurring cycles of violence, destruction, and death.”
Ironically, because the sphere of data and information operates within the abstract time and space of capital, the material consequences of communication infrastructures threaten the very conditions of life. Access to cheap energy not only presupposes human conflict but also results in a massive carbon footprint, pollution, electronic waste, and raw material extraction. Thus, the “end of message” that the festival addresses also encompasses the material layer that makes the message possible—not the material conditions of producing information, but the diverse human and more-than-human perspectives that unfold different facets of (mis)understanding.
Irena Borić, Curator of IZIS
References:
- James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso, 2018)
- Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um) (Institute of Network Cultures, 2011)
- Trevor Paglen, “Society of the Psyop, Part 2: AI, Mind Control, and Magic,” e-flux Journal, no. 148, Oct. 2024
- Trevor Paglen, “Society of the Psyop, Part 3: Cognition and Chaos,” e-flux Journal, no. 149, Nov. 2024
- Hito Steyerl, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (Verso Books, 2025)
NEW SCHEDULE DURING THE EXHIBITION:
- Monday–Friday: 16.00–20.00
- Saturday and Sunday: 10.00–13.00, 17.00–20.00
GUIDED TOURS:
- 18.10., 11.00, Loža Gallery
- 24.10., 17.00, Loža Gallery
- 31.10., 17.00, Loža Gallery
