New Materialisms (Station 3.6)

Project New Materialisms has been a collaboration between grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art and HICA (Highland Institute for Contemporary Art), carried out through multiannual series of exhibitions, performances and lectures. New Materialisms project reflects historically divergent art practices and discursive fields of concrete and conceptual art, as defined in the 1960s. Project tackles understanding of those art practices through the discourse of post-media contemporary approaches to art as well as via post-digital condition of our every day life, whereby digital is interwoven with each aspect of our social being. New Materialisms strives to formulate a dialogue among important authors of concrete and conceptual art and contemporary practitioners who work within the post-media context, while assuming the design of aesthetic experience as a vital mechanism which has its agency in the process of creating the physical world.

Text Trends by Martin Callanan looks at our perception of words and data when displayed in graphical form thus studying the spectacularization of information. The work uses the data about the usage of Google search engine gathered within a four-year period, while reducing that process to some essential elements: searched terms vs. frequency of searched over time are presented in the form of a line graph. Through human perception of words and data, the work encourages the critique of the phenomenon of generating data.

In the untitled work by Goran Trbuljak, which is being at display within the permanent exhibits in Korčula's Town Museum, there is a hand counter which the author counts the visitors with, or, more precisely, the visitors who have been coming to his solo-exhibitions openings since the early 1970s. Those who have come more than once are counted only once. The second work is also without a title. Identical hand counter, but with another figure, one which shows the number of the people who came to his solo shows in 2016. With these works Trbuljak, via for him typical institutional critique, takes part in the questioning of the large quantification of the matters and phenomena in contemporary society from the first person position, which also reflects on the interpretations of the notion of new materialism seen through the optics of different fields that use the same term, but very often with different meanings.

Resonance (The Bell) by Hrvoje Hiršl is an interactive sound installation that problematizes the relationship among an object, space and the audience. The resonant frequency of a pipe, placed on this occasion in St. Peter's church in Korčula in the middle of the room, is 140 Hz. Audio loudspeaker in the centre of the steel pipe continually reproduces a 140Hz tone that stimulates the pipe to vibrate and produce its own tone. Vibrations of the pipe are interacting with the space, causing a sound reflection and changes in tone, depending on the visitor’s position in space. During two months, more than 10000 people interacted with this work.
The composition entitled "Interference" is specifically composed for a sound installation Resonance (Bell), two audio generators (204c hp) and an audio mixer. The piece positions the performer in the role of a catalyst between the audience, object and space. The performer manually regulates sinusoidal frequencies of 110-140 Hz emitted from the object. The tempo of the frequency changes controlled by the performer causes gradual intertwining of sinusoidal waves and the interference in the space of the performance.

The Internet project "The Fine Line H-K-H-F" by Eloi Puig connects four locations, namely HICA (Inverness, Scotland, UK), Grey Area (Korčula, Croatia), Hangar (Barcelona, Spain) and Funchal (Madeira island, Portugal), monitoring weather at each location in real time. The Internet document shows a map of Europe with four locations, from each the line is started to be drawn on the map and develops over a period of two months. Four lines change their properties every day according to the weather report. This process ultimately creates a dynamic drawing generated by the particular climate of each location.Four variations of weather are taken in consideration: sun, clouds, rain and extreme weather, from 9th August to 1st September 2016. Unfortunately, the huge fire that caught Funchal showed the importance of meteorological conditions and their vital impact on people and environment.

Puig's art book Speresaic was made with the experimental software called Roloc, which operates with chromatic code of images, id est analyses an image from the spectre of colours chosen by a user. An image is subsequently converted into stripes of different sizes, depending on the chromatic proportions of an image. An image is being recomposed into vertical stripes of pure colours. Speresaic demonstrates a selection of photography of a location in Barcelona and their repeated recoding via Roloc software. Upon the artist's invitation, the user Ljiljana Bomeštar, who visited Barcelona as a tourist, chose a set of five colours inspired by the location that she visited for the first time. Author then made a series of photo-works of the square that made an impression on the user (Plaza de Sant Pere) and recoded them chromatically.

Series of the portraits by Ivan Marušić Klif's colleagues and friends came to light via a special process. 3D scan of a face is shown on a screen of an analogue oscilloscope, which then directly rays the photo-paper. The oscilloscope was used for the manipulation of raster data, investigating into the nature of a visual signal.