Aphra Tesla & Miha Horvat

Cat-egories of Being

Who is the son, the neighbour, the healer? Who the catalyst, the ghost chaser, or rather the b(l)ind – the tongue and the master of spaces?
Who is the inter-sensorial accelerator, speeding up the flow of remembrance through the network of reality’s transformations? Who draws invisible diagrams of the structures of power, identity, and interspecies being? Who has created a tool for understanding and opening complex questions of power, community, co-temporality?
Who performs a radical remapping of the constructed passages of roles between the dimensions of being?
Who gathers the unspeakable from the edges of the existential in order to create a tool for the deconstruction and reassembly of the world?
Who does not reproduce?Who gazes motionless into the darkness of the cellar slit?
Who is 5, 6, 7 or 4, 3.14?
And who elegantly shi(t)nes?
Who is this intrepid traveller of abstract thought, this network of multiple historicities?
To whom do we open the door into the unnoticed categories of life?
Who is the killer, the lover, and the poet?

Corinna Simonini

Accepting the Territorial Union: The Role of Friulian Autonomy (and the Udine-Trieste/Friuli-Venezia Giulia Binomials) in the Birth of the University of Udine

Manca Koren

Informal employment of domestic care workers in the Border Area between Slovenia and Italy.

Slovenia's western border, the border between present-day Slovenia and Italy, has a long history of change, influenced by different political regimes, ideologies and major historical events that have repeatedly redrawn the border and created new dividing lines. The border divides two countries, two cultures, two political regimes and two welfare states. Despite these changes and divisions, the space remains connected. The long continuity of crossing borders and seeking new opportunities is an almost traditional feature of this space. This is also the case for domestic care workers, who find new job opportunities on the Italian side of the border that they cross regularly and frequently. In this presentation, I examine the phenomenon of informal employment among domestic care workers operating in the Slovenian–Italian border region who provide care for the elderly. The analysis explores the functioning of the welfare state, the organization of social services, and the emergence of an informal labour market in the field of elder care, alongside the specific forms of cross-border labour mobility that have developed in this context. Particular attention is devoted to the mechanisms and dynamics that structure the relationships between families and domestic care workers.

Giulia Bandini and Roberto Tartaglia

The Exhibition “Global Baroque. The World in Rome in the Age of Bernini”

The exhibition Global Baroque. The World in Rome in the Age of Bernini, hosted at the Scuderie del Quirinale and concluded on July 13, 2025, represented a major curatorial project on transcultural dialogue and artistic globalization in Baroque Rome.Organized in collaboration with the Galleria Borghese and leading national and international museum institutions, the exhibition reconstructed the cosmopolitan character of seventeenth-century Rome — the epicenter of cultural, religious, and diplomatic exchanges among Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia.Through works by masters such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Pietro da Cortona, and Nicolas Poussin, the exhibition explored Rome’s global connections, illustrating how missionaries, artists, ambassadors, and travelers contributed to a plural vision of the world.The curatorial design offered an innovative narrative on identity, otherness, and cultural hybridity, portraying Rome as a city capable of welcoming, transforming, and disseminating artistic and spiritual experiences from every corner of the globe.In doing so, the exhibition provided new interpretative tools for understanding the Baroque as a global phenomenon and Rome as the central node of an intercontinental network of exchange and vision.

Nik Obid

The National Identity of Slovenian Emigrants in the Context of Everyday Life Practices

This paper focuses on examining the national identity of contemporary Slovenian emigrants in selected European countries. Since an individual's national identity is closely linked to its daily reproduction or change, my doctoral research deals with everyday life contexts. In the first part of the presentation, I will focus on presenting contemporary emigration from Slovenia to various European countries, presenting the most common destinations and migration dynamics. In doing so, I will pay particular attention to the differences between emigration in the past and in the present. Due to the individualized nature of contemporary migration, I will present various ways of studying the effects on an individual's stay in a foreign environment, changes in their national identity, and their relationship to the country of immigration. In doing so, I will highlight the importance of sociological theories of structuration, forms of (cultural) capital, and everyday nationalism, through which I will attempt to explore the macro, meso, and micro influences of the foreign environment on national identity.

Cecile Sandten

Postcolonial Cities on Screen: Heterotopic Border Spaces, Diasporic (Un)Belonging, and Cinematic Experimentation

As contested spaces, metropolises are sites where borders, identities, and migration processes are constantly negotiated, and film provides a testing ground for exploring these dynamics. This paper examines how postcolonial urban cinema portrays the metropolis as a heterotopic border space where diasporic identities are continuously reconfigured through encounters, exclusions, and everyday practices (de Certeau). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, Marian Nebelin and Cecile Sandten’s notion of ‘palimpsestic spaces’ and AbdouMaliq Simone’s account of improvisational urban practices and ‘cityness’, the analysis emphasises how cinematic narratives represent borders not as fixed lines but as fluid thresholds of both possibility and constraint.
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The discussion focuses on Peter Chan’s Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) and Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002). Both films situate migrant protagonists within metropolitan contexts – Hong Kong and London – where urban life unfolds through precarious negotiations of legality and illegality, visibility and invisibility, and assimilation and cultural memory. In Comrades, diasporic aspirations intersect with gendered labour, financial insecurity, and social vulnerability, while Dirty Pretty Things depicts London (the space of the hotel) as a contested heterotopia in which established and newly arrived migrant communities confront one another, producing layered and (gendered) forms of othering and exclusion.

Combining close film analysis with urban sociology, postcolonial theory, and migration studies (“cruel optimism”, Berlant), the paper demonstrates how postcolonial metropolises function as laboratories for methodological reflection, experimental narrative strategies, and nuanced understanding of diasporic experience. By foregrounding borders as material and symbolic thresholds, the paper contributes to inter- and transdisciplinary debates on urban border spaces, highlighting how cinematic experimentation reveals the aesthetic and productive tensions of metropolitan life, negotiation, and hybrid identities.

Nayari Castillo

Simultaneous Arrivals - Embodying Artistic Research

Nayari Castillo, together with Hanns Holger Rutz, is co-principal investigator of the project “Simultaneous Arrivals – simularr.” Financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) within its Artistic Research Framework (PEEK), simularr proposes a novel mode of collaborative artistic practice based on simultaneity and spatiality. Both concepts serve as ‘basic’ or ‘boundary’ ideas that complementarily guide multidisciplinary artists working together – preserving diversity and individuality within the group while uniting the process as a whole. The project is a collaboration between the Gustav Mahler Private University of Music (GMPU) Klagenfurt, and the IRG at Graz University of Technology, Austria. In this lecture, Castillo presents her perspective on the project while showcasing several of her artistic crystallizations developed during the research span of simularr: “Spells for Shapeshifting,” “Shrine to the Goddesses of Transformation,” and “The Empathetic Wishing Tumulus.” Castillo will focus on perception, embodied research, magic, and posthuman knowledge.

Jatun Risba

De-generative Art and the Inner Rivers of Consciousness 

Degenerate art has historically engaged with the fluidity of gender roles and the blurring of fiction and reality. Periods of rising authoritarianism and autocratic regimes often see the reassertion of rigid gender norms and the repression of material, formal, and social “messiness.” In this context, the use of nakedness, bodily fluids, and biofiction in artistic practice creates and sustains spaces of ambiguity, porosity, leakiness, and generative change. Crucially, it foregrounds vulnerability as a central value within the nexus of cultural life and political imagination, emphasizing that vulnerability is our greatest measure of courage, and that without it, no genuine growth or healing is possible.

Juan Duarte Regino

Resonant Atmospheres

Building on my artistic research “Weather attunement as ecological engagement,” and drawing from previous installations across the Nordic-Baltic region, this project proposes a new paradigm for environmental engagement through artistic practice with media instruments.

Weather, often dismissed as trivial conversation, opens vast territories of inquiry spanning perception, listening, meteorology, media theory, and ecological thinking. These fields have been extensively explored in recent geo-humanities, sound studies, and artistic research.As climate change becomes increasingly complex and difficult to predict, we need new ways to understand and connect with it. This project aims to create artistic experiences that make weather approachable through attunement – the ability to perceive it simultaneously as a meteorological phenomenon and an embodied aesthetic experience.

“Resonant Atmospheres” explores ways of sensing weather through sensory infrastructures, drawing on ancestral knowledge associated with animism and meteorological divination.

Chiara Roccatello

The origins of digital animation in Italy: programming at the crossroads of art, industry and science

Since the 1960s, the concept of programming has emerged as a key term capable of crossing disciplinary boundaries, from computer science to art, from industrial design to aesthetic theory. In Italy, the exhibition Arte Programmata (Milan, 1962), promoted by Bruno Munari and theorized by Umberto Eco, represents one of the first attempts to translate the language of calculation and systemic variability into an aesthetic experience. At the same time, the industrial experience of Olivetti, active in developing electronic machines and supporting visual culture, created fertile ground for the encounter between technological experimentation and artistic creativity (Lagonigro, 2020). Yet, critical reflection on this intersection has remained marginal within the broader history of animation and digital imagery, which would later inherit the notion of visual programming as an operative principle (Grandi, 2014). This contribution reinterprets the historical and theoretical debate around the notion of programming in light of the emergence of digital animation. The goal is to relate Munari’s theory of the “opera programmata/programmed work”) (Meneguzzo et al., 2012) and Eco’s theory of the “opera aperta/open work” (Eco, 1984) to the later production chain of the animation industry, identifying conceptual correspondences between the analog practice of kinetic art and the algorithmic logic of early digital studios. The research combines a historical-critical and comparative approach, drawing on catalogues and interviews by Arte Programmata artists, integrated with a theoretical reading of Munari’s and Eco’s writings. These materials are compared with literature on computer animation and graphical programming practices (Bendazzi, 2017). The study shows how the concept of programming developed in 1960s Italy anticipated, both theoretically and aesthetically, the operative logics of digital animation, from procedural generation to interactivity, from the dialectic between chance and control to the overcoming of individual authorship toward collective creative systems.

Tery Žeželj & Darko Ilin

Borders Crossing with Zines: Queer Print Cultures in Slovenia

This contribution looks at cross-border communication through the world of queer zines and magazines that appeared in Slovenia during the final years of socialism and the first years after its collapse. We start with Viks, Gayzine, Revolver, and Kekec, publications that were established during the rise of nationalism and the transition from socialist to capitalist society. Rooted in local activist and literary circles, they were at the same time in constant dialogue with different kinds of borders. On one level, they blurred the usual boundaries between media: fiction sat next to reportage, translations, gossip columns, visual art, and activist appeals, making queer communication unfold in hybrid, experimental forms. On another, they opened Slovenia to wider conversations, introducing translations of international queer writers and debates, while also pushing local voices into transnational circulation. We will also consider how these publications addressed the material crossings of the Italian–Slovene border, a space of exchange but also of tension, and ask how queer subjectivities negotiated questions of mobility, identity, and visibility in that context. Reading these zines across genres, languages, and national borders, the paper argues that they should not be seen simply as ephemeral or subcultural artifacts, but as tools of mediation that unsettled cultural isolation, fostered queer world-making, and redefined what it meant to belong in a time of political and social.

Giacomo Vidoni

Where the Set Ends: Rethinking the Boundary in Virtual Production.

This paper investigates how Virtual Production (VP) reshapes the notion of the boundary in contemporary film production and set design. Drawing on digital media theory (Manovich 2001), (Manovich, L., & Arielli, E. 2024), performative aesthetics (Fischer-Lichte 2008), and the concept of the processual image (Denson 2020), this contribution proposes the idea of an aesthetics of the threshold: a framework in which the distinction between production and post-production becomes a dynamic field of co-creation intersecting the physical and virtual dimensions. By focusing on two case studies in Italian contemporary audiovisual production — The Opera (Showlab/Rai Cinema, 2024) and M. Son of the Century (Sky Studios, 2024) — the study highlights how VP redefines stage-crafting practices (Lo Brutto 2021) and spatial perception, creating an (invisible) boundary-space where techniques, performance, and processes of image-construction converge in real time.

Gioia Zurlo

Amateur Geographies: For a Liminal History

Nika Bronič

Cities, Citizens and Non–humans Toward Nbs Urban Management Models

This research investigates the evolving relationship between humans, non-human species, and urban environments, with a particular focus on how co-creation tools can foster the adoption of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in local governance and planning processes.The methodological framework is structured around three core components: (1) the development of co-creation methodologies, (2) the formulation of co-design cycle protocols, and (3) localized participatory approaches. The research aims to generate tested protocols for the renaturing of urban spaces through NbS, drawing on mixed-methods data both on a qualitative versus quantitative and participatory versus non-participatory horizons. Through the use of participatory and non-participatory methods, collaborative decision-making instruments, and models of horizontal governance, case-study cities will co-develop site-specific solutions and transferable protocols applicable across diverse European contexts. The selected cases represent a range of climate conditions, ecological challenges, and local governance models.

At its core, this research explores the co-design of urban spaces for—and in collaboration with—non-human populations. This represents a paradigm shift in urban green space strategies: from anthropocentric planning toward a multi species approach that supports the coexistence and wellbeing of all urban life forms.

Shintaro Miyazaki

Computation for All by All or About Becoming Common and Unnoble

The world is facing multiple crises that demand new modes of living together – humans, machines, and environments intertwined as an ever-becoming network of resonating realities. Endosymbiotic computation is one such vision: computers, organisms, and technologies operate as a cooperative, self-sustaining system organized around the directive to follow the living and the collectives of the smallest units. Life generates order and structure through energy and metabolism, while simultaneously dissipating matter-energy in flux. Life is not about hoarding or accumulating resources for too long. Endosymbiosis once led to an abundance of energy, as in the merger of proto-mitochondria with larger cells that produced eukaryotic unicellular organisms. Only after this event, roughly two billion years ago, could more complex unicellular and multicellular forms emerge. The keynote will outline the principles involved, how they respond to current issues, and how revisiting European theories from the 1970s and 1980s – despite their middled-age-white-male origin – may help us move beyond our toxic traditions toward shared responsibility and a collectively programmed survival machine.

Roberto Trotta

Beyond the Algorithm: The role of humanities in an AI-dominated future

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming every aspect of our lives, from the way we do science to how we interact with one another, and even our very sense of self in relation to an “otherness” of chatbots. If the immense potential of AI is to be shared for the benefit of all humanity, we will need to integrate the perspective of the humanities into the design of the AI-dominated future we wish to inhabit. To enable this, opportunities for cross-disciplinary discussion and pollination of ideas are urgent and necessary. I will show how SISSA’s Interdisciplinary Lab aims to create a space where science, the humanities, and the arts engage in dialogue with each other and with society to imagine, inspire, and shape a shared future.

Marino Jurcan

Remix of Identity (Remiks identiteta) 

"Remix of Identity" (Remiks identiteta) is an ongoing media-artistic project initiated by Metamedij Association (Pula, Croatia) in 2015. It focuses on reinterpreting intangible heritage through remix culture, participatory audio workshops, and youth engagement.

The program includes an open call for musicians, mentoring, live field recordings, collaborative production, and the release of albums featuring reinterpretations of dvoglasje tijesnih intervala (narrow-interval two-part singing, UNESCO Representative List), endangered languages such as Istro-Romanian (Vlaški/Žejanski), and the musical heritage of national minorities (Roma, Bosniaks, Italians, Hungarians, Montenegrins, etc.).By combining ethnomusicology with contemporary sound practices (live sampling, VJing, electromagnetic sound mapping), the project connects generations and communities across cultural, linguistic, and territorial lines. Based in the Istrian Peninsula – a contact zone between Romance, Germanic, and Balkan cultures – it reflects on shared heritage and future coexistence. Final outcomes include both digital and physical music releases, visual design, and public showcases. Remix becomes a tool for cultural sustainability, experimentation, and translocal dialogue.

Jurij Krpan

TBA

Felix Deufel

Sound, Ecology, and the Sonic Dimension 

In this talk, sound artist and researcher Felix Deufel introduces his artistic practice at the intersection of sound, environment, and science. He will present his work on spatial audio technologies developed at Not a Number Studio and the Centre for Immersive Media Art, Music and Technology (ZiMMT), which he co-founded in 2020. Deufel is premiering his new multisensory project Fracture Zone at Pixxelpoint 2025, which investigates processes of ecological destruction driven by human impact on Earth’s ecosystems. Focusing on the bark beetle – an insect amplified by climate change that devastates forests worldwide – the work reveals the otherwise inaudible sounds of feeding and burrowing, transforming them into an immersive multisensory experience of sound and scent. By listening into this microscopic world of destruction and regeneration, Fracture Zone invites reflection on the fragile relationship between human and non-human life and the rhythms of transformation shaping our planet.

Hanns Holger Rutz

Simultaneous Arrivals – On Vibrational Inscriptions

Hanns Holger Rutz, together with Nayari Castillo, is co-principal investigator of the project “Simultaneous Arrivals – simularr.” Financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) within its Artistic Research Framework (PEEK), simularr introduces a novel mode of collaborative artistic practice grounded in simultaneity and spatiality. These concepts function as ‘basic’ or ‘boundary’ ideas that guide multidisciplinary artists working collectively – fostering diversity and individuality while connecting the process into a cohesive whole. The project is a collaboration between the Gustav Mahler Private University of Music (GMPU) Klagenfurt, and the IRG at Graz University of Technology, Austria. In this lecture, Rutz shares his insights into the project and focuses on a series of sound and intermedia crystallisations developed under the title “Reticules”. Rutz’s presentation focuses on sound, materiality, and experimentation. In the final minutes, Rutz invites Castillo to briefly present “Assembly of Rogues.”

Mauricio Valdes

KUBER, Experiential Spatial Audio Unit 

As curator and head of R&D at HEKA Lab, I will present our current approach to spatial audio research and creations, emphasizing the stance towards diversity, both sound creation and spatial rendering. We actively develop user-centric solutions that reach beyond conventional multichannel arrays, including prototype multi-driver headphones and tangible controllers to explore gestural interaction with immersive sound environments.The contributions we have made towards software (i.e. Hyperspace) and hardware (I.e. DodekaOTTO) and development projects focus on interoperability and creative flexibility, exploring the existing encoding and decoding tools across diverse industry standards – Ambisonics, Wave Field Synthesis, Sony 360, Dolby Atmos, MPEG-H, THX Immersive, and other emerging formats. 

HEKA Lab keeps the inclusion of whatever tools aimed to enhance creative exploration, bridging artistic, technical, and user-driven domains in spatial audio without subscribing our production to any style or aesthetics in particular.

Elisabetta Tola

Turning Data into Memory

At Facta, we explore how data, satellite imagery, and scientific photographs can become narrative instruments to investigate the world and make it intelligible. Our journalism is not, obviously, an artistic practice, yet it often borrows from art its visual grammar and emotional resonance. In Swampower, a data-driven scrollytelling project on European wetlands, we used maps, satellite views, and field stories to show how fragile ecosystems store energy and memory. In Green to Grey, a cross-border investigation involving 41 journalists from 11 countries, we used an algorithm analysing thousands of satellite images to measure the loss of nature across Europe — from roads and resorts to residential developments. Our story focused on Lake Garda, where construction has reshaped the landscape and its ecological balance. Through these projects, we seek to turn evidence into experience, showing that journalism and art, while distinct, may share a common pursuit: to make people care about what they come to know.

Andreja Gomboc

Who are we?

In the last centuries, humanity has made a huge progress in understanding the Universe and Earth's insignificance in the cosmic vastness. Yet, even today, as scientific research and advancement of technology enable us to discover thousands of planets orbiting other stars and look for biomarkers in their atmospheres, humanity remains deeply stuck in its anthropocentric mindframe. While we ignore that Earth has physical limits and that our actions are causing global warming and extinction of species, we make plans to expand the usage of nearby space orbits, mine asteroids, and colonise and exploit the Moon, Mars and space beyond. Who are we, one of many species floating, as Carl Sagan said, “on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”? What is our future?

Sybille Neumeier

Sensing multiplicities – Towards more-than-human atmospheres

Sybille Neumeyer presents from her artistic research in the field of more-than-human atmospheres, climate literacies, ecological sensing and grounding meteorologies. Her interest are methods and interfaces that enable imaginations of a dialogue between scales, between remote and bodily sensing, bridging perspectives of planetary and local conditions She will be presenting her recent art-science projects “Grounding BiosphereX” – a BioArt installation amplifying the planetary agency and circular existence of microbial entities – and the “Almanac for Alternating Atmospheres” – a speculative cultural tool and interface for knowledge exchange in the era of climate crisis. By investigating shifts in cultivation and migration of plants due to climate impact. The multimedia almanac aims to facilitate connections between generations, regions, traditions and local ecological knowledges. With these projects, the artist fathoms potentials and limits of data-driven observation, of the view from above and below, as well as notions of prediction.

IP GROUP

Sensing multiplicities – Towards more-than-human atmospheres

In our presentation, we focus on IP Group’s recent projects, exploring how human perception functions when our senses are subjected to sonic and visual experimentation. By observing the unfolding of waveforms over time or the illusions created by mirrors, we shape a perception-oriented, light-driven dramaturgy of objects and forms within a given space, allowing phenomena at the threshold of our cognitive capacities to gradually emerge. By subverting conventional uses of media tools, sound becomes a generator of visual animation, metal plates serve as speakers, and vibrations become tangible – inaudible frequencies manifest as physical, visual, and spatial phenomena. During IP Group’s talk, we will present several video documentations of recent kinetic Sculptures – centered on vibrations, low frequencies, and resonance – to illustrate a multidimensional strategy for re-engaging with the environment. We will also discuss our creative process of transforming the sensorium, reshaping how we perceive our immediate surroundings, and expanding perceptual experience without relying on complex code or advanced technological tools.