ART AND NATURE IN THE HUMAN PERFORMATIVE LOOP OF DIGITAL FRAMING

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17/05/2025

Dr. Vesna Srnic

The project Hologram for plants and students: ADU & ARTHEA & UNISB (*Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb & NGO ARTHEA & University of Slavonski Brod) is presented as a performative event that uses the artistic metalanguage of media art, i.e. digital synesthetic framing with a hologram image, sound and the process of a recorded dance next to a sound-activated plant in the real space of the biosphere.

Back in 2011, the thesis of my doctoral dissertation Electronic media and aesthetics in post-feminist theory was that the aesthetic of media art becomes valuable through the performative, holistic and cybernetic in the domain of the Technosphere.

What is important, the spectacle is not the intention here, because we question whether the artistic event/performance notices us, to paraphrase the painter Paul Klee and media art theorist Žarko Paić (2019) – is there (astonished) biofeedback?

Žižek (2024) in his book Christian Atheism writes about Athings or Non-things as a new materialism of objects without aura, which do not have a discrete language of objects, that they are the real that escapes symbolic and quotes Han: The NON-THING impresses because it does not inform. It is the reverse, mysterious backyard, the ‘subtle beyond’ of the artwork, even its unconscious. It resists the disenchantment of art.

In this sense, our performative project transcends the banality of the spectacle of the Technosphere in a way that, through biofeedback from the audience, scientists, students and artists, and especially the plants, it is self-regulated through the loop of the (cybernetic) system, granting deep spiritual peace and a moment of tranquillity in which, as philosopher Marijan Cipra (1999) would say, Sisyphus’s rolling stone stops.

The lucid David Bowie, an English rock singer, also spoke about the unconscious levels of assimilation and humanization of technology through experimentation in inner worlds, in a famous interview (1999) with an interesting statement on technology (the Internet): … it is an alien lifeform – a technology that is both exciting and terrifying, we would say an area of existential and spiritual transformations that are intensifying.

With this infinite loop of the present, we twist the past and the future, referring to Badiou, and through the performative event of authentic humanity, we contribute to the union in a higher organic unity – that of science and art through love, or to apply the moral code of Cipra (1999) from his Christocentric period to collision with the technology of transhumanism, in which he directs people to the revelation of the dialectical principle of the Apostle Paul in the New Testament: (…) we have been freed from the Law and serve in the newness of the Spirit, and not in the oldness of the letters.