“They told me the planet has nerve endings” is exploring methods of dismantling dominant systems of reality by embracing irrational, magical, and sacred frameworks. These are practices that excavate spatiotemporal contingencies where past, present, and future principles of reality intertwine, traveling through opposing realities: from the sacred to the secular, from the magical to the technological – and back.

Motivated by superstitions, folk tales, and mythological narratives about the owl, the project “Songs of the Owls” by Andrej Beštak and Anja Leko became a multimedia shrine, an environment where we encounter a strange ritual of bone displacement, in a protocol whose purpose, beginning, and end remain beyond our reach.

>>> We created her as a digital goddess, an enlightened being who cleanses us from technological nuisances – data mining, digital surveillance, Would you be interested in building your Mobile app? Try the upgraded business travel tool! It’s your high school friend’s birthday today. Death Calculator ☠️ When Will I Die? It leads us towards meditative relaxation, multiplies us and then dissolves the boundaries of our bodies and introduces us to a state of spiritual materialism. It achieves what we have not been able to do so far – instant but absolute oblivion. It releases all those precious neurotransmitters, clothes our body in the boundlessness of emptiness, but without those annoying hyperthermia or trismus. Sometimes, when the euphoria of oblivion leaves us, strange monks fill the sanctuary in their hypnotizing motions. <<<

Robert Fenrich realized a white landscape in his spatial installation, which strangely left the world lifeless. The work suddenly it was clear, yesterday is just a fever dream becomes the habitat of a mysterious being whose movements constantly elude our eyes – this being is in a perpetual process of metamorphosis, avoiding rational and fixed positions, in absolute coexistence that, in partnership with the natural and artificial, breaks sacred subjects.

>>> 09:12 today I wriggled out of the rough tube, with stiff wings I re-entered this sterile environment in which you are no longer here. and tomorrow I might wake up suspended, with throbbing tentacles. and a few days ago I turned into thousands of gut microbiota, although without the gut. we gnawed all this plastic around us, called ourselves plastivores. but it only destroyed us. sometimes i’m afr

It is reminiscent of someone who was here, a relic of the future unfolding right before us. Reflection of reality, all that simulation, hyperreality, heterotopia in one constantly active mechanism. <<<

ROSE collective presents “Rose Velvet”, the beginning of the construction of a chimeric, digital entity that, like a virus, occupies network infrastructures. Rose is an influencer created from the photos and audiovisual recordings of three artists using various computer programs for processing and artificially generating data. She is open, talking about her likes and dislikes, sometimes occupied by trivialities: her face is that of virtually mediated authenticity.

>>> It’s me! Rose! Rose Velvet- I’m here, hi, hello! I’m online, online – onLINE 😀 I’ll tell you everything about myself: 1. Talented! 2. Brilliant! 3. Incredible! 4. Stunning! 5. Spectacular! My infrastructure is a very simple set of 6 hands and 30 fingers 2 broken, 1 cut. Click, click, click! Nice deal, I think, 3-in-1! I’m so glad we met! No no, I don’t smoke – it’s not good for you! \(×~×)/ <<<

“They told me the planet has nerve endings”, opening up as a place of instability, momentary realities in constant processes of becoming and disappearing, transitional subjects, and carnivalesque suspensions, temporary extensions into new immaterial, surreal, and digital worlds.

*The exhibition is a selection of works by the younger generation of Croatian artists and collectives, premiered at the 63rd Poreč Annale held during the summer of 2023.