The post-internet utopia never arrived. Instead, we got a destabilising world, full of uncertainty, surveillance, violence and powerlessness. Trust in institutions has collapsed, and the systems that once claimed to safeguard stability now accelerate our descent into chaos.
The Kres 3.0 exhibition examines this collapse through multiple lenses. In the current hyper-capitalist technofeudal world order, the owners of Big Tech act as modern-day feudal lords, while data becomes the new world currency. This unaccountable concentration of power gives rise to networks of dependency, surveillance, extraction and data harvesting, while fuelling violent algorithms designed to extract attention, normalise and push harmful content, and desensitise us to violence and hate. This relentless pursuit of engagement generates slop aesthetics flooding our screens with meaningless AI-generated, brainrot content.
On the other hand, however, impending collapse could allow new tactics to emerge – interventionist practices that hack, disrupt, and repurpose this broken system. By oscillating between analysing certain historical and current situations, forging secret connections, creating strategies of evading reality and fabricating ideas of refusal, the artists in the exhibition refuse to give in to despair or naïve optimism. Instead, they inhabit collapse as a contradictory state, a space where the exhaustion of current systems intertwines with the emergence of new aesthetics, new ways of thinking, and new future imaginaries. In the spirit of a bonfire (kres in Slovenian), we ask not only what burns, but what grows from the ashes.
Kres is an annual exhibition project that focuses on the perspective of a younger generation of digital artists whose world has always been mediated through screens and digital technologies. Using various media – from computer games, interactive websites, and digital graphics to immersive worlds and hybrid environments – they explore current social, environmental, and political issues linked to the impact of technological development and dependency. Visitors are invited to activate each work by plugging in a computer mouse and turning on the screens. Through this deliberate, physical, almost archaic gesture, the project refuses the passive view or frictionless scroll now expected of digital users.
Kres 3.0 offers strategies of hacking, glitching, decomputing, withdrawal, deceleration, degrowth, sabotage, care, and reorganisation. By creating counter-narratives that challenge existing ideologies, the artists encourage visitors to reconsider whether current exploitative systems could be reclaimed and rebuilt on new forms of collectivism that reject extraction in favour of solidarity. Even if the post-internet utopia never arrived, the ruins of a collapsing world still invite us to build anew.
Artists: Beti Frim, Celeste Sanja, Farah Sara Kurnik, Jaka Juhant, knnz, Lana Hasić, Matej Mihevc, Neo Nor, Oddelek za čisto in praktično koncertno arhitekturo Gabra Miroslava III., Oskar Slabe, Tisa Troha & Lea Sande, Uno.Tisto & Jure Sulič, Niko Zelenik
Curators: Dorijan Šiško, Lara Mejač, Sara Bezovšek
Production: Projekt Atol Institute, Mala galerija BS
Thanks to: PiNA – Association for Culture and Education
Technical assistance: Oskar Kandare, Aleksander Tendjer, Valter Udovičić
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and City of Ljubljana
