Sara Bezovšek & Dorijan Šiško, Black Box
Our gallery programme continues with How Do You Cope?, an exhibition by Slovenian artists Sara Bezovšek and Dorijan Šiško. The exhibition will open on Thursday, 19 February at 7 pm at the Filodrammatica Gallery, where it will be on view until 12 March
Gallery opening hours:
Monday – Friday 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. | 5 – 8 p.m.
Saturday 5 – 8 p.m.
– closed on Sundays and public holidays
Sara Bezovšek, www.s-n-d.si, screenshot
The exhibition brings together three works that explore how contemporary political subjectivities, relationships to the future, and collective fears are shaped within algorithmically mediated environments. Moving between video games and film, the works approach digital culture not as a neutral technological backdrop, but as an active system of orientation that shapes identities, structures imaginaries of the future, and aestheticizes crisis.
At the centre of the exhibition is Black Box, a collaborative work by Sara Bezovšek and Dorijan Šiško, which takes the form of a video game to expose the logic of algorithmic selection by turning it into an environment open to exploration. Players navigate a recommender system that mirrors the ways in which online platforms fragment often radical political positions into aestheticized, niche identities. Ideology thus does not appear as a stable set of beliefs; instead, political subjectivities are assembled through memes and filtered information drawn from inexhaustible databases, continuously recombined and performed across platforms. By inviting players to move through algorithmic systems, Black Box visualizes the black-box mechanisms through which online culture produces worldviews, transforming identity into a modular, memetic construct.
Black box, excerpts from the video game
This concern with orientation and choice continues in Šiško’s solo work The Core, which shifts the focus from identity formation to the question of the future. Also structured as a video game, The Core places the player inside an abstract labyrinth navigated through a speculative, almost mystical interface resembling a crystal ball. Here, decision-making becomes a metaphor for accelerationist imaginaries of the future. Each choice opens a new trajectory while simultaneously closing off others. Yet the promised destination – the very centre – ultimately reveals the emptiness of teleological thinking. The future, the work suggests, is less a concrete horizon than a projection generated by the very systems we follow.
The Core, photo: Domen Pal / Aksioma
Bezovšek’s solo film www.s-n-d.si extends these questions into the realm of collective imagination and catastrophe. Constructed as a collage, the film creates an apocalyptic narrative assembled from online materials and disaster cinema. Pandemics, ecological collapse, alien invasions, and nuclear explosions unfold through memes, GIFs, short clips, and digital remnants. By adopting familiar cinematic tropes and overwhelming the viewer with excessive visual stimuli, the work reflects how crisis is consumed, aestheticized, and normalized. Apocalypse does not appear as a singular event, but as a recurring genre—endlessly replayed, shared, and memefied—mirroring an attention economy that thrives on permanent crisis.
www.s-n-d.si, screenshot
Together, these three works trace a continuum from the algorithmic present to speculative futures and imagined endings. They reveal how digital infrastructures do not merely mediate reality but actively produce modes of perception, belief, and expectation. The exhibition advocates the use of immersion, navigation, and choice as critical tools, inviting viewers and players to reflect on how their own positions are shaped by the hidden logics of algorithmic systems that condition how we imagine who we are, what is coming, and how it might all end.
MORE ABOUT THE WORKS:
Black Box
Black Box is a manifestation of total algorithmically driven curation, encapsulated in the form of a video game. The intermedia installation codes between the physical and virtual realm, tasking players with exploring the inner workings of a deconstructed recommender system that forms, facilitates and amplifies online identities. In a political environment where the overton window is drastically shifting, the complex relations of different ideologies and identity positions can be difficult to fully grasp. The inherent ability of capital to immediately co-opt any radical thought, politics or cultural expression and encode it in its own axiomatics generates fragmented and niche political identities that generally express their ideological beliefs through aesthetic forms [1]. These are often personalized or augmented individual mods downloaded and installed from the massive library of the database. The database as a model of cultural production and consumption imposes ceaseless recombination, memeing, parodying and remixing of content aggregated and obsessively organized in online threads and wikis [2].
Faced with the influx of paradoxical belief systems in a digital economy of post-truth, a turn towards aesthetics is the only sensible one [3]. If every online interaction is purely performative and post-ironic, memes become the fundamental carriers of meaning, assembled through iconology, propagated by online echo chambers and harnessed as function [4]. Black Box is a project deeply rooted in these online communities and memetic dialects, often appearing as if to be in direct conversation with them. It carefully and precisely maps out the current online aesthetic ecosystem and lets the player roam free, learning about and engaging with different distinct types of character builds that algorithmic culture imposes upon our IRL selves. The player will chart out this dense memetic landscape by feeding themselves to different filter bubbles and interacting with diverging pills, creating an aesthetic representation of their internet-mediated worldview. Based on their decisions, interests and exploration the player will be awarded their own custom wojak – a quintessential symbol of the slowly dying deep vernacular web. Black Box is thus a critical, faithful and attentive look into the workings of aesthetic dimensions and manifestations of the online contemporary.
[1] Citerella, J. (2022). Politigram & the Post–left. [→]
[2] Azuma, H. (2009). Otaku: Japan’s database animals.. University of Minnesota Press.
[3] Aemmonia, & Xleepyfey. (2024). The Xenofeminist hauntology. In 0nty & Smith (Eds.), Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde.
[4] Whistler, T. (2023). Internet Core. Do Not Research. [→]
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Authors: Sara Bezovšek, Dorijan Šiško
Author of the text: Lea Sande
Development: Esben Holk
Music and sound design: ascyth
Additional 3D design: Jaka Juhant
Production of installation boxes: Matic Gselman
Financial support: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
The Core
The Core is a video game in which players navigate through an abstract labyrinth that articulates various notions relating to the visual imaginaries of the future. The players enter the game through a speculative interface resembling a crystal ball, with which they try to steer their way to the looming core of the maze. The path presents the players with crossroads that lead to different accelerationist routes towards divergent visions of potential worlds to come.
Grappling the uncertainty of what lies ahead, players must make choices that determine the course of their journey as alternative paths emerge to create new trajectories to futurity predicated on past decisions. When, and if, the players finally reach the core, the idea of a pursued future becomes demystified, unveiled as a mere representation awaiting the conclusion of an imaginary journey.
www.s-n-d.si
www.s-n-d.si is a film inspired by various apocalyptic scenarios that imagine the end of the world as we know it. It collages visual material found online – short videos, memes, photographs, GIFs, emoticons, and various external links – with original works to create a complex, visually saturated narrative. Following familiar Hollywood disaster-film premises, the film guides the viewer from an initial idyllic state through scenes of natural disasters, global pandemics, alien invasions, nuclear explosions, meteorite impacts, and other horrifying situations.
☛ Galerija Filodrammatica, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka
EXHIBITION OPENING:
Thursday, February 19, at 7 PM
GALLERY OPENING HOURS:
Monday – Friday 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. | 5 – 8 p.m.
Saturday 5 – 8 p.m.
(closed on Sundays and public holidays; contact us to arrange another time of your visit)
SARA BEZOVŠEK
DORIJAN ŠIŠKO
Sara Bezovšek is a visual artist working in the fields of internet art, experimental film and graphic design. Her artistic practice is characterized by reappropriation of online and pop cultural materials. Using a dense visual language of references, she taps into the collective imaginarium and constructs engaging narratives that are both a critique and a celebration of the highly saturated online media landscapes we navigate daily.
Dorijan Šiško is an intermedia artist and graphic designer whose practice spans the fields of video games, experimental interfaces, spatial installations, 3D graphics, and digital art. In his practice he explores speculative, post-digital, post-internet, experimental, and critical aspects of art and design. By creating virtual visual-theoretical worlds, his works explore themes such as fringe digital culture, parallel realities, the dark side of the internet, alternative futures of humanity, and post-truth.
(photo: Fenja Cambeis)
