[spectre] H2O Interface / exhibition / Media Mediterranea 27 festival

[Darko Fritz]

H2O Interface

Media Mediterranea 27


artists: Leah Barclay, Karla Brunet, Nigel Helyer, Toni Meštrović, Dijana Protić, Robertina Šebjanič, Entangled Others (Sofia Crespo & Feileacan McCormick)
 
curator: Darko Fritz


Exhibition
28th June - 6th July 2025
Galerija NOVO
Pula, Croatia

Video program
26th June 2025
Malo rimsko kazalište
Pula, Croatia


 
Media Mediterranea 27 festival program:
https://metamedia.hr/en/media-mediterranea-27-2/



H2O Interface

“Dip your finger into the sea, and you are connected to the whole world”
(a saying of unknown origin, also used in Croatia)
 

The Media Mediterranea 27 festival, titled H2O Interface, presents artistic works that question the role of water on planet Earth, its interfaces, and the interaction of all entities. The project examines the relationships between water and diverse groups of living organisms—including humans, animals, fungi, plants, viruses, and others—aiming to expand the vocabulary of networks of living organisms and objects in complex relationships within the post-digital paradigm. In this paradigm, technology is interwoven with nearly every aspect of the contemporary world while still maintaining its connection to nature. The project explores the intertwined fields of natural processes, technology, and social interactions across a broad spectrum of interests, including biology, zoology, physics, chemistry, growth processes, network cultures, sonification and data visualization, real-time data transfer, and more.

Humans, composed of approximately 70% water, live on a planet where 71% of the surface is covered by water. Freshwater accounts for only 2.75% of all water on Earth, with the majority—2.14%—stored in polar ice caps, while 0.61% exists as groundwater. The remaining freshwater is found in lakes, soil, the atmosphere, and rivers.

How do living beings—plants, animals, and humans—as well as the inorganic world interact with water in all its forms and aggregate states?

What are the interfaces through which the ever-changing forms of water communicate with other material entities?

What relationships and interfaces emerge through human economies—such as fishing, piracy, smuggling of goods and people, tourism—and, furthermore, for the energy needs of all other actors of the Anthropocene?

How do human-made products, water supply infrastructures, underwater data transmission cables, fishing nets and traps, hydroelectric plants, beaches, lighthouses, and other artifacts impact the broader Anthropocene?

Unlike many contemporary artworks in which metaphorical reflection on a chosen theme is the sole content of the work, the selected artistic pieces in this project aesthetically reflect the processes occurring in our environment by incorporating the processes themselves or their precise representations through the use of scientific data as artistic material. These works employ innovative technological methods of data processing, sometimes in real time, forming new aesthetic and cognitive wholes. All participants of the Anthropocene are connected through sound—one of the rare manifestations of the material world that exists perpetually in a physical sense. Thus, particular attention is given to sound in visual works, sound art, and acoustic ecologies.

Commenting on the distorted dichotomy between culture and nature, Bruno Latour in 1989 urges that we—as humans—must rethink our perspectives to conceive a “Parliament of Things,” where natural and social phenomena, along with the discourses surrounding them, are not seen as separate objects studied by specialists but as hybrids made and examined through public interaction between things and concepts. Following Latour’s ideas, we can imagine the possibility of conceptualizing larger networks where non-human actors transcend predefined proportions, appearing as rendered entities through the act of observation, within the very processes of which they are a part.

Darko Fritz