Under the Bark

Under the bark is an artis­tic rese­ar­ch pro­ject of para­si­tic insec­ts from the bark beetle family (lat. Ipidae) and mac­hi­ne repro­duc­ti­on of arte­fac­ts found in […]

12 9 – 31 10 2024

Under the bark is an artis­tic rese­ar­ch pro­ject of para­si­tic insec­ts from the bark beetle family (lat. Ipidae) and mac­hi­ne repro­duc­ti­on of arte­fac­ts found in fores­ts thro­ug­ho­ut Croatia, espe­ci­al­ly in the area of ​​Gorski Kotar, Lika and the Croatian islan­ds. By feeding on wood mate­ri­al and tree bark, the para­si­tes leave a mark simi­lar to typo­grap­hi­cal ele­ments that the aut­hor sha­pes into a type of ase­mic han­dwri­ting. By cons­truc­ting a mil­ling and engra­ving mac­hi­ne for wood and metal, the aut­hor engra­ves the grap­hics cre­ated by digi­ti­sing the found bark into modern indus­tri­al wooden panel mate­ri­als such as plywo­od, mela­mi­ne and vene­er. By mac­hi­ne car­ving into wood mate­ri­al and soft metals, the tra­ces dura­bi­lity of such natu­ral arte­fac­ts dete­ri­ora­ti­on is pro­lon­ged, and the com­po­si­ti­on cre­ated by rear­ran­ging and sam­pling the reli­ef for­ms is remi­nis­cent of a long-lost manus­cript. The main idea of ​​this artwork is to pro­du­ce com­pu­ter models from natu­ral sam­ples of gnawed wood that will be repro­du­ced and mate­ri­ali­sed aga­in after pro­ce­ssing, thus clo­sing the cycli­cal acti­on thro­ugh the cir­cle of natu­re-man-tec­h­no­logy wit­hin the con­tem­po­rary artis­tic context.

a: Branimir Štivić

Branimir Štivić (1991) gra­du­ated in New Media from the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts (2021) and in Information and Software Engineering from the Varaždin Faculty of Organisation and Informatics (2015). His artis­tic work invol­ves sound and lig­ht ins­tal­la­ti­ons, audio/visual per­for­man­ces, live film, expan­ded cine­ma per­for­man­ce, pro­gram­ming art, AI and sound for con­tem­po­rary dan­ce per­for­man­ces. He pre­do­mi­nan­tly starts with sound, using tec­h­no­logy and pro­gram­ming codes as the pri­mary medi­um in his recent wor­ks for a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary appro­ach to explo­ring the medi­ality of air, bre­at­hing, wind, pne­uma­tics, soil, LED tec­h­no­logy, the physi­ca­lity of pixels, lost foota­ge, neural syn­t­he­sis, ani­mism, and the vita­lity of objec­ts and mat­ter in the age of the Technosphere and the Anthropocene.