GIF on screen.

The piece was done for the 19th Media Mediterrane festival in Croatia. 
Installation consists of a screen depicting a GIF of infinite loop. The GIF is a manipulation of a diorama photograph of Homo erectus trying to start a fire representing the earliest human species that is known to have controlled fire (The National Museum of Mongolian History). The photograph is manipulated in a way by adding two vector drawn clothing pieces that appear and disappear in an infinite loop. Symbolics and realisation of the piece have multiple meanings. First of all, reacting to the theme  of the competition Digital romance, the artist searches for something that is not changing, something that is still, no matter the enviroment and progress, and he is placing it in today’s society in which proliferation and the fast pace of idea changes are constant. Neither one is truly original, neither are new but are versions of the old ones. Impatience with the ‘now’ and  the evolutionary difficulties of human kind to cope with technological advances are almost pathological. By putting the element of fire in the first perspective of the work, the artist reflects on something  that does not change and that is always in the same physical form. The discovery and the control of fire is considered a turning point in a cultural aspect of human evolution. 'New’ ideas are also presented in this way, as they are often 'turning’ points in everyday life. People are constantly forced to change and adapt to new ideas. Everything has to be new and different up to the point that everything is the same! The diorama photograph also reflects the evolutionary aspect of human kind which brings attention to the existential anxiety that accompanies the difficulties of adapting to the internet era making people less aware of the world around them and images the mentally store. With the manipulation of the clothing pieces (shirt and pants), the artist puts in relation the 'old’ and the 'new’. At the moment, under the influence of the internet beginnings aesthetic (again regurgitating old ideas), a lot of vector based graphics of fire and flames can be seen on clothes or photographic manipulations. This puts the fire discovery form the beginnings of the human kind in relation to its position now, comparing the extremes. Are we the appropriating natural elements or maybe even the Homo erectus that discovered it in the first place. Furthermore, the GIF is depicted on a screen which is another parody of the video fire places that are all very common in interiors today helplessly trying to create a false warm mood, again appropriating nature. Finally, as a coincidental symbolism, the used diorama photograph is already a part of the meme empire going by the name Rare pic of men discovering fire form 2015, which is just another evidence that in a today’s world you can find almost nothing that is already a byproduct of internet by mixing different systems and ideologies.

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LIT (2017)