Industrial Art Biennial

A monstrous era of industrialisation is unfolding around and through us. It is beyond human comprehension, hyper-granular but opaque, ubiquitous and always somewhere else. It is multi-scalar, as its processes and bodies are capable of mobilising and intersecting multiple layers of human and non-human lives, from the nano to the planetary scale, from the molecular to the geopolitical, fostering novel interconnections and frictions, when not overt conflicts.

Emerging from an extensive process of extraction and transformation of planetary resources and intelligences, such an evolving landscape embodies both a material force and a powerful cultural engine. Networks of global logistics, real-time management, smart agents and automated feedback loops not only redefine production, supply chains, or the design of infrastructures, but also human intelligence and subjectivity, as well as a sense of agency and the functioning of democracy at scale.

All of a sudden, a strange similarity emerges with the old mining industry, a production machine lying beneath the earth’s surface perpetually cloaked in obscurity, whose only marks manifested either as its inconspicuous overground facilities or as the illnesses on workers’ skin and lungs. The current scenario poses a similar challenge, but at a rampant speed and intensity

What is the industry, when industrialization runs through data streams and convoluted decision-making processes? Where to look when there is apparently nothing to look at? When machines and sensors do the job of seeing and understanding instead of you? How can you orient yourself when you only get blurred shadows of what industrialisation is really setting in motion? How do you reclaim agency and redefine justice?

In this terrain crumbling beneath our feet, we are requested to imagine the unimaginable.

Spectres of the Geogothic

In the framework of the 5th Industrial Art Biennial, the aim is to expose the blind spots and explore the opportunities of this emerging landscape. We set out to tap into the current polycrisis and observe the social and technical apparatuses inherited from the 20th century, which provoked it. But that is not enough. In order to unleash alternative imaginations, we also need to forge an inventory of terms and artistic practices that may look strange and unstable, at times even dark and menacing to a human-centered order of things. They will turn out to be necessary to capture material and cultural transformations that are often faster than our ability to recognise and express them.

In the Istrian landscape, the specters of old infrastructures linger, echoing the instances of individuals that made, inhabited, and even questioned them. But specters also come from the present, as unheard voices or invisibilized realities; and from the future, disguised as promises and dreams. Specters of the accumulated knowledge required to design and operate machines of extraction, but also the knowledge necessary to destroy them, or take them over to imagine society. In a way, technologies are time machines that are capable of evoking, compressing, anticipating and preempting.

The curatorial rationale unfolds through the following main threads, taking their cues from artistic practices and projects that the 5th Industrial Art Biennial hosts.

Mythologies of Calculating Machines


The Vast Automaton is a shape-shifting myth that mutates and adapts to the new century. Today, from opposite corners of the same binary imaginary, both the idea of a god-like, charismatic and thaumaturgic superintelligence and the plagues of out-of-control zombie nanorobots can perfectly coexist. But is this the only way to imagine an alternative to the humanist project and its blind spots?

Ghosts in the Machine

The process of suppression of diversity escalates in the statistical operations that we call artificial intelligence, the building blocks of contemporary supply, production, distribution and consumer chains. They are made invisible by design. In the age of machine vision, human visual culture has become a special case of vision, often bypassed by artificial sensing apparatuses which in turn have become the cornerstone of automation, blurring boundaries between large-scale systems and user interfaces. What is the role of machine learning within these operational landscapes? What are their technical and social implications?

Infrastructures of Fear, Cruelty, and Collapse


The industrial revolution was always tied to control over land, people, animal and vegetal life. From climate change to war, from logistical revolution to indiscriminate exploitation. The notion of the uncanny valley refers to the moment of bewilderment when facing robots that look almost, but not quite, like human beings. What if AI and other examples of planetary-scale computation could work as machines that produce effects of inverse uncanny valley, as mirrors pointed at us and the uncanniness of our civilisation?

Inverse Gravity 

Extraction has always been incited by the dream of infinite energy. Extractivism magnifies it into a systematic, all-encompassing endeavor. Extractivism is two-fold. Firstly, it is a strategic vision that is embedded in large-scale technologies of extraction. Secondly, it stands for the deployment of extraction into other realms, including the extraction of human and non-human intelligence for optimisation, control and exploitation. Now the ore fluctuates in the sky and in our cells, the weightlessness becomes heavy, water is instrumentalised, oxygen-based creatures plunge by proxy into the abyss of the sea.

Spells and Antidotes

The selection of art projects, newly commissioned installations, and films presents a vision of the industrial as a multi-faceted landscape, explored according to the main threads exposed above. The artists invited to exhibit in the 5th Industrial Art Biennial embrace a range of strategies aimed at mapping this elusive territory, tackling its dominant mythologies, conjuring up new ones, evoking its ghosts or exorcising its demons.

Our selection suggests creative possibilities rooted in synthetic storytelling, machine visualities, speculative fiction, counter-design, documentary, ethnography or performativity in the statistical underground of contemporary technological mediation. In one way or another, the artworks of the 5th Industrial Art Biennial inhabit the latent space of contemporary production and logistics and question the historical alignments of facts imposed by power, envisioning alternatives to the extractivist, dark and violent presents we live in.