Concept

With its thirteen-year-long tradition in Maribor, this year’s edition of the international festival KIBLIX, entitled KIBLIX 2014 – Parallels, addresses and concerns an array of research perspectives that pervade the field of contemporary interdisciplinary production. It is not limited to a specific niche, nor does it concern only the narrow field of authorial approaches, but accepts the heterogeneity of contemporary production and presents it with an exhibition, audio-visual performances, lectures, workshops, round tables and artist talks, appealing both to the professional, i. e. academic, as well as the wider public.
Despite its seeming eclecticism, the KIBLIX 2014 – Parallels festival is in search of a hidden pulse that vibrates inside all its participants. The presented works re-question the foundations of the modern world and tackle the issues, which are becoming detected by all of us – what is the postdigital era and what are its consequences; can the combined efforts of artists and scientists hack up a free future; the uses and misuses of the enormous amounts of data; electronic and technological pollution and waste circulation; strategies of surviving in a world with only illusory privacy; the internet black market; the fragmentation of contemporary identity to the real and the virtual. The questions and issues perceived by the presented works and the festival participants are crucial to our present, and even more so to our future. Fundamentally, they represent the momentum that has been present throughput our history – what does swift progress mean for the human race? Are new technologies a way out of the gutter or just wool over the eyes of the already illusory freedom? Following the tradition of past editions, the basic goal of the festival is to act connectively and to create an open space for a common, unburdened consideration of the paths that we choose. KIBLIX joins scientists and artists, researchers and gamers, computer experts and biologists, hackers and musicians, producers and random visitors. The intertwinement of guests and visitors from most diverse directions is the soul of the festival platform – the format of the festival enables spontaneous connections between people of different professions but kindred interests, which creates an intellectual surplus and a tremendous creative potential that stands as a purified vision of interdisciplinary activity, which is almost inevitably the core upon which it is sensible to build a future.