PIFcamp

Martina M. Yáñez’s project is an ongoing research endeavor, diving deep into the connections between art, our planet, and the more-than-human elements that shape our world. In her work, she explores the intricate links between sound, rocks, time, and memory.

Central to the project is a speculation: imagining a rock created not by nature, but by artificial means. How would such a “geological dislocation” a rock fundamentally out of place in terms of its origin force us to rethink history and nature itself?

For Martina, sound plays a crucial role. She sees it as a way to both speculatively translate the materiality of rocks and to uncover their hidden histories, delving into the intricate connections binding sound, geological formations, the passage of time, and collective memory.

During her time at the camp, a geological-inspired study will take center stage. She plans to scan the shape and sound of diverse rocks, carefully chosen from different geological eras and formations. These scans won’t just be raw data; they’ll merge into what Martina calls an archive of future geologies. Essentially, she’s proposing the creation of a multimodal archive of fictional sedimentation, a speculative exercise where alternative pasts and geological futures blend together, inviting us to imagine new narratives for our planet.

The WEBPIT project by Vytautas Bikauskas explores the creative possibilities of wireless (WLAN) and portable networks that operate off-grid. Its latest version, WEBPIT 3.0, is a portable system featuring a crank generator, a printed circuit board (PCB), and a microcontroller. This system creates a WLAN and hosts a local server, allowing users to connect and read HTML poetry for as long as someone is manually cranking the generator.

When showing the work to others, Vytautas noticed that users frequently broke the generator. This experience (while repairing) prompted him to reflect on the importance of designing with failure and maintenance in mind. Therefore, he plans to run a workshop focused on making repair kit prototypes and broadening the discussion on the significance and necessity of repair practices in media art. He also aims to draw attention to the sometimes neglected questions of power access and consumption, especially for on-grid media works. Finally, he intends to further experiment with interactive poetry designed for minimal resources and implementable on an ESP32 microcontroller.

How can designers and artists meaningfully engage with more-than-human contexts? How
do we avoid superficial conclusions and instead uncover situated relationships? How might
we navigate the intricate entanglements of humans, non-human organisms, materials,
technologies, and other phenomena without getting lost?

Tamara Lašič Jurković is an interdisciplinary designer, researcher, and teaching assistant. She works at the intersection of design theory, regeneration, and posthumanist perspectives. At PIFcamp, she will collaborate with Lovro Vehovar, a biologist, herbalist, and certified permaculture planner, to further develop a method for entanglement mapping. This method helps identify human and non-human entities within a specific context, analyze their interrelations, and visualize them. Such detailed mapping enables the discovery of challenges and opportunities for design and artistic interventions that would be overlooked by conventional design research methods.

Building on Arturo Escobar’s concept of relationality, Bruno Latour’s Actor-network theory
and the principles of permaculture, Tamara and Lovro will explore the surroundings of PIFcamp, experiment with different approaches for investigating the more-than-human interrelations and hopefully
gather some inspiring insights for future projects!