Michal Mitro - Edge of Chaos | SIMULTAN Festival 2023

It is hypothesised that dynamic systems with feedback can experience an adaptation to the Edge of Chaos. This term is used to denote a transitional space between order and disorder, a region of bounded instability that engenders constant dynamic interplay between the opposing poles. This work aims at creating a framework for such phenomena to occur and for the audience to enter this realm and add or subtract from it. Doing precisely that, it seeks to embody the specificity of the contemporary momentum – the rhizomatic now.

Rhizome is a botanical term used to describe the system of roots of various plants and fungi. Its specificity is horizontal growth, great complexity, multitude of nodes and interconnectedness. This artwork utilises multichannel routed feedback as a metaphor for the flow of information that has become rhiozmatic. It presents a signal whose origin and destination is not clear, where linear causality loses its explanatory and predictive potential, and where everything is interconnected to the point when the whole information system becomes a huge organic infrastructure impossible to decode.

One may enter the system and add to it or subtract from it but without ever knowing the exact result of their actions. The system encompasses incoming signals, reiterates them and functions self-sufficiently as a hyperobject outside human scope.

Michal Mitro is an artist and a researcher working across the field of disciplines and media. Trained in Psychology and Sociology, he focuses on the nuances of everyday life as well as hyperobjects of planetary scale. In his artistic practice he translates his sociological imagination into crafted sculptural environments with elements of sound, light or electricity. Themes that he gravitates towards explore relationships between human and more-than-human worlds and the supposed friction between natural and artificial. Mitro proposes narratives both affirming and disturbing in order to shape viable futures one may like to inhabit.

The project is part of the national cultural program “Timișoara – European Capital of Culture in 2023” and is financed and organized in partnership with the Municipality of Timișoara through the Center for Projects.

Part of

City Celebration 2023

City Celebration 2023