Violeta Vojvodic Balaz is artist and digital humanities researcher located in Belgrade, Serbia.
Media art, Art methodology, Computer-based art, Cognitive anthropology, Cybernetics, Philosophy of technology, Virtual economy.
Data design, Experimental art, Installation art, Painting and Sculpture, Teaching, Academic writing, Project management, Strategic planning, Branding and Copywriting.
https://memoduct.org (2020-)
https://hoopup.net (2011-)
https://valuequest.info (2011)
https://urtica.org (1999-2012)
Graduated at Academy of Arts Novi Sad in painting and art pedagogy (1995), and received MA at Faculty of Fine Art Belgrade for postgraduate work CD-ROM Urtica Medicamentum est (2000). She specialised European Diploma in Cultural Management, Brussels, her research was focused on strategic planing and virtual organisation (2006). Violeta studied at the University of Belgrade at the Faculty of Fine Art for her PhD (2017), with a doctoral thesis The Case Of Art-Adventurers Operating Into Global Margin: Art, Money, and Value in The Age of Artificial Intelligence. Currently, she is PhD candidate in Transdisciplinary Studies of Modern Arts And Media at the Faculty for Media and Communication in Belgrade.
Early works of Violeta included art objects and installations that revolved about the language identification patterns and visualisation of linguistic expressions, such as neologisms and onomatopoeia. Her interest in symbolic communication and new media drove her toward experiments that combine ICT and fine art. She co-founded Urtica art and media research group in 1999, where she worked as media artist, lecturer, and project manager till 2012. Within the framework of Urtica's projects Social Engine and HoopUp, she held the workshops with students and artists at the universities at Saint-Etienne, Luneburg, Belgrade, Novi Sad, and art organisations in Innsbruck, Ulm, and Montreal. She was the co-founder and project manager (2001-02) at New Media Center kuda.org (Novi Sad). During 2005-07 she worked as an editor (New Media Expert) at labforculture.org (Amsterdam). Currently she is working as a freelance researcher in arts and digital humanities, as well as media artist.
The group was founded in 1999 by Violeta Vojvodic and Eduard Balaz. Their production ranged from Internet based artworks and media actions to art objects and installations. Special focus was put on educational projects such as workshops and web applications. During 2003 Urtica won UNESCO Digital Arts Award at Institute for Advance Media Art and Science in Japan. Urtica held workshops and shown artworks in Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Israel, USA, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, within a framework of festivals and exhibitions such as: Ars Electronica (Linz), Viper (Basel), FILE (Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro), Ogaki Biennial (IAMAS, Ogaki), The Israeli Center for Digital Art (Holon), dystoRpia Project (Queens Museum of Art), and Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, among others. Retrospective exhibition of Urtica is planned for 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina. The major art projects of Urtica include: socially-engaged art campaigns Omnigenus and Ratioremedium under the slogan Urtica Medicamentum Est, which consisted of newspaper ads, radio jingles, and short videos broadcast to the general public on television (1999-2001), an online memory game Lapsus Memoriae (2002), a phonetic database Dictionary Of Primal Behaviour--Mouse says: click! and human says: eek! (2003-04), an interactive database of socio-cultural patterns Social Engine (2004-08), a hazard gaming setup Art of Fortune and Economy of Risk and Value Quest Bourse (2010-11), an online artistic-educational platform Hoopup (2011).
Read more https://urtica.org
Art-research grant (Ministry of Culture and Information of Republic of Serbia) Gallery Nadezda Petrovic, art PhD project The Case Of Art-Adventurers Operating Into Global Margin (2015)
Visiting Artist (Canada Council for the Arts), Festival The HTMlles 10, feminist artist-run centre Studio XX, Montreal, Canada (2012)
Visiting Artist (Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen), Bundesverband Bildender Kunstler Ulm, Germany (2010)
ArtsLink Fellowship at Rhode Island School of Design, Digital Media Department, Providence, USA (2004)
Fellowship program for visual art and theory at Kunstlerhaus Buchsenhausen, Innsbruck, Austria (2004)
KulturKontakt guest studio program, Vienna, Austria (2002)
Gulliver Connect Programme, AIR at C3 Center for Culture and Communication, Budapest, Hungary (2002)
The Global Margin deals with the emergence of monetary themes in art such as Money, Banking, Stock exchanges, Market Bubbles and Economic Crisis. It analyzes methodical transition from Art:Craft to Art:Science, and examines relation between symbolic character of the artistic system and the monetary system. How cyberspace, created by imagination and invention, gets real by circulation of cultural values and monetized messages. A narrative follows transformation of cultural values and the accumulation of resources necessary to build a post-society: the beginning of globalization, burst of the first stock market bubbles in fundamental economy (South Sea bubble 1720, subprime mortgage crisis 2008), virtual economy (dot-com bubble 2000), and crushes triggered by the trading programs (Black Monday 1987, Flash Crash 2010), symbolization of value through the use of paper and electronic money, the effectiveness of the division of intellectual labor, the origination of computer and network, development of romantic hi-tech utopia, the commercialization of the Internet, virtualization of monetary system and high-frequency trading, the birth of a new virtual class adapted to live and work in the quantified infinity of Information Frontier.
In the information age, the emergence of virtual worlds guide artistic research toward the question of how the manipulation of symbols and internal structures of the media produces New Realities. Contemporary art practice in digital humanities therefore requires a methodology that focuses on the relation between creative individual and computerized environment. The workshop done at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, aimed to: 1) Pinpoint the anthropo-technological values that were embedded in the development of historical communication networks: ARPANET 1969, Minitel 1981-82, Internet and Web 1989-90 up to date; 2) Mark the position of an artist within the socio-economic cycle of Information Frontier; 3) Make a draft on an artistic methodology in the age of artificial intelligence. New workshops are planned for school year 2017-18.
Urtica 1999-2012, Art Monograph, [in preparation].
Social Engine: The Hybrid Source Book, eds. Violeta Vojvodic and Eduard Balaz. Innsbruck: Kunstlerhaus Buchsenhausen, 2008.
Moires. Andreas Fogarasi, Katya Sander, Urtica, eds. Astrid Wege, Ulf Wuggening. Luneburg: Verlag fur Wissenschaft und zeitgenossische Kunst, 2008.
"Digital Migration of Generation X and Eco-techno Utopia: The Case of Novi Sad New Media Scene”, Session 5 “Migration, Climate, Surveillance – What does Media Arts Complexity want?” at CIHA World Congress, Sao Paolo, 2022.
“Social Engine Communication Experiment”, PANEL 5: AI: Surveillance, Activism and Control, at Social Change Art Technology, NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Dundee, 2019.
“Monetary Symbolism: Art as a Deposit of Value”, FMK Journal.
“L'art pour l'art Pattern and the Autotelic Intelligent Machinery”, 21 International Congress of Aesthetics, Belgrade, 2019.
“AI and Virtual Well-being”. GLOBAL CONTROL, Riga, 2018 [view presentation]