Digital Sovereignty, Convivial Tools: New Media in the Age of Ecocide
Wednesday, February 12, 2025 |6:30 – 8PM
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From their roots in the military-industrial complex to their contemporary entanglements with control, surveillance, and extractivism, digital technologies present us with ever more troubling ethical dilemmas. As digital artists, how can we mount effective critique of, and resistance to, the very systems from which our tools originate? In this artist talk, 2025 Media Arts Prize Finalist Marko Cindric reflects on this question as it pertains to the core tension of his practice: engaging the climate crisis using technologies undeniably tied to its acceleration. Anchoring the talk are the insights that emerged from the creation of his undergraduate thesis project, Fiat, which he chose to develop with the open source Godot game engine. How might we as artists begin to reclaim our digital sovereignty, envision new futures beyond those endorsed by the market, and inspire others to do the same? Cindric shares his own orienting strategies and inspirations, with topics including Linux, Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, the Hundred Rabbits artist collective and their solar-powered sailboat, and more. Far from offering conclusive answers, it is Cindric’s hope that this talk will leave attendees with fruitful questions, illuminating new avenues for exploration within their own creative practices.
About the Artist
Marko Cindric is a new media artist and researcher interested in the overlooked presuppositions and ideological residues that inadvertently shape discussions on the climate crisis. Synthesizing themes of degrowth, decentralization, and ancestral lifeways, his practice orients itself toward disrupting the age-old tendencies of science and technology toward control, decontextualization, and forceful quantification of a living, interconnected world. Throughout his research, he grapples with a central tension: can our digital technologies be emancipated from the ecocidal military-industrial paradigm from which they emerge? And how can we reformulate our questions in ways that de-centre the human, that we may better honour the sovereignty of our more-than-human kin.
Cindric’s creative practice may, to some, appear paradoxical: while digital technologies serve as his media of choice, his works at their core are deeply critical of the techno-solutionism and computational thinking that pervade contemporary idea-space. For his purposes, the digital is a Trojan horse, an often already-open channel of communication through which to consider topics otherwise prone to aversion or repudiation: challenges to anthropocentrism; interconnectedness, interdependency, and the porousness of the self; ecological unravelling and the societal presumptions (including proposed solutions) that perpetuate it; unquantifiability, uncontrollability, and the sublime; spirituality, psychology, and mortality; and the contextualization of a single human lifespan within the broader cycles and gestures of deep time. Cindric wields human-made systems as his materials in the interest of redirecting attention to, and rebuilding kinship with, the natural and living ones that inspired their invention. As such, relationality, impact, and emergence are recurring motifs within his practice.
Cindric holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in New Media from Toronto Metropolitan University. He is currently pursuing a Master of Arts degree in Digital Media at York University, and is a research assistant at the SLOlab (Systems | Life | Ontologies) directed by Jane Tingley and Dr. Roberta Buiani.
About the Media Arts Prize
Since 1990, the InterAccess Media Arts Prize has been granted annually to a graduating student whose work exhibits excellence and innovation in new media practice. Nominations are adjudicated by InterAccess's Programming Committee, who select a prize winner to be awarded a solo exhibition opportunity, a complimentary one-year studio membership, and professional development and mentorship. Finalists receive a complimentary one-year studio membership to InterAccess and an opportunity for a public artist program.
Image courtesy of the artist.