Speculum Artium

The festival of new media culture Speculum Artium (hereafter SA) has been held since 2008. The first year the festival took place in Ljubljana under the leadership of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, and since 2009 the festival has been held every year under the leadership of Zavod za kulturo Delavski dom Trbovlje.

Throughout all these years, the festival grew exponentially, upgraded itself qualitatively and quantitatively, and built its own identity, with which it stood alongside world-famous new media art festivals such as: Ars Electronica Linz Austria, Transmediale Berlin Germany, WRO Wroclaw Poland, …

Every year the program is more extensive, and in recent years there has been a lot of emphasis on education. The education was carried out through workshops, with public guidance and worksheets and lectures, which were not only part of the festival, but were carried out throughout the year. Every year, the festival is attended by several young people attending school from all over Slovenia and abroad. At SA, a young audience learns about global achievements in the field of cooperation between science and art. As part of the festival, in addition to the exhibition projects, we also prepare an annual symposium aimed at the professional public, which is attended by leading scientists and artists of new media culture. We also broadcast the symposium live on social networks in order to reach even more audiences who are interested in this type of content.

In the coming years, the festival will permanently upgrade the program, because on the one hand, we want more guest appearances by top new media artists who work at the intersection of science, art, technology and economy, and on the other hand, presentations of not yet established young artists who have just made their way into this kind of field. This networking of knowledge between the experienced generation and the young confirms the correctness of our path every year. The festival will work even more interdisciplinary in terms of connecting different paradigms of the development of modern society through culture and art, and of course in cooperation with science and economy. The large number of young visitors indicates the need to spread educational content, even after the end of the festival itself.

The vision of the festival is to support intermedia art, Slovenian authors, and with the cooperation of various sectors from education to economy.

In the future, we therefore plan to do more cooperation between schools and universities, both domestic and foreign. We will continue with the presentation of the works of students at the international level. We will also integrate the festival more into the local community, because the essence of the festival is to co-create it with the surroundings in which the festival resides, and after all these years, it has become one of its most important events of the year.