The confluence of visual culture and digital devices has brought unprecedented connectivity while contributing to an expansive and vastly unsustainable media (eco)system. The materiality of communication, devices, and their encompassing infrastructure indicates a visual culture that is materially extractive and computationally heavy.

At the same time, it creates specific subjectivities, relational engagements, and perceptual effects.

The project Sustainable Media speculates on the degrowth of visual culture and computation in line with ecological concerns, and on its reconfiguration in terms of material, computational, and affective operations.

By examining the relationship between technical processes of perceptual coding and a broader socio-technical coding of perception, the project ultimately surveys the possibilities of deceleration of visual cultures’ perceptual engagements while attempting to degrow its computational strata.

Ava Zevop is a Ljubljana-born, Brussels-based visual and new media artist, and an independent researcher. Recently, she has shown in solo exhibitions Rise and Fail of Algorithmic Cultures (2023) at the Ravnikar Gallery Space, In the Beginning, There Was Static ... In the End, There Was the Webbed Wide World (2022) and Webbed Wide Worlds (2023) at osmo/za, and in group shows Fever Dream at Galerija Kresija (2023), at the Design FEST Gent in the Design Museum Gent (2022), in the exhibition Let it be Queer! in the City Gallery of Ljubljana (2021), and at the 26th edition of the International Festival of Computer Art (MFRU) - Infrastructural Complex: Altered Earth (2020), amongst others. Additionally, she has participated in academic conferences on technology and migration, such as the Digitized Migrants Conference in Istanbul (2022) and STS Italia (2023). In her media art practice, she has previously focused on machine learning as an epistemological paradigm, while she is currently exploring digital cultures’ (un)sustainability.

Portrait: Marijo Zupanov / Ravnikar Gallery Space

Visual: Ava Zevop