The 59th edition of the famous Venice Biennale, an international art exhibition in Venice, Italy, is set to open tomorrow.

Croatia will be represented by the project Untitled, by artist Tomo Savic-Gecan and curator Elena Filipovic. For the first time, there will be no physical space of a pavilion. Instead, the project’s concept profoundly questions the world that we live in, the cycle of news, artificial intelligence, and the influence of algorithms on our lives. It is a metaphor of the contemporary moment in time in which people, controlled by technology, think for themselves less and less.

On the eve of the start of the Venice Biennale, N1’s Foreign Affairs editor and author of Global Fokus programme, Ivana Dragicevic, spoke to the director of Kunsthalle Basel and curator, Elena Filipovic.

“This year’s Tomo Savic-Gecan’s genius proposition, an audacious one, that I was very happy was selected, was to get rid of the physical space of the exhibition and instead to invest in the local, Croatian talent, to put the money, as modest as it is, in bodies, in humans,” Filipovic said.

There are 25 professional performers from Croatia, who are rotated, so that five are always in Venice. Every morning, those five performers get their instructions from artificial intelligence.

This artificial intelligence has been created, for over a year, by brilliant minds from the University of Zagreb, she explained. The system was programmed to look through the daily papers every morning. One paper is randomly selected out of 250 from the whole world, the main story is chosen, translated by Google Translate, and processed. The AI asks a series of cause-and-effect questions and creates a script of sorts for the performers based on the determinants.

“They are almost entirely controlled, as we all are with these devices that we have,” she said.

His project speaks about this type of control, she added, but it also speaks about the news.

“It talks about different perspectives, the fact that every day, a different news source is selected, so sometimes Ukraine is the lead news story, but not always, and that really depends on whose perspective the AI has randomly selected for the day,” she said.

It’s important to say this is not an aggressive takeover of other nations’ pavilions, she stressed.

“On the one hand, the project is audacious, innovative, because it doesn’t rely on one physical exhibition space. On the other hand, it is not without space. It just infiltrates every other national pavilion,” she said, stressing that this is not an aggressive takeover of other nations’ pavilions.

“We have carefully negotiated over half a year with nearly 30 other national pavilions to be able to assure ourselves that we could enter their pavilions and we could perform there,” she said. “It’s important to say that Tomo has imagined a performance which is extremely respectful, extremely discreet, so it also goes a little bit under the radar.”

“Maybe I’m an eternal optimist, but I have great hope in the capacity of artists to translate and reflect back to us all of the situations in which we’re living,” she said. “The news tells us one story, whether it’s true or not, biased or not, but artists have this particular capacity to turn it into form, into something else. Every society needs to be better trained to read the images that we are being thrown at. Whether those images come from social media, like Facebook, or the news. Artists can help us to be better readers of these images.“

Watch the full interview with Elena Filipovic below: