Metamedij

29/04 2025

OPEN CALL | Pipedreams & Lushlakes: Speculative Design & VJ Workshop

News

 

Metamedia Association in collaboration with The Design of Visual Communications Department (Arts Academy in Split) is organising a Speculative Design workshop under the title “Pipedreams & Lushlakes’’. The workshop will take place from 26th to 30th of May 2025 in the Association of Technical Culture in Pula, Croatia and will be led by Dora Đurkesac and Lilly Urbat.

 

In this workshop, participants will explore essential tools and methodologies of speculative design and integrate them with real-time VJ-ing techniques to create dynamic visual narratives. The workshop will be held during the 27th edition of the Media Mediterranea festival, offering participants a unique opportunity to develop their skills at the intersection of speculative design and VJ-ing and showcase their work on the final day of the festival at klub Kotač (Community Center Rojc).

 

 

// Workshop Context

Pipedreams: tech fantasies, algorithmic hallucinations, hidden design
Lushlakes: ecosystem of excess, toxic waters, digital and material debris

 

Pipedreams & Lushlakes is a design and VJ workshop exploring the psychedelic feedback loops between technological fantasy and environmental fallout.

The workshop explores water as an interface – symbolic, emotional, organic, and chemical – revealing how subconscious desires clash with the material realities of water contamination, overconsumption, and organic survival. From water as a new oil, blue gold, and hormonal disruptor to organisms thriving on the plastic island, we’ll engage with scientific facts entangled with internet mythologies.

 

Can personal dreamscapes reveal the fears of impending catastrophe, the path to regeneration, or an attraction to self-destruction? Participants are invited to delve into the personal and collective subconscious, exploring the metaphors of water, contamination, and transhumanist desires embedded in dreams, corporate aesthetics, or esoteric diagrams. By understanding the cultural meanings behind these symbols, we explore how they shape our desire, fear, and imagination.

 

Shifting between personal and planetary scales, we delve into browsing histories, digital folklore, and dream logic, transforming them through open-source tools, symbol libraries, and corporate design into new visual languages and synesthetic experiences. Drawing from the roots of VJing as a tool for psychedelic mind expansion, a visual mashup of speculative psychedelia culminates in a collective live VJ performance that blurs challenge and celebration, aesthetic excess and ecological realities.

 

// Workshop Approach

Through research, we will examine water-related myths and facts to uncover hidden material and chemical realities behind technological infrastructures. Participants will reflect on personal browsing histories, track dreams, dive into digital folklore, and analyze corporate aesthetics as expressions of tech desires. They will use a mix of personal softwares and open-source tools (3D modeling, coding, video effects, design templates, and symbol libraries), along with found materials to map ecological imaginaries into speculative psychedelic scenarios. At the same time, participants will develop practical VJ skills using Resolume, learning to organize content, manage video codecs, set up cables and controllers, and create live-reactive visuals. Emphasis will be placed on connecting conceptual material with technical workflows. Through a collective live VJ performance, participants will arrange projections and transform the space into an immersive environment, blending all created material into a shared audiovisual experience.

 

// General Information
This call is addressing a diverse range of participants, from students to professionals across the creative sector, we particularly invite art and design practitioners from fields of new/interactive media, IT, sociology, psychology, (eco)biology, artivists, etc., ages 18-35. The workshop programme includes lectures and collaborative as well as interactive exercises, visual/media presentations, and group work focused on the process of practical co-creation. The working language of the workshop is English, fair fluency in spoken English is thus expected. Participation in the workshop is free of charge. Accommodation expenses are fully covered for all accepted participants by the organisers. Food and travel expenses are not covered and are at the expense of the participants themselves. Refreshments will be provided during the workshop.

 

// Applications

To participate in the workshop, please fill out the application form. For more information, contact us at kontakt.radionice@gmail.com

The final date for application is May 18, 2025. The number of participants is limited. All applicants will receive notification of the selection decision by email on May 20, 2025. Once selected and notified, the participants will be expected to respond to all communications by the organisers duly.

 

// Mentors

Dora Đurkesac is an artist working at the intersection of contemporary dance, new media, and design research. Her practice explores embodied cognition and the entanglement of material, chemical, and technological realities. Recent projects include Shivers, a movement and listening practice exploring the body’s “electrome,” and Plastic Drift, tracing contaminations of waters through synthetic materials. Her work is often shaped by collective and poetic efforts, such as a herbalist collective, community-building and design speculation with Vancouver Design Nerds, and art and activism at Tuntenhaus in Berlin. Through collaborations with dance artists, choreographers, and a long-term exchange with Improspekcije Festival, she further explores the intersections of scenography, design, dance, and digital media. She has participated in programs such as Goldrausch Künstlerinnen, the Performative Research Academy at ZHdK, and Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including Centrum, Spike, Haubrok Foundation, Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (Berlin), Neu Now (Amsterdam), Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb), La MaMa Theatre (New York), and Tjarnarbíó (Reykjavík). She completed a master’s degree in new media arts and industrial design.

 

Lilly Urbat (she/her) is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist and photographer. Her practice centers around the performative staging of bodies, symbols, and consumer aesthetics, using photography, video, and live visuals to explore the intersections of pop culture, feminism, and image politics. With a distinct sense of humor and an affinity for exaggeration, she creates hybrid visual spaces that deconstruct dominant narratives and recode visual language through subversive strategies. Urbat’s work challenges how cultural myths and media aesthetics shape our collective imagination—posing questions around power, representation, and visibility. Often drawing on corporate design, mythology, and internet debris, her pieces are both affective and critical, rooted in feminist thought and a fascination for the absurd. After co-founding an art space and an internet label, Urbat co-hosted 404.earth (2014–2019), first a radio show, later a podcast “driven by artistic research that negotiates the social and cultural implications of technological progress.” Lilly Urbat’s works and video projections have been shown at institutions including Haus der Kunst, Muffatwerke and Galerie der Künstler (Munich), Contemporary Fine Arts and Zeiss Großplanetarium (Berlin), Schnütgen Museum (Cologne), Kunstpalais (Erlangen), UMPRUM (Prague), Galerie Krobath (Vienna), and at numerous festivals. She is a member of Femxphotographers.org, which publishes biannual editions with Hatje Cantz. Her work has been featured in System Magazine, Photonews, Profifoto, Missy Magazine, VOGUE Germany, Salamé Magazine and many more.