#14 IZIS: Delay III – Systems in Delay

The 14th edition of IZIS delves into and reflects on delay by highlighting repetitions, echoes, loops, and resets within various mechanisms and systems. It explores the notion of delay as a potential strategy of resistance against the relentless imperative of hyperproductivity, while presenting diverse artistic positions that foreground aspects of the temporality of (digital) technologies from the perspectives of environmental processes, human experience, and the mechanical gaze of the machine.

In a saturated techno-social reality, time both stretches and contracts: endless waiting can resemble relentless action. The relationship between past, present, and future further complicates spatiotemporal coordinates, making disorientation a modus operandi.

Disoriented, we press on because a world without progress is unimaginable. Disoriented, we follow the imperative of productivity. We hurtle toward a future that, under corporate capitalism, serves merely as a means to an end, already mortgaged in advance. Delay, in this sense, can be seen as a consequence of chronic exhaustion. Although exhaustion – as a sign of poor efficiency – carries negative connotations in Western culture, the philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi insists it must be recognized and embraced as a new paradigm of social life. In 2010, he wrote: “The coming European uprising will not be driven by energy, but by slowness, withdrawal, and exhaustion. It will be about the autonomy of the collective body and mind from exploitation through speed and competition.”

Delay can be seen as falling behind a faster-moving world, yet in a landscape of constant stimuli, delay is also a pause, a gap, a rest, a crack, a rupture. It opens a time of potential and anticipation, as well as a withdrawal from the predetermined paths of toxic hyperproductivity and a retreat from exploitation. By stretching their own temporality, workers reclaim their colonized time, which, in an era of perpetual extraction, has itself become a resource to be mined.

But how does delay operate within the measurable or mechanical time governed by clockwork mechanisms and the economic value of goods? How does it function within the lived temporality that resists calculation? As philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson notes, computational time belongs to mathematics and economics, yet society exists in the incalculable time of death as an end, not as a fate. Our perception of time is shaped by the finitude of life, and understanding real duration offers insight into experimentation with what contemporary, biotechnologically mediated bodies can become in relation to their environment. But how does delay alter this perception? What exactly is delayed – time, space, or the very perception of either?

Participants: Format C (Dina Gligo and Vedran Gligo), Oskar Kandare, Urška Preis, Lara Reichmann, Lina Rica, Saša Spačal (with Alison Sperling), Swamp_Matter (Ana Laura Richter and Eva Garibaldi), Robertina Šebjanič, Ida Hiršenfelder et al. Ana Lokovšek (NIB – MBP), Lukas Truniger, Staš Vrenko, Luiz Zanotello

Curator: Irena Borić

Curators of the HEKA production exhibition (Bastion): Borut Jerman, Ana Markežič, Mauricio Valdés San Emeterio, Marko Vivoda

Producers: Borut Jerman, Ana Markežič and Marko Vivoda

Lighting design: Marko Vivoda

Visual identity and graphic design: Katja Mijajlović

Public relations: Šiva Rustja

Acknowledgements: Vesna Pajić, Helena Brec Loredan, Andraž Gombač, Sani Rahul Roy, Toni Bračanov

IZIS Festival XIV is supported by: PiNA, HEKA, Stran22, City Municipality of Koper, Institute for Youth, Culture and Tourism Koper, Ministry of Culture, JSKD, Piran Coastal Galleries, »Santorio Santorio« Italian Community Koper – Comunità degli Italiani »Santorio Santorio« di Capodistria, University of Primorska (Faculty of Education – Visual Arts and Design), City of Zagreb, EMAP, European Union, gnration, Kersnikova Institute, Lighting Guerrilla / Forum Ljubljana, Koper Theatre, Otok – Institute for the Development of Culture and Society and Pro Helvetia.