Between the Device and the World
For more than two decades, Device_art festival has provided KONTEJNER with a platform for exploring technology not only as a tool and functional means of realizing artistic ideas, but also as an active medium, a cultural condition, and often a curious companion that shapes the ways in which we engage with the world. Since its first edition in 2004, the festival has continuously connected the Croatian art scene and selected international contexts, seeking out environments in which the intersections of art, science, and technology have generated distinctive artistic languages and experimental approaches. An important part of this process has been KONTEJNER’s role as a producer of new works, with the majority of Croatian artworks presented through Device_art festival being produced or co-produced in collaboration with artists. In this way, the festival not only provides a platform for existing practices, but also actively contributes to the development and visibility of new artistic approaches to technology within the Croatian art scene.
The latest iteration of the festival turns its attention to South Korea and its exceptionally dynamic ecosystem of artistic, scientific, and technological innovation. Developed in collaboration with the Korean curatorial collective Vestige and its members, including artist Yunchul Kim and curators Jungyeon Park and Menger Chu, the festival explores a context shaped by unique perspectives on particularly rapid technological change, a distinctive contemporary cultural presence and a strong legacy in media art history.
The decision to focus the new edition of Device_art festival on South Korea stems from KONTEJNER’s own recent history and a series of encounters that have shaped its international trajectory. In 2017, Yunchul Kim was part of KONTEJNER’s Touch Me Festival titled The Invisible Around Us and guest-curated by Mónica Bello, then artistic director of Arts at CERN. Five years later, Kim represented South Korea at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, transforming its pavilion into an extraordinary environment in which matter, machines, fluids, light, and invisible forces came together as parts of a single, interconnected system. At the same edition of the Biennale, KONTEJNER organized the Croatian Pavilion and produced Tomo Savić-Gecan’s artwork Untitled (Croatian Pavilion), 2022. The AI-driven performative project of the Croatian Pavilion unfolded unpredictably across national pavilions and exhibition venues throughout the Biennale. The Korean Pavilion became one of its remote sites, creating an unexpected connection between two otherwise completely different artworks, as well as between our teams, within one of the world’s most significant international contemporary art platforms.
This renewed connection became the starting point for the eighth edition of Device_art festival – a project that brings together Croatian and Korean artists who approach the device not as a mere technological instrument, but as a site of transformation and interconnected processes through which matter, energy, perception, and human experience can be reimagined. Their practices explore what happens when devices and machines exceed their functional purpose and become spaces for experimentation, poetic speculation, and new forms of encounter between humans and the world around them.
Across its editions, Device_art has continuously rethought the device, the machine, and their changing roles within human, technological, and environmental contexts. In 2018, the sixth edition, Machines Are Not Alone, developed in collaboration with internationally recognized media art curator ZHANG Ga, explored devices as part of broader ecologies, entangled with human bodies, living systems, environments, and other machines. The following edition, developed in 2021 in collaboration with the team from ZKM in Karlsruhe and focused on German device_art tendencies, shifted its attention towards the increasingly diffuse presence of technology in everyday life. At a moment when artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other emerging technologies were rapidly transforming the technological landscape – and continue to do so – the works presented questioned their social and epistemological implications through artistic and often subversive approaches.
With the 2026 edition, this ongoing inquiry takes another turn – not by abandoning its critical perspective, but by opening it towards other forms of engagement with technology. The Korean artistic context offers a particularly fertile ground for this shift. Rather than approaching technology primarily as an object of critique or as a force shaping our everyday environment, the artists brought together in this edition consider devices as materials and active systems through which imagination, curiosity, and transformation can unfold. Devices mediate between different states of matter, information, and perception; materials circulate between physical and computational realms; and scientific processes become tangible through sensory and often intimate forms of experience. Technology becomes less about what a device is designed to do and more about what it can produce through its behaviour, interactions, and unexpected transformations.
This is where the idea of device poetics begins: in the moment when technology exceeds its assigned function and becomes a medium for sensing, imagining, and discovering. A device is no longer simply an object designed to perform a task, but an active participant in a network of relations between materials, bodies, environments, and ideas. What emerges is neither technological optimism nor technological pessimism, but an openness to technology’s capacity to surprise – to produce unfamiliar sensations, unexpected behaviours, moments of wonder, and possibilities for play. Poetic devices do not promise a better technological future; they invite us to experience technology differently in the present.
These impulses have been part of the Device_art festival since its beginnings. But two decades later, they take on a different form in its newest edition. In KONTEJNER’s collaboration with Vestige, Croatian and Korean artists presented at the festival approach technology not as a tool to be used or a problem to be solved, but as a field of relations through which new forms of transformation, imagination, and experience can emerge. Technology is not only something we use – it is something we are in a relationship with. The role of art, then, is not only to examine this relationship, but to explore what else it might become.
KONTEJNER