Marko Batista and Nataša Mušević (text by: Luka Zagoričnik) Marko Batista belongs to the younger generation of Slovene multimedia artists. Splitting his time and creative efforts between London and Ljubljana, Batista – like the majority of Slovene contemporary artists – creates and presents his work with far more success abroad than at home, where there is a considerable lack of both appreciation and venues for this kind of artistic expressions. At least we thought so years ago, when Marko Batista started to appear in the spaces which are today considered places for sound art or multimedia experience. Marko Batista first appeared in Slovene contemporary sound landscape as a member of Klon:Art:Resistance, which he co-founded with Miha Horvat. Marked by the digital milieu of video art, noise, and the pulse of harder electronic dance practices with occasional echoes of underground dub, this heterogeneous art collective at the time persistently rubbed the image with its guerrilla interventions into our, now trendily-called urban cultural space, from galleries, festivals, to clubs. Klon:Art:Resistance thus entered the emerging techno culture in Slovenia in a rather specific and unique way – it introduced it with artistic intervention. This manner of space as well as perception intervention can be gathered from Batista’s performance titled ‘Error Trash v.1.3’, a sound intervention and audiovisual project, grounded in imperfections of data transmission, in information interruptions, contortions, and distortions on their way to the receiver via connectors, laptops, and wireless communication networks within the web of digital technology. Disruptions and interferences lie at the very heart of noise and contemporary electronic music; similarly, they can be found in many Batista’s projects, in their core which lies in the investigation of the current media and technological society. This investigation can be construed as a consistent idea, which Batista often obscures, distorts by layering the information into a web of noises generated by technology, both analogue and digital, into a web of information, visual and sound mediated, which are passed over as distortions in all their intensity. Interpreted as a break or interference, noise can be juxtaposed in opposition to music. However, precisely by becoming a genre, noise re-enters music as a specific deconstruction. Seen in this context, a certain segment of Batista’s work can be understood as a musical experience, even though his individual projects involve experiences of different kinds and qualities that join and disjoin different media, which network, overlap, envelop, and are split into heterogeneous experiences. All things considered, we need to bear in mind that Batista’s first medium is visual art. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Ljubljana, in 2005, and still as a student, presented his work at the 50th Venice Biannual in 2003 in the frame of the collaborative project ‘VV2 Recycling the Future’. In 2007, Batista finished his formal education by earning a Master from ‘fine arts’ in London. The above mentioned work-in-progress ‘Error Trash’ was presented at Ars Electronica in Linz in 2008 within the frame of the project ‘Ecology of Techno Mind’, organised by Kapelica Gallery, while this year Batista appeared at the Berlin-based ‘transmediale’ with the work ‘Syphone:Sys:Apparatus’. His 2010 work ‘Hybrid Sound Machines’ marks Batista’s break into the hybrid field between the mechanic and the digital. Here, Batista embodied, through the medium of sound, an intertwinement of wires, digital technology, mechanisms, and mechanic transmissions of different sound signals that are continually shifting between meaning and meaninglessness of signal and noise. Through this hybrid technological disposition (a fusion of mechanics, electronics, and ultimately art, in this particular instance, contemporary electronic music with a minimalist visual component of undulating, evenly pulsa
