Super-teleMagdalena Pederin (HR)

Interactive installation, 2006

Super-tele deals with the issue of communication. It consists of a monitor with a video link with me speaking live with the audience and several interactive teddy bears scattered around the room. Each teddy bear has its own ‘character’ and contains a module with a sound recording which consists of fragments of typical, everyday conversations, activated when the visitor comes close to it. In a separate room, a teddy bear is placed with a mobile camera whose motion around the room can be followed on the monitor. At the moment when the visitor steps onto the marked line in front of the teddy bear, the camera focuses on his face and the teddy bear asks three questions: who are you, what do you do and what’s your phone number. This conversation is recorded.

“...Our bodies are of similar construction and exposed to the same external influences. This results in the likeness of response and concordance of the general activities on which all our social and other rules and laws are based. We are automata entirely controlled by the forces of the medium being tossed about like corks on the surface of the water, but mistaking the resultant of the impulses from the outside for free will. The movements and other actions we perform are always life preservative and thou seemingly quite independent from one another, we are connected by invisible links. So long as the organism is in perfect order it responds accurately to the agents that prompt it, but the moment that there is some derangement in any individual, his self-preservative power is impaired. Everybody understands, of course, that if one becomes deaf, has his eyesight weakened, or his limbs injured, the chances for his continued existence are lessened.

But this is also true, and perhaps more so, of certain defects in the brain which deprive the automaton, more or less, of that vital quality and cause it to rush into destruction. A very sensitive and observant being, with his highly developed mechanism all intact, and acting with precision in obedience to the changing conditions of the environment, is endowed with a transcending mechanical sense, enabling him to evade perils too subtle to be directly perceived. When he comes in contact with others whose controlling organs are radically faulty, that sense asserts itself and he feels the “cosmic” pain. The truth of this has been borne out in hundreds of instances and I am inviting other students of nature to devote attention to this subject, believing that through combined and systematic effort results of incalculable value to the world will be attained....”

The Art of Teleautomatics
Nikola Tesla, My Inventions, Electrical Experimenter, February - June and October 1919

collaboration: Dubravko Kuhta - Tesla, Ivan Marušić Klif
production: KONTEJNER (DIY_ARTLAB)

Magdalena Pederin (HR)

Magdalena Pederin was born in 1968 in Split. She graduated from the School of Applied Arts and from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Magdalena Pederin is a multimedia artist whose new media and interactive projects are concerned with the issues of identity, our dependence on external factors, the question of what we achieve through everyday communication and how much are we willing to offer. She has had solo exhibitions in Slovenia, Holland and Croatia and group exhibitions in Germany, Great Britain, Estonia, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Italy. She’s the author of the multimedia project the eye hears the ear sees, in collaboration with Lala Raščić, Ivan Marušić Klif and Dubravko Kuhta Tesla. She’s the author of a number of curatorial projects: Toy Factory (1998), Attack, Zagreb; Youth Center, Split; Otok Gallery, Dubrovnik, Tunnel (in the tunnel under Grič), Zagreb, 1995; Installations, Old printing house, Zagreb, 1994; In 1994. she was awarded the KunstRaumMitteleuropa Stipendium Bank Austria & Siemens award in Austria.