World.exe

(2020–2021) collage generator: online interactive audiovisual application

The World.exe project consists of two parts: HelloWorld.exe (2020) and ByeByeWorld.exe (2021). The interactive collage speculates on the degraded state of the world today (i.e., in 2021) and on a distant future, long after the extinction of the human species.

ByeByeWorld.exe

(2021) Collage Generator V2.0: online interactive audiovisual application

ByeByeWorld.exe, is a digital collage generator presented as an interactive audiovisual application. Developed in collaboration with artist Nejc Trampuž, the application is programmed by Srđan Prodanović, with sound design by Tim Kropivšek. This is the second part of the World.exe project, which, in these turbulent pandemic times, takes on a digital form. The interactive generator creates collages of surreal landscapes, with user interaction based on a stream of news items—more or less closely related to environmental issues.

The title of the exhibition, ByeByeWorld.exe, is a logical continuation of the first part of the project, HelloWorld.exe. The phrase "Hello, World" is commonly the first output produced by beginners learning to program. Similarly named programs are typically used to demonstrate the basic syntax of a given programming language. The .exe extension refers to an executable file format used by many operating systems—"execute" meaning both to run a program and, ominously, to carry out a sentence.

The first part of the project, HelloWorld.exe, is set in a distant future where humans no longer inhabit the Earth. In contrast, ByeByeWorld.exe brings us back to a moment in time when we say "goodbye, world"—likely not only to the planet as it was before us, but perhaps also to our own future. The project moves from a post-human future, the year 3020, back to the age of the Anthropocene—specifically, to the beginning of the year 2021.

HelloWorld.exe

(2020) Collage Generator V1.0: online interactive audiovisual application

The exhibition titled HelloWorld.exe is the first half of the World.exe project, which, in these turbulent pandemic times, takes on a digital form: an interactive online collage generator. These collages depict surreal landscapes, dated to the year 3020 – many years after the extinction of the human species, when nature once again seeks a new balance.

The collage-making process (which Trampuž had previously carried out manually in Photoshop using a similar principle) was transformed, together with programmer Srđan Prodanović, into an interactive, digital generative experience, accessible via computer and the internet. This introduces a new, temporal component and simultaneously enables viewer interaction, allowing the work to be experienced in a much more personalised way. The collage generator is built from fragments of photographs found online. The author has damaged these fragments of natural landscapes, phenomena, animals, and other visuals through exaggerated, destructive post-production processes—strongly distorting their colors and brightness values—and throughout the entire process, additional (e.g. compression) artifacts may emerge. Through interaction, a virtual collage is automatically generated before the user's eyes, based on their typing activity. The aim is to establish a direct relationship between the entered text and the image, but this does not occur; the author also does not always observe a correlation between political discourse and reality, and the actions themselves are ecologically alarming. The user of the generator has access to a magical button: delete. In the real world, that button does not exist. The algorithm also contains an element of randomness, which is predetermined by the entered characters. This means that the number of possible landscape variations the generator can produce is greater than we can calculate, but the results for the same character combinations are always identical. The experience is rounded out by a soundscape generated from sounds prepared by musician Tim Kropivšek. In creating the audio, Kropivšek followed a logic of destruction: nature sound recordings found online were heavily distorted using post-production tools, and multiple tracks layered at once form the soundscape of the generator.

The title of the exhibition is a portmanteau of the file extension .exe and the phrase "Hello, World!" This phrase is often the first thing written by those learning to program. Similarly named programs, which typically display this phrase, are used to demonstrate the basic syntax of a given programming language. The .exe extension is commonly associated with executable files in many operating systems – the so-called "executable file format" ("execute" in English meaning either to run or to kill).