Ivan Marusic Klif

The artwork of Ivan Marušić Klif feature two aspects of media art: one is the use of contemporary electronic and digital technology in the art world context and the other is a research of relationship between human being and his/her technological environment. In the space of an art exhibition, the both aspects are usually indistinguishable: visitor enters the enclosed, technologically created environment, changes its parameters and, leaving more less visible traces of his/ her presence, walks out.

If we had to choose a corresponding genre, closest to his work, it would be an artistic intervention known as ambient installation. Whether Marušić works with sound, light or video image, he usually construes an enclosed ambience, rather different from the visitors' well-known everyday environment.
Over time, his ambiences have become technologically more complex. In 1993, his early light ambiences consisted of mobile objects whose moves changed the type and intensity of the light. In 1995, computer set in motion and controlled the installations while since 2001, Marušić has started working with complex interactive sound and video installations. The series of exhibitions entitled “Inside/Outside” that took place in Zagreb, Croatia, Maribor, Slovenia and Labin, Croatia from 2004-2007 were the best examples of the author's approach to technologically determined, interactive ambiences.

It was a video installation that functioned according to the principle of a closed circle of production, processing and projection of an image. Differently positioned cameras produced the image that went through the system of monitors and cameras for several times and then was projected on the walls and monitors in the gallery. The cameras were directly linked to the monitors and video projectors, while the computer controlled their moves, zoom and focus. There was no digital image processing. The installation was in motion, changing the ambience of the space independently of visitors. Marušić's ambiences are extremely visually attractive so we may feel that the aspect of interactivity disrupts technological biotope rather than supporting it.

One of the most distinguished qualities of Marušić's work is that, although a trace of interactivity aspect can be found, the installation is actually independent of visitors' participation. At the Galženica Gallery exhibition, the potential of his ambient installation to function on its own, without interaction with visitors, is stressed even more. With the help of computer algorithm, Marušić randomly dials phone numbers taken out from the public database of the phone book of Republic Croatia. The dialled users take part in unwanted communication through Skype web server. On the other hand, the visitors can choose between the positions of a voyeur/ listener or a participant/ collocutor.

Seen from today's perspective, there is something fair about his installations. They have never bothered us with interactivity, in fact the illusion that a visitor participates on equal terms in creation of (new) media artwork. Marušić seduces us with potentials of technology and the beauty of technollogically generated images rather than warning us of cultural and political backround of every technology, including the one used in the art context. - Klaudio Štefančić

Ivan Marušić Klif is born in 1969 in Zagreb. Graduated from The School of Audio Engineering in Amsterdam in 1994. His field of interest includes fine arts (light installations and kinetic objects), music and sound for theatre, film and television, set design (theatre, film and television) and performance art. In last few years he started working with computers - mostly in the field of multimedia programming, interactive video and problems of interfacing computers with the real world. Exhibited and performed in Holland, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Macedonia and Croatia. Teaches multimedia and installations at the Multimedia department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.

Links:
(1) http://boo.mi2.hr/~klif/
(2) http://www.mediascape.info/seiten/2006/marusic.htm