The Yugoslavian kid
I was born in Yugoslavia, a country no longer on a map of the world. I was raised during a civil war almost erased from the European memory, by parents openly opposing the war amidst a nationalistic current which demanded it. My mother would stand perplexed as I, her child, would sing nationalistic songs for the army in the streets, knowing I would receive candy. When asked on the first day of school what I wanted to become, I climbed on the table, stated: "a singer", and started to sing. For my 10th birthday, my father gave me as a present the book "First three minutes of the universe". He told me about ancient Greece, about the French New Wave, about theories of the cosmos, about the Russian realists...
I heard my mother say that the war saved us, because we owed a lot of money, which lost all value due to inflation - due to war. I grew up in a country which ridiculed people who wanted to achieve something, and made its best to bring them down. I grew up in a country in which I could safely hitch-hike and accept invitations to a sleep over from unknown men, without feeling any fear.
At the intersection of so much "history", so many confusing moral debates, so many opinions, I have developed a deep interest in the famous "human condition". My art and my science stem from that same root, a wish to understand and to be liberated, to fully understand and accept the limitation of categories, moralising, opinions, but instead to honestly desire to live forever, and to live each day accordingly.
The reason for art
I started off as an artist. I was painting, dancing, playing music and composing early in my teens. I think I had not even considered that art is something you can make into a feasible career because of lack of examples in my life. I grew up in a 5k people town, and I hadn't known anyone to seriously pursue arts. After a long scientific detour (on that more underneath), I have realised that I crave the vitality, embodiment and direct engagement with my peers and audience that art makes possible. Today, my artistic interests are quite centred around two things: physical presence (stage arts) and experiential novelty.
By physical presence I literally mean anything where (to quote the giant) the artist is present. I feel that the physical presence raises the stakes of everything - since most of our brain power is dedicated to interpreting social, bodily and emotional cues from others, the physical performer needs to be very skilled, very honest, and very inspired. Only then can they weave the necessary energy to make this presence come about in the audience too. I explore this element in my theatre productions by identifying the subtle line along which the rupture for both performer and audience is possible.
The idea of experiential novelty came to me in a very primitive form when I first heard and danced to electronic music. It opened a mental space for me which I previously hadn't known to exist, and it therefore increased my being. This is the type of art I strive for. Not easy, but sure is a great direction to keep in mind. I experienced this again after the concerts of Jojo Mayer & Nerve and Mark Giuliana's Jazz Quartet, after seeing the Triptych from Peeping Tom, and more recently when I saw the amazing object theatre performance Maria and Myselfies.
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The good and the bad of science
Because of my father's intense love for science, myth and arts, I was enchanted by it all since I can remember. The school never really delivered, though, and I hadn't felt a genuine passion for scientific work until we got some old computers at school, and I got to make a website. That is when the realisation hit me that I can use (almost) regular language to instruct the computer what to do, and it could do almost anything! In that moment I decided to study computer science.
I enjoyed the university, but already during my studies I felt a growing disappointment in the practicality and engineering feel of it all. People were not preoccupied with the question of what all of this technology will do to people, and how to meet people's needs with it. There was a general attitude at the university that the human sciences were somehow beneath us, and this felt extremely wrong.
It took me while to understand that, while I found CS genuinely interesting, it wasn't something I really had questions about. I used it as a tool. But what I did have questions about were living systems. I shortly hopped onto bioinformatics, before understanding that bioinformatics was just CS for biological data, and then finally found my proper field of intrigue in systems biology. In this field, people were studying exactly what I wanted to know - how are living systems organized, and which types of organisational structures can support perseverance of such complex systems. With this research, I obtained a PhD in Theoretical Biophysics.
Apart from ugly moral conflicts regarding authorship and credits, I found it quite dissatisfying that there seemed to be little interest in the inquiry of the underlying assumptions of the models we produced. This has inspired the now new stage of my research: an inquiry into the cosmological underpinnings of our world-models, the models we use to understand the world around us.
Current work in art
I am currently working mostly in the field of visual and music theatre. Music, for me, has the greatest possibility of transcendence and a direct influence on our emotional state. I am interested in topics of growth, overcoming, femininity & masculinity, mythology, archetypes and fairy tales. I am currently revising the myth of Adam and Eve and plan to portray Eve's perspective of awakening in Eden as a live musical audiobook in concert format. The work will be loosely based on Mark Twain's "Eve's Diaries", a sweet, beautiful and profound work of his last years.
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My recent development has lead me to appreciate the power of the new that comes from joining of the (seeming) opposites. I am particularly interested in the merger of the holy and the silly, and the reflections these dimensions create in our life force, sexuality, spirituality and humour.
I plan to explore all of this in EVE.
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I play the classical and the e-guitar and sing. However, I find myself more and more drawn to electronic music, with its great malleability and capacity of creating grand narratives with simple (and cheap ;) ) equipment.
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Current research
My current research is focused on something I call the "cosmological imaginary". It is the set of beliefs that underlie our models of the world. The most straight-forward way I have found to describe this is through the famous Bohr-Einstein debate. It was not a scientific debate, it was a cosmological debate between scientists, in which neither could be persuaded to take seriously the other's opinion, because it clashed with their own cosmological foundations through which they saw the world. Einstein could not believe that there is chance in the building blocks of the universe, and Bohr could.
While this is a straightforward example, I think that the cosmological imaginary is influential in many of everyday our activities, and that we can greatly benefit by actively examining it, and developing a language in which to talk about it.
Because of my scientific background, and because of relative simplicity of science compared to phenomena such as religion, this is where I'm starting my research. I am now working in examining the history of scientific development, and its metaphysical foundations.
In parallel, I am educating myself in interpretation of myths and fairy tales, which are sometimes the only remnants of times long gone, and if read properly, can reveal a lot of the preoccupations and attitudes of humans of different times.
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