The world is tearing at the seams: rights are revoked under the guise of law, freedoms are tightened with barbed wire, and voices are being silenced.
The contemporary world offers no stability, only constant overflow – between the real and the virtual, freedom and control, rights and restrictions. Structures fracture from within, and the boundaries between opposites grow porous. Concepts lose their sharpness, roles shift, and positions that once seemed clear now mirror each other in a cracked reflection.
In such a world, art does not seek refuge. It does not pretend to know, nor to resolve. Instead, it moves into tensions, contradictions, and fractures. It breaks with binaries and enters the space in between: undefined, hybrid, ambivalent.
Where civilization loses its compass and language becomes imprecise, art takes the risk. The construction of identity becomes an act of resistance. And every ambivalence — a new form of expression.
The fly is watching you — mind where you step!
The visual identity of Videomedeja 2025 is centered around the image of the fly—an ostensibly ordinary insect that, in fact, possesses extraordinary visual capabilities. The fly perceives the world through complex compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny receptors, allowing it to see as a mosaic of multiple images. Unlike the focused human gaze, a fly’s field of vision spans nearly a full 360 degrees, enabling it to simultaneously register multiple directions and perspectives. What to us appears as a blurred, rapid motion, the fly detects in a series of sharp sequences—its nervous system is capable of processing around 250 to 300 images per second. The fly’s eyes have evolved for speed: they may offer low spatial resolution, but their exceptional temporal sensitivity allows this tiny observer to experience reality as fragmented, manifold, and highly dynamic.
This fractured way of seeing—multiple simultaneous perspectives and accelerated perception—resonates deeply with the aesthetics of contemporary video art and new media. Much like the fly’s eye, which assembles countless fragments into a single vision, modern video works often consist of multiple simultaneous frames or parallel narrative threads, creating a mosaic of experience for the viewer.
Unlike traditional cinema, video art allows for storytelling in a fragmented and abstract manner, granting artists great freedom to experiment and innovate in visual composition. Artists employ advanced digital techniques to explore themes from multiple perspectives, breaking away from conventional narrative structures. Time and space become flexible elements: events need not unfold linearly, but can be cut, repeated, or occur simultaneously, while scenes are often set in virtual environments where perspective and scale play with our perception. This kind of multiperspectivity and nonlinearity—in which the whole experience is assembled from fragments—reflects the same principle as the fly’s compound vision: to comprehend a complex image, we must accept that it is composed of many partial views.
On a broader level, this visual fragmentation serves as a metaphor for contemporary society and identity. The festival’s theme, Ambivalent Identity 2025, points to a world split between extremes, where stable foundations of meaning no longer hold. Just as the fly constructs its perception of reality through fleeting fragments gathered by its compound eyes, so too is our sense of self shaped by an overabundance of perspectives and conflicting information in the digital age.
The boundaries between what is real and virtual, permissible and forbidden, have become porous and blurred—we now live in a constant overflow from one reality into another. In such an environment, identity is no longer a singular, stable category, but an ambivalent fusion of hybrid and mutable aspects. Art, therefore, does not seek simple resolutions but situates itself within the very tensions of contemporaneity: it occupies a “space in-between,” defined by ambiguity, hybridity, and ambivalence. It is precisely there, at the intersection of opposites, that new forms of expression emerge—much like the fly’s gaze, which shapes a coherent image from chaos and fragments, art embraces uncertainty and transforms it into creative force.
For nearly three decades, Videomedeja has fostered this kind of pluralism of vision and an aesthetic of experimentation. Founded in 1996 in Novi Sad, this contemporary media art festival has built a unique tradition and a reputation recognized in the international context. With a consistent focus on progressive, avant-garde artistic practices, Videomedeja promotes independent production and innovative artistic forms in new media.
Its program brings together and collides a wide range of media and genres: from experimental video, animation, and sound installations to interactive projects in the realms of extended reality (XR), virtual reality (VR), robotics, and artificial intelligence. This breadth reflects the festival’s boldness in stepping into territories where art intersects with cutting-edge technology and pressing social phenomena. The audience, in turn, is not a passive observer—at Videomedeja, it is invited to feel, reflect, and actively engage with the artwork, whether by immersing itself in a VR environment or interacting with multimedia installations.
As one of the few festivals of its kind in the region, Videomedeja plays a key role in connecting the local scene with global currents in contemporary art and new media. It is a laboratory for the visual future and a meeting place for courageous ideas, where each year affirms that art can be both a mirror and a force of transformation. That is why the fly—this tiny, all-seeing witness with a multiplied gaze—is a fitting symbol for Videomedeja 2025. It reminds us that, in order to understand ambivalent identity in a fragmented world, we must broaden our own perspective and learn to see the world from multiple angles at once, embracing complexity as an essential part of the contemporary experience.