The exhibition by the winner of the main prize at the Parameter Arts Fair presents a time-based and site-specific protocol that appropriates abandoned military technology into an apparatus for the transmission of wishes.
The same meteors that carried our ancestors’ worries and our wishes were used by NATO for long-range communication in the 1960s. When a meteoroid enters the atmosphere at high speed, the friction and heat create a glowing trail of ionised particles. These sizzling, glowing, hot traces of plasma were instrumentalised to reflect radio waves, thereby establishing extremely brief time windows for data to flow through. Even today, the persistent recurrence of meteors makes them a potential military backup for satellite communications in the event of atmospheric nuclear explosions.
The Earthside Wish Machine is a time-based, site-situated meteor protocol (literally based on Earth’s rotation and orientation) for wish transmission, which appropriates obsolete military technology as a personal wish apparatus. It establishes a (re)generative network connected by glowing ionised air and military radar signals in place of copper or fibreglass. Rather than through strategic algorithms, our wishes become mediated through meteors. Thus, the Earthside Wish Machine is also a rehearsal for a future where our technological infrastructures do not and cannot follow a linear upwards trajectory towards stability and advancement but are cyclical and responsive to Earth.
jiawen uffline (*~362 PPM) exists as a user most of the time in her life and is surveilled by her computers, phones, browsers, door cams and tooth brush. Having little agency both technologically and politically, she seeks hidden possibilities in the cracks of the internet, queering the given identity of a standard user. jiawen’s research addresses technology as memory and desire, with contaminated history, but is presented pure, sterilised, decontextualised and dehistoricised, operating through scaling and reducing rather than relating. jiawen looks into the infrastructures, materiality, politics and imaginaries of technology, which she also cares a lot about.
Free admission.
28. 5.–3. 7. 2026
Text: jiawen uffline
Exhibition production: Kino Šiška and Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory, supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
The exhibition is part of the Adela – International Festival of Generative Arts. The artwork was selected through a public open call in the frame of the Parameter – Generative Arts Fair (2026).
Expert committee: Davide Bevilacqua, Maja Burja, Luka Frelih, Aleksandra Jovanić, Katja Pahor, Bérénice Serra
