The exhibition of the 10th edition of Fubar — world’s longest-running glitch-art festival — gathered more than a hundred artists and collectives exploring the many edges of digital experimental practice. Glitch art as the art of error, deconstructs and reveals the hidden infrastructures of digital electronic semantics and reveals the messy poetics beneath our everyday tools. The theme of our 2024 exhibition focused on archiving failure and errors, and the curatorial selection included failed and never before exhibited new media artwork. Our collective exhibition aimed to highlight art that emerges from cracks in DIY new-media workflows — failed attempts, corrupted files, broken code, lost references and other ghosts of the digital pipeline.

For this year’s presentation within the Empathy Festival (24–30/11/2025, Rijeka–Osijek–Zagreb, HR), we selected a collection from our 2024 archive, that shows how wide the spectrum of opportunities brought by “failure” really is. Failure is often an amazing starting point, a space of freedom or newness, or a surprise detour. It’s a demonstration of our resourcefulness, patience and imagination. Within failures we find ideas, patterns, and new potentials — and by sharing them, we empower others. This artwork collection is based on experimental video spanning motives such as feedback loops, shell-scripted collage, machinima performance, remixed archives, analogue degradation, as well as AI conflicts, alchemical incompleteness and digital residue. Each piece comes to life within the freedom brought by errors in procedural shifts, algorithmic repetition, performative simulation, infinite loops and broken digital memory. As a part of this exhibition programme takes place at the Typhlological Museum Zagreb, we developed audio description (“AD”) in collaboration with the Center for Audio Description, aiming to broaden access to experimental multimedia art.

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List of Works by Location:

Typhlological Museum Zagreb

• Ashkan [IR] Unclear Sideway [2024] 02’39’’ (incl. AD)
• Henrique Cartaxo [BR] How to walk around and be perceived as normal [2024] 01’39’’ (incl. AD)
• Michael Betancourt [US] Mnemonic Fields [2024] 02’00’’ (incl. AD)
• Rachel Efruss [US] Noise Study 02 [2024] 03’06’’ (incl. AD)
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• crash-stop [IE] Words words words [2024] 02’51’’ (incl. AD)
• jonCates [US] RGBMTLRMX [2024] 01’00’’ (incl. AD)
• mother_woolf [IE] rebis-in-situ [2024] 01’11’’ (incl. AD)
• Tristan Calvo-Studdy [US] TEXT DEGRADATION [2024] 02’27’’ (incl. AD)

City Library Rijeka

• Estelle Flores [BR] Explaining-Showing-Doing Series [2024] 05’30’’ (incl. AD)

Cultural Centre Osijek

• Matteo Campulla [IT] THAT FEELING [2024] 40’20’’ (original sound)
• VAL1S [HR] 空っぽの夢 [Empty Dreams] [2023-2024] 41’27’’ (original sound)

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More details about the Artists and the artwork on display can be found here: https://formatc.hr/fubar-2025-expo

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Credits

The exhibition is part of the curatorial selection by Dijana Protić for the Empathy Festival 2025, held 24–30 November 2025 in Zagreb, Osijek and Rijeka, with the theme of FAILURE.

The Empathy Festival is an interdisciplinary project combining art, psychology and inclusion. Visitors can attend exhibitions, film screenings, literary discussions, lectures and workshops on mental health, free of charge. The festival offers programming for all age groups—from primary school students to seniors. All festival locations are accessible for people with disabilities.
festivalempatije.com

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Participating Artists

With work selected from the 2024 Fubar archive:
Ashkan, crash-stop, Estelle Flores, Henrique Cartaxo, jonCates, Matteo Campulla, Michael Betancourt, mother_woolf, Rachel Efruss, Tristan Calvo-Studdy, VAL1S

Fubar is an international festival dedicated to glitch art and experimental digital practices, combining exhibitions, workshops, talks and online programs. It focuses on error as a creative tool, DIY methodologies and open-source software, while bringing together artists, researchers and communities around contemporary digital art and cultural practices. Established in 2015 in Zagreb, the festival runs annually with an active online programme, and is in 2026 evolving into a biennial event for variable and glitch art.
fubar.space

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Audiovisual Adaptation

Center for Audio Description
Dramaturg: Natko Jurdana
Director: Antonio Pavlović
Narrator: Petra Težak

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Selection and Production

“Format C” Art Organization (Dina Gligo & Vedran Gligo)

Format C is an art organization focused on collaborative, inclusive and open processes in contemporary visual and interdisciplinary digital art. It operates through long-term research programs, international collaborations and public programs based on FLOSS tools, experimental methodologies and shared learning. The organization develops networked and local projects that foster participation, knowledge exchange and open cultural production, with emphasis on sustainability, accessibility and shared digital infrastructure.
formatc.hr

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Financial Support

The production of the Fubar exhibition setup is part of the Empathy Festival 2025 programme and the “Fubar Exhibition and Archive” programme, financed by the Ministry of Culture and Media, City of Zagreb, and the Kultura Nova Foundation.