Marko Peljhan is a conceptual artist, researcher and professor at UC Santa Barbara. He works at the intersection of art, technology and science, and his work of the last 27 years has been presented in museums and exhibitions around the world and awarded at numerous festivals and biennials. He is a recipient of the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, presented at the 50^th and 58^th Venice Biennales and documenta in Kassel. Several projects have emerged out of his work, where art is intertwined with high-tech and industry. In 2007 he co-founded the C-Astral company, a frontrunner in the field of drone production and small unmanned aerial vehicles, and was one of the key initiators of the Center Odličnosti Vesolje (Slovenian Centre of Excellence for Space Sciences and Technologies Space-SI), which produced and launched the first Slovenian NEMO-HD micro-satellite.

The event will focus on and assess the possible developmental and business opportunities of and through artistic pursuits and how artistic thinking can contribute to the growth of innovation and unexpected use of technologies.

Marko Peljhan’s projects, initiatives and collaborations extend to the fields of ecology, social reflection and aeronautical and space research. In his art practice, he often uses materials and methods that directly confront systems of social control and their strategies, the development of new communication technologies, transport and surveillance, and the question of how political, economic and military power systems accelerate technological development and how we direct this development with so-called “conversions”.

Individual counselling is intended primarily for artists who are interested in how to direct and convert their artistic pursuits into business ideas, and entrepreneurs who are interested in strategic cooperation between the art and research sectors.

Register for the workshop here.

Marko Peljhan has exhibited at Ars Electronics and in museums such as MoMA PS1, New Museum of Contemporary Art, NTT ICC in Tokyo, YCAM in Yamaguchi, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, ACC in Gwangju, and Garage in Moscow, among others. In 2001, he received the Ars Electronica Golden Nica for the Polar project, which he co-created with German artist Carsten Nicolai. Together with the American-Canadian artist Matthew Biederman, he has been leading the Arctic Perspective Initiative since 2008, which reflects on the global significance of the Arctic’s geopolitical, natural and cultural dimensions and was exhibited in 2011 at the Coded Utopia exhibition at the Modern Gallery Ljubljana. In Slovenia, he was one of the initiators behind the establishment of the Center odličnosti Vesolje (The Slovenian Centre of Excellence for Space Sciences and Technologies SPACE-SI), and in 1998 began working actively in space and aeronautical research and the culturalization of space. In 1998 in Piran, he organized for AV Studio the first live video connection between the Russian space station MIR and Slovenia while it was flying over Slovenia. On the radio waves he is known as S54MX.

The company C-Astral, co-founded with Sam Stopar and Nejc Trošt in Ajdovščina, is a frontrunner in the production of small unmanned aerial systems (UAS) with a fixed wing and a special emphasis on high productivity, durability, aerial surveying and other remote sensing methods. Commonly, their clients consist in commercial UAS operators, major institutional networks, scientific users, and government entities. Currently, C-Astral systems fly for more than a dozen governments on four continents and are used for research, missing persons, force protection, border protection, fire control, and remote sensing. They are also used by more than 100 commercial and scientific operators worldwide. C-Astral has a multidisciplinary laboratory for software and hardware for work in aerodynamics and for system integration, as well as a prototype CAD/CAM workshop for the production and modelling of composite materials. Today, C-Astral systems flies across all continents, even in extreme environments such as high-altitude open pits, deserts, mountains, Antarctica, Arctic, agricultural land, and forests around the world.