2020
Deni Horvatić,
SCAN
Marina Viculin Award 2020 was awarded to Deni Horvatić for the project SCAN, presented at the Gallery Miroslav Kraljević in Zagreb as part of the 11th Organ Vida Festival, curated by Lovro Japundžić.
“Privacy advocates will find it difficult to convince the public that traditional definitions of privacy hold greater value than the freedom to leave one’s home. This does not mean that privacy as a value should be abandoned or diminished; rather, it is possible to rethink it beyond metaphor—toward new boundaries aligned with the practical challenges contemporary society faces.”¹
In a time of self-isolation, the home becomes the primary site of experience. Suspended between a film set and a black box theatre, it transforms into a stage for a life that, until recently, unfolded elsewhere. The illusion of normalcy is sustained by the screen, which continuously acquires new functions. Within this newly established framework—isolated behind glass—we continue to fulfill our needs, desires, and obsessions: meetings and intimate encounters via Zoom, social exchanges through Chatroulette, Michelin-starred meals delivered by Wolt, or early-morning raves at Club Quarantine. The screen becomes the central site of meaningful contact, enabling a form of reintegration into a society from which we are physically detached. Before it, we confess, learn, dance, and undress—constructing identities, or at least approximations of who we believe ourselves to be.
I magnify your feet with my thumbs.
The expansion of screen-mediated communication opens new fields for voyeurism and surveillance. In its interaction with technology, the body becomes both extension and interface—translated into code, data, and infrastructure. Much like the stranger’s arrival in Teorema, the screen seduces, extracts confession, and destabilizes identity, transforming the subject into information. Surveillance is no longer understood simply as the act of watching, but as a system of organization, analysis, and storage. Although bodies and actions remain its raw material, the human dimension of observation is increasingly erased. The central agent becomes the algorithm—an “eye” that is far from neutral, shaped by embedded beliefs, assumptions, and biases that operate under the guise of objectivity.²
While the pandemic has intensified our cohabitation with the screen, it has also accelerated the redefinition of privacy. Across many contexts, sophisticated technologies of mass domestic surveillance have emerged under the pretext of public health. The logic of “trusted computing”—surveillance by consent—has enabled the repurposing of tools historically tied to warfare and profit, now mobilized in the name of preserving life. One such speculative framework is SCAN, an experimental program attributed to the Government of the Republic of Croatia. Integrated into personal devices as a wide-angle micro-scanner, SCAN establishes an expanded ecosystem of monitoring, continuously recording behavioral patterns both inside and outside the home.
The power of trusted computing lies precisely in its invisibility. Computers, chips, networks, and clouds operate as constant observers—capturing, sorting, and interpreting data. For years, there has been a desire to resist such infrastructures: to remain unseen, to evade systems that fix representation to coordinates of time, space, and affect.³ Yet prolonged isolation has gradually shifted this position, encouraging a relinquishing of invisibility and a surrender of control to systems like SCAN—systems that paradoxically promise a renewed access to visibility itself.
Refrences:
¹ Bruno Maçães, “Only Surveillance Can Save Us From Coronavirus,” Foreign Policy, 2020.
² Douglas Thomas, “Surveillance in the Age of ‘Trusted Computing’,” in No Internet, No Art: A Lunch Bytes Anthology, Onomatopee 102, 2015.
³ Hito Steyerl, “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation,” e-flux Journal, 2012.
Deni Horvatić (b. 1991, Čakovec) is a student of Art History and Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. His artistic practice spans photography, video art, and CGI.
He worked for several years at Studio Silvio Vujičić and with the fashion brand E.A. 1/1 S.V., where he was engaged as a researcher and led communications and visual design. More recently, he has collaborated with the fashion brand XD Xenia Design. Horvatić is the recipient of the Marina Viculin Award in 2020. His first solo exhibition, SCAN, was realized as part of the 11th Organ Vida International Photography Festival (Hesitant Images) and took place at the Gallery Miroslav Kraljević.
He lives and works in Zagreb and Čakovec.