Matej Mihevc
Drift Index

Curated by
Maja Burja

Exhibition
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
7 October–13 November 2026

Opening: 7 October, 19:00–21:00

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

“It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”¹

Windows boarded up with cardboard provisionally separate the drifter’s space from the sweltering atmosphere of a self-digesting grey zone. Shifting air masses carry weathered plastiglomerated material inside, an omnipresent metabolic dust that gathers in the corners of his studio. Every so often, the winds bring in an interesting remnant: an abandoned fragment of latent desire, which the drifter examines under a magnifying glass during network outages.

When the connection is restored, the dormant surfaces of the screens are flooded by a luminous stream of content, directing the gaze along updated vectors of arbitrary cultural production. A matter of sampling, engineering and market co-optation—at once everyone’s and no one’s.

Successful immersion in the generative mass requires some detail to strike the drifter and trigger an obsessive search for something indefinable. This is followed by rapid intuitive validation on the local server and a combing through printouts of related coordinates that have been captured on thermal rolls over the course of the day. Magnification, sharpening, solarisation… Once the intuition of a drift has been consolidated, it is time to post to the Drift Index.

The Drift Index network developed on the remains of subcultures and against the backdrop of an omnipresent and flattened visuality. It connects self-proclaimed drifters who use the network interface to conduct amateur investigations into visual codes and media artefacts in the interspaces of a self-contained system. Drifters can be compared to coolhunters, who at the turn of the millennium searched the streets for early signs of future trends—sneakers, baggy jeans, gaming consoles and the like. Mass marketing would then equip these with an image, a story and the aura of a world of their own, translating them into market objects and identities.

With the dematerialisation and platformisation of markets, the dominance of automated marketing loops, and the capacity for the endless generation of personalised content, cultural production has become an autonomous creator of infinite consumer subjectivities. Images no longer function merely as carriers of meaning, but as complex feedback systems² and affective attractors³ within a collective hallucinatory exchange.

In an environment of post-synthetic and ubiquitous production, the drifter spends his time in unproductively attentive observation and mapping of overlooked artefacts, channels and connections, as well as in the aimless exploration of the field of possibilities within the circuits of images…

¹ Gibson, W. (2003). Pattern Recognition. Viking, p. 48.
² Cf. O’Murchú, N. (2026). When images become systems: on visuality, affect and platform power. Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, p. 4: “[…] visuality becomes a form of administration through which social, emotional and computational life is constructed and managed by atmospheric persuasion, algorithmic sorting, affective conditioning and aesthetic manipulation.”
³ See: Mihevc, M. “Avtonomija kontenta.” Ekran, July/August 2026.