Tradition, Untraditionally

Created 2025
Medium: Audiovisual AI

Created in collaboration with ÚĽUV, an institution focused on
preserving and developing Slovakia’s living cultural heritage, the project examines how tradition can be reimagined within a contemporary, open, and inclusive context. Rather than presenting folk culture as something fixed, nostalgic, or tied to nationalist narratives, it approaches tradition as a living and evolving space that allows for experimentation and new interpretations.

Collaborator: ÚĽUV

The audiovisual piece draws on traditional Slovak visual elements such as embroidery motifs and Čičmany-inspired geometry and places them in dialogue with digital technologies. AI-generated visuals created through Stream Diffusion are further developed in TouchDesigner, where real-time audio-reactive processes allow the ornaments to move, pulse, and transform. Through this process, traditional forms become dynamic, responsive, and grounded in the present.

① Final Audiovisual Piece

② Behind the Process

Generative traditional ceramics

A unique Slovak wire craft

Generative wood carving

The soundtrack is built around the electro-folk compilation Liptov, released by the Prague-based community project Punctum.
The album brings together contemporary Czech and Slovak electronic producers who reinterpret traditional folk songs from the Liptov region, originally documented in the 1982 collection Liptov - A panorama of Folk Songs and Music Culture.

Elements developed in this project—specifically the use of Stream Diffusion and the fusion of AI-generated patterns with traditional embroidery motifs—were later applied in an illustration created for PATVAR magazine. The illustrated poem is available in the online issue HERE.