Maite Cajaraville & Gisle Frøysland

Red Thread of New Media Art

Online and upstairs vitrine
Online and as part of exhibition: open throughout

Under the title Red Thread of Media Art, STWST invites artists and critical producers from the field to select projects and images from their own archives from the last 40 years in order to present the various lines of development in media art, new media, and art after new media, and to contextualize developments.

In 2025, STWST invited Piksel to contribute their version of a Red Thread of Media Art, which will also be presented at STWST84x11.

Piksel's thread aims to shed light on the DIY aspects of electronic art, drawing from 23 years of the Piksel archive, its artists, and their works. The featured projects are grouped into various DIY themes: from DIY radio to DIY bioart, from performative coding to code art, from self-destructive hardware to radical networks, and finally, from generative electronic literature to critical AI installations. Critical art, joy, and science converge in this list of projects. Many more artists could be included—digging through the Piksel archives has revealed an incredible number of original creators and relevant projects. It’s been difficult to choose just a few. If you'd like to explore more of the Piksel artists and projects, you can dive into the archive at piksel.no.

Thanks to STWST for the invitation. We truly hope you enjoy this journey through time as much as we did.

Piksel's DIY Thread is part of STWST' Red Thread of Media Art: All Threads here.

Piksel is an international network and annual event dedicated to electronic art and technological freedom. Part workshop, part festival, it takes place in Bergen, Norway, and brings together participants from over a dozen countries to exchange ideas, code, present artworks and software projects, and engage in workshops, performances, and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of free technologies.

Gisle Frøysland is the founder of the Piksel Festival. In 2014, Maite Cajaraville joined him as co-curator. Both are practicing artists developing their own bodies of work. In 2015, they formed the collective NSA.