SOLL's Mediterranean Space Exploration Suit: Posthumanist Critique in Contemporary Artistic Practices

Abstract

Conceiving the Mediterranean as a fluid network of relations and data, the contemporary artwork SOLL’s Mediterranean Space Exploration Suit – created by Croatian authors Silvio Vujičić, Miro Roman, and the artificial intelligence SOLL – is examined in this paper as a case study in posthumanist critique. Within the theoretical framework of the Technocene, understood as a geological epoch in which technology actively shapes social, cultural, and ecological relations, the SOLL project opens up the possibility of a posthumanist reading of art, where artificial intelligence operates not merely as a tool but as an active co-creator. By complementing the aesthetic codes of history with newly generated digital representations, the work embraces posthumanist tendencies toward post-centralization and hybridity, questioning the boundaries between human and non-human, digital and material, mythical and algorithmic. In this sense, SOLL’s Mediterranean Space Exploration Suit is not only an artistic experiment but also a theoretical contribution to debates on posthumanist strategies for overcoming the limitations of the Technocene, affirming ideas of openness, plurality, and transformation as potential responses to contemporary challenges.