A portrait of the artist created using Fresnel lighting: Atelier Peraica, September 2025, Split
Martina Moon Zelenika (b. 1978) is a Croatian transdisciplinary artist and academic whose work moves fluidly between drawing, sound, moving image, and emerging technologies. She works across a wide range of media, including: spatial drawing, video, geomorphic reliefs, sensor-based performance, augmented reality, animation, and generative systems while maintaining drawing as the conceptual and material core of her practice. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of New Media Art at Algebra Bernays University in Zagreb.
At the heart of Zelenika’s work is an ongoing exploration of how traditional artistic processes can expand through technology. Her drawings do not remain static; they evolve into sound, data, and immersive environments. A key aspect of her practice is the sonification of data, translating X-ray scans, biosensor signals, satellite transmissions, and even drawn forms into sound. Through this process, she creates works that invite audiences to experience visual, physical, and invisible phenomena in new, sensory ways.
Her artistic approach is both intuitive and research-driven, shaped by an interest in perception, embodiment, and the relationship between human and non-human systems. Rather than treating technology as something distant or purely analytical, she uses it as a means of connection linking the body, natural processes, and wider cosmological structures. In this sense, her work resonates with posthumanist thought, particularly in its attention to relationality, transformation, and expanded forms of awareness.
Working within the field of post-digital art, Zelenika does not see the digital as a separate or “new” medium, but as something embedded in everyday life. Her projects bring together artistic intuition, scientific thinking, and technological processes, forming a practice that moves across and beyond established disciplinary boundaries.
Over the past decade, she has developed a number of distinctive and forward-looking works. These include TAB_letter (2011), a musical alphabet; 6th SENSE, MSSS(2018), which combine augmented reality with drawing and sound; Particles (2018); La Petit Mort (2019); and Receptilium (2018), a performance in which the human body functions as a live audiovisual instrument through biosensor data. In New Europe (2017), she explored the transformation of mineral structures into sound, while her later projects ChORUS, MSSS (2019) and ChORUS2 (2024–2025) engage with signals from the Earth’s magnetosphere. Alongside these works, she has continuously developed a series of drawings (2017–2025) based on strange and simple attractors, reflecting her long-term engagement with chaos theory.
Zelenika has presented her work in over thirty solo exhibitions and more than thirty group exhibitions and international festivals, across Europe and internationally, including Germany, Belgium, Spain, Denmark, Austria, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Italy, and South Korea. Her work has also been shared in academic contexts, including the RE:SOUND conference at Aalborg University and the POSTSENSORIUM programme at the RIXC Festival in Riga.
She graduated in 2001 from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb (Printmaking Art), and completed her MA in Video and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana in 2006. She has received several scholarships, awards, and numerous grants supporting her artistic research and production. She is a member of the Digital Art Archive (ADA, Krems, Austria), ULUPUH (Croatian Association of Applied Artists), and Matrix Croatica in Zagreb.
Through both her artistic and teaching work, she advocates for an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach to art education – one that brings together experimentation, technological awareness, and critical reflection.