A Conversation with MADtech Students Beatrice Fini and Smilte Butkevičiūtė

FMI Graduation Show 2026 Interview Series

By Olivia Niuman

Beatrice Fini and Smilte Butkevičiūtė are both graduating from the MADtech (Media, Art, Design & Technology) department this year with projects that take different angles to reveal a feeling, memory, or emotion embedded in a particular kind of space. For Beatrice, this is through a dreamlike space: “My work is about liminal spaces and dreamscapes. I work on the concept of dissonance between the awake life and the dream life,” she shared. 

“So, I'm interested in pointing out that in dreams you often see and experience emotions and, for my work especially, spatial experiences that you cannot really experience in real life because of the subconscious. But, you can express it inside your dreams. So, you can acknowledge some more things about your awake life.” 

Smilte, on the other hand, works with reconstructing and re-imagining stories from her culture that have been lost, destroyed, or erased. “Currently, I'm working with lost Pagan heritage from Lithuania, specifically because a lot of Lithuanian Pagan heritage is just completely undocumented or has been erased due to Christianization.”

“And as someone who is from Lithuania and has a very deep connection to these things, I was brought up taught to care about those things. I've always really loved that culture and that heritage, but because it is so fragmented and so little of it exists, it feels very difficult to properly connect to it and to really understand what used to be there.

“So, with my work, what I'm trying to do is reimagine what my ancestors might have imagined that religious experience to be like, that culture to be like, because a lot of it is based on myth and legend, but there is very little visual history that actually remains. There is almost no imagery left over.” In her work, she weaves historical sources with her own imagination to recreate what that history might have looked like.”  

Both artists have shifted their approach - conceptually and physically - over the last two years of the study, but the core element has remained the same. Beatrice’s liminal spaces have gained a slightly more personal angle. “I started this course being interested in doing more environment design, so all sorts of spaces, outside spaces, inside spaces.

“But at the same time, last year, I was building digital worlds to escape reality, while now, I'm more building digital environments to better know reality and myself.” When asked if she thinks this helps an audience connect more with the work, she agreed: “Last year it was kind of more, you could say it's not a ‘real’ space. Even now, probably, they are not real spaces, but I think people have experienced them anyway, somehow, in their dreams, in reality. So I think maybe you could play the video game and be, oh, I've been here, oh, I've seen this.” For her, dreamlike spaces have an inherent connection to memory and reality because it is impossible to dream of something that you never saw. “It's always something that you saw and your brain kind of processes it, maybe as something that you don't recognize, but you have seen it already. So it's part of your memory already.” 

As for her shift over the last two years, Smilte became more comfortable working with physical objects. While her work has always been primarily digital, “in the past two years I have found myself tinkering a lot more and playing with Arduinos and buttons, and I have actually found that it's not as scary as I thought it was.

“So even though I have still returned to the screen for my graduation project, I'm glad that I will be graduating with the knowledge that I can actually do physical things, and it's not going to be a terrifying experience.” 

Along the way, both artists were also inspired, helped, and influenced by their peers in the MADtech department. Smilte said that Eryn’s (Eryn Bosma) attitude has inspired her to lean a little bit into silliness. For her, Eryn “has always been sort of an inspiration because of the fun and creative nature of the work. It just brings me so much joy whenever I see the things that she makes.”

Beatrice noted how she learned a lot from Joyce (Ying-Chen Joyce Lin) when it came to technical problems, and that she has learned from their whole cohort: “Even if our artistic practices are different, still we learn from each other, both technical, emotional, how to support each other, how to even behave in stressful situations for each other.”  

Students in the MADtech department work with a wide range of media and materials: audio, video, coding, AI, electronics, sensors, machines, and anything in between. I asked them both how their chosen format helped them express the specific themes of their projects. 

For Beatrice, it is important to create an immersive experience for the audience. “My personal preference and my personal practice is around game engines. So, for me, that is a medium where you can actually kind of experience it in the first person, and I try to make you feel that dissonance also.” She will be showing a video game called Noclip, titled after the internet subculture term that is used as a way to enter liminal spaces through a “glitch” in reality. Noclip is made of constructed architectural and spatial phenomena gathered from her dreams, translated into a form where a viewer can explore and maybe find some of their own glitches in the reality of the game. 

Smilte will be showing a hand-drawn animated film called Alkos at the graduation show. “Illustration is just my primary way of expressing myself. I feel like the most freedom that I get is through illustration. But, illustration by itself just sort of exists on a piece of paper, and with movement is where it sort of comes to life a little bit better.”

Immersion and interactivity are also important elements to her, but for this project, she decided to show a film due to the nature of the story that she wants to tell: “In this particular case, because the story that I'm trying to tell is a little bit long and a little bit complex, I realized that the interactivity might actually detract a little bit from the story.

“The format of a film helps a bit with sort of guiding the audience through the story and just allowing the person watching to simply be immersed instead of thinking about game mechanics.” 

Beatrice and Smilte’s work will be on view at the Frank Mohr Institute Graduation Show at the A-Kerk in Groningen from 25-28 June, 2026. For more interviews, information, and details about the students and their graduation work, keep an eye on the event page on our website and follow us on Instagram.