Eternal Engine (Martix Navrot & Jagoda Wójtowicz)

Unbelievable Geomagnetic Storm. Hyper-myth*, 2024
video, 7′30″
media: text, 3D, Unreal Engine, Python, Sound, Remix

A massive geomagnetic storm has been raging across Earth for a few days, the phenomenon caused by solar wind impacting the Earth’s magnetosphere – our planet’s magnetic field. It usually coincides with powerful solar eruptions referred to as coronal mass ejections, resulting in huge volumes of charged particles reaching the Earth. These particles disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field. Most commonly, they cause no major failure or damage, their presence indicated by the appearance of the aurora borealis – yet more powerful ejections can harm electronic devices and shut them down, in extreme cases disrupting entire infrastructure systems.
This time, our Sun’s activity has reached the maximum, confirming speculations regarding its destructive impact on human technologies.
Electronic appliances and monitoring systems are malfunctioning. Luxury automobiles are mutinous. Royal Servers have been destabilised. Changes to the terrestrial electromagnetic field may affect our inner electromagnetic field…
Believers in the destructive and hallucinogenic force of the phenomenon, the Court Jester and Empress of Time Extinct have recognised it as the long-awaited opportunity to rebel against the rule of the King and Queen of the Immortal Castle. In order to reach the Castle, they will have to travel the Unending Highway, facing their own imaginings, and desires born of the new systems.

* Hyper-myth / hyper-legend – a term coined by the Eternal Engine duo to describe the new model of mythology which gives rise to new archetypes rooted in current technological, environmental, and social phenomena.
** Immortal Castle – image of a monumental hyper-mythical system, where the King and Queen, the Castle’s perpetual guardians, are in charge of their digital kingdom, where capitalism is eternal, incited by the logic of profit and domination. The vision is one of a self-propelled chain of corporations united in a pervasive structure – a system seemingly without beginning or end, our mentality confined within its own borders..

Eternal Engine – multidisciplinary queer artistic duo formed by Jagoda Wójtowicz (she/her) and Martix Navrot (they/them, he/him). Martix Navrot (official ID name: Marta Anna Nawrot) is a programmer, poet, and audio and virtual experience artist. Graduated with a master’s degree from the Archisphere Studio, Faculty of Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Participated in the Erasmus Exchange Programme at the Glasgow School of Art, Interaction Design programme. Assisted Piotr Kopik at the 3D and Virtual Occurrences I Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the years 2020-2023. Jagoda Wójtowicz is a multidisciplinary artist, 3D designer, gaming experience author, and audio artist. Graduated with a master’s degree from the Archisphere Studio, Faculty of Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Former (2021) head of the New Media Studio at the Faculty of Stage Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. The duo have been collaborating for 6 years, engaging in speculative narratives regarding technological acceleration trajectories, technomysticism, parascience theories, post-labour, and the quantum future and psychedelic present. In their artistic practice, they critically investigate the domination of big tech corporations, analysing alternative technological development paths through the lens of storytelling, worldbuilding, and radical imagination. Every project authored by the duo involves a speculative multidisciplinary narrative with a post-real imagery focus, basing either on new media (i.a. VR, AR, AI, 3D, video, sonic fiction, creative coding) or on textual content, sculpture and space. Eternal Engine have shown their works i.a. at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Morris Gallery in collaboration with Tate Liverpool, BFI London, Krupa Art Foundation in Wrocław, Skala Gallery Poznań, HOS Gallery in Warsaw, Import Export gallery in Warsaw and Slug Art Gallery in Leipzig, at the Unsound Festival in Cracow, and many others. In 2022, the duo took part in the Unseen Futures art residency organised by Abandon Normal Devices in Manchester, and targeting queer female digital artists. That was also the year of Eternal Engine making the European Change Makers 2022 list published annually by Creative Europe.

photo: Adam Gut