Dominika Wolska
Utopijna trajektoria, 2022–2023, instalacja wideo / środowisko generatywne, Unreal Engine
dźwięk: Filip Kołodziejczak, czas trwania: ∞
Punktem wyjścia do pracy Dominiki Wolskiej jest pojęcie antropocenu jako nowej epoki geologicznej, które współcześnie jest jedną z najczęściej dyskutowanych i najbardziej problematycznych kwestii. Artystka zastanawia się, na czym polega impas antropocenu, nazwanego przez Bernarda Stieglera „epoką bez epoki”*. Wpływ człowieka na środowisko naturalne jest nie do pominięcia. Niestety często bagatelizujemy go lub wręcz nie chcemy pamiętać o tym, że to właśnie my, ludzie, jesteśmy odpowiedzialni za krytyczne zmiany zachodzące w środowisku. Nadszedł jednak moment, gdy należy zacząć myśleć o przyszłości planety i zapewnieniu jej bezpieczeństwa. Kategoria człowieka uniwersalnego gatunku, zawierająca w sobie biologiczną tendencję do rozwoju technologicznego i wywoływania kryzysu środowiskowego, powinna być zdaniem Wolskiej zdekonstruowana. Nastanie antropocenu byłoby wszak niemożliwe bez rozwoju technologii, ten zaś nie zachodziłby bez sprzyjającej postępowi polityki, przyzwalającej na nierówności w sferze pracy i zakłócenia w obiegu surowców naturalnych.
W swojej pracy Wolska tworzy środowisko generatywne, które będąc zestawem symulacji, odzwierciedla geofizykę. Przedstawia utopijną wizję świata, w którym natura wygrywa z „epoką człowieka”. Ziemia z własną geofizjologią dąży do optymalizacji warunków życia, mimo że siła geologiczna (rozumiana jako intensywna ludzka działalność na skalę globalną, radykalnie wpływająca na przebieg procesów geologicznych) zakłóca wielkie cykle rządzące trajektorią planety.
Towarzyszący projekcji utwór Filipa Kołodziejczaka jest kolażem syntezatorowych dźwięków rozciągniętych w czasie – pogłosów i ech imitujących wielkie, otwarte, puste przestrzenie, z których dobiegają pojedyncze odgłosy. Są pozbawione melodyjności oraz dźwięków, które przypominałaby ludzkie instrumenty. Inspiracją do utworu były field recordings nagrywane na biegunie.
* Patrz: B. Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Daniel Ross, London 2018.
Anastasiia Vorobiova
Lemurian Time War, VR installation-experience: Virtual Reality, social media platform VRChat, running time: 30′
VR installation: Anastasiia Vorobiova (idea, text and digital realisation); creative team: Chris Ross-Ewart – a sound designer, En Lai Mah – dance & choreography, Pavel Mazur – AI-generated art, Inaaya Sophia Bocken – Polish-language voice, Laura Goodier – English-language voice
Vorobiova’s project ties in with her interest in activities and theories of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (British experimental cultural theorist collective), and their Writings 1997-2003. The artist claims that reading CCRU texts has boosted her logical grasp of information, affording a deeper sense of information operating on a number of cerebral activity levels. Vorobiova explores global digitisation, human entanglement in processes related thereto, shifts in perspective (anthropocentric to non-human), and revised mythologies.
The artist began developing the general project outline two years ago; approximately one month prior to the opening of the exhibition in Białystok, she proceeded to build a Lemurian Time War world on the VRChat platform, the origins of the name referencing the title of an essay describing Lemuria*, and included in Writings 1997-2003. Therein, CCRU “documents” traces of Lemurian occultism, connecting the dots of disparate stories by individuals who have encountered hidden relics of non-human intelligence. Vorobiova writes:
My focal point of fascination with the adventure arises from the fact that the deeper I delve into the concept, the higher the number of intriguing details I discover. Did you know that lemurs are primates, just like us humans? There are not that many species amongst the assorted branches primates are perched on in the animal kingdom. If we truly are simian siblings, the lemurs have chosen their own path, and there are no other primate species. Yet in all actuality, this project is all about a magical journey across a virtual world. The intent is to activate and experience magic.
Spectators will be offered the opportunity to become participants in a Virtual Reality ritual – a journey across points of tension and/or places of power in the Numogram – a Decimal Labyrinth sourced in CCRU theories. In creating her world, the artist has also referenced theories by Burroughs, Blavatsky, Crowley, Lovecraft, Jung and Gibson; she combines science fiction with elements of theosophy and futurology, psychoanalysis with mysticism. Vorobiova invites her audiences to embark upon a journey and experience the world through her – virtual – body, to “get under her skin”, as it were. The activity also indirectly assumes a meditative exploration of the self, the option made possible owing to the complex virtual world created by the artist.
* Lemuria – a continent which – according to a hypothesis by zoologist Philip Sclater (proposed in 1864, overturned in the early 20th century) – had existed, then sunk into the Indian Ocean. According to Darwinists, the hypothesis explained the isolation of lemurs on Madagascar, and the presence of their ancestors’ fossilised remains in Africa and south-eastern Asia. Lemuria is also mentioned by occultists and esoteric believers in theories regarding ostensible origins of mankind
Szymon Rogiński
Solastalgia, 2023, VR experience
The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia in 2003 to describe emotions caused by industrial landscape-related changes. Natural ecosystems are degrading at a pace we are unable to emotionally integrate. Warfare, the extraction of natural resources, pollution, and climate change are destroying human and other beings’ habitats on a scale never experienced before.
Szymon Rogiński shows the catastrophic aspect of daily life embedded in global capitalism, whose economic principle is constant growth. Facets of everyday life – housing, shops, workplaces, means of transport – are producing landscape calamities comparable to areas affected by environmental disasters.
The volume of destruction we have caused to our landscapes makes it difficult to remain sentimental about the naive aesthetics of provincial shops, or sympathetic toward the tenacity of human efforts. Having joined forces with a programming team, Szymon Rogiński created a Virtual Reality environment based on data recorded with the use of photogrammetry in Warsaw and a number of other Polish cities. The conscious use of technology lets us see the true face of the reality we inhabit.
The movements of any visitor to the virtual world of Solastalgia are ghostly. VR technology enables realistic feelings of flight, penetrating walls, hovering above streets. While the buildings and space look familiar, the viewer’s experience of them is completely different from the one we are used to in the real world. A sense of disembodied presence prevails, evoking questions about the nature of consciousness and our relationship with the outside world.
Text by Agnieszka Tarasiuk
colophon:
Concept design / directed by: Szymon Rogiński
Collaboration: Agnieszka Tarasiuk
Photogrammetry: Szymon Rogiński
Music theme: Macio Moretti
Soundscape & implementation: Gustaw Gliwiński
Digital Artists: Pavlo Mazur, Martix Navrot, Jagoda Wójtowicz
VR App Production: Marcin Marczyk
Programming: Łukasz Nizik
Graphic design: Michał Babski
Producer: National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning
Coordination: Kacper Kępiński, Klementyna Świeżewska, Joanna Waśko
Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
Co-financed by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Preparation work delivered in part under the 2018 Scholarship of the Capital City of Warsaw.
Szymon Rogiński (b. 1975 in Gdańsk) – visual artist, photographer, director, and author of photobooks. Lives and works in Warsaw. With photography as a base for his work and practice, he has been creating series for more than twenty years, focusing on nocturnes and the material qualities of light. His work, present in a number of collections, has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. In addition to his individual work, he enjoys collaborating in artistic and commercial contexts as a photographer/director.
Inspirations for his works range from road movies, pop culture and Poland (as cliché, phantasm, and place) to the Anthropocene, postapocalyptic scenarios and visions, and man-altered landscapes. Currently, he is exploring the creative use of photogrammetry as well as VR.
PXKRW (Ewelina Aleksandrowicz & Andrzej Wojtas)
Quantum Dreamweaver and the Boundless Odyssey of Synaptic Transmutation ~ Chap-ter 00, 2024
hybrid short film, 6′8″
written and directed by PXKRW
Rain: Anna Nazo @annanazo
sound: AM sin — SILVER LINING @amsin_amsin_amsin
Quantum Dreamweaver and the Boundless Odyssey of Synaptic Transmutation („QDAT-BOOST”) is an episodic, immersive odyssey—an elevated fusion of film, animation, augmented reality, poetry, sculpture, and AI.
Set in the near future, it follows Rain, a non-binary researcher, writer, and experiential designer, as they construct an organic processing unit aimed at expanding their consciousness and establishing connections with sentient entities. On this path to harnessing newfound powers, Rain encounters deities—mystical oracles offering wisdom from the spaces in between.
Viewers are granted a glimpse into Rain’s surreal memories, within the simulacrum of cognitive systems—a dream engine—where they embark on a journey of self-discovery, empowerment, transformation, and profound connection with their own body and surroundings.
This story explores the expansion of identity, the reimagining of belonging, networked consciousness, self-expression, and the search for safe space within global chaos. Through an intuitive blend of live-action and immersive media, PXKRW creates a new universe.
Ewelina Aleksandrowicz and Andrzej Wojtas are award-winning Directors and Artists, work-ing under the moniker PXKRW (aka Pussykrew). Creating visionary films, short forms, visual experiences and immersive installations. PXKRW worlds are spectacular yet sublime, they speak of body, sensuality, materiality. PXKRW have built a compelling universe, influencing new modes of storytelling, elevating evolving identities and empowering narratives. They have created iconic pieces with music artists (Peaches, Sevdaliza, Chloe x Halle) and collaborated with institutions and independent art spaces. Hailing from club culture, with a background in fine art, film, and digital media, PXKRW synthesize their unique sensitivity to shape inclusive realities and build new mythologies. Their work has been exhibited internationally at Saatchi Gallery, MOCA Shanghai, Berlin Art Week, New York Media Center, Denver Film Festival, Art Center Nabi Seoul, NADA Art Fair, WRO Biennale, including guest lectures at UCLA, Cooper Union, RCA London, Parsons.
https://hybrid-universe-emulation.net/@pxkrw.hybrid
Piotr Kopik
The Four Seasons, 2024
video, 2′, loop
3D animation, 3840 × 2160 px, 25 fps, stereo sound
The work revolves around my subjective image of the four seasons arranged to form a circle. The imagery of top and bottom circle sections standing for summer and winter, respectively, has been accompanying me since my childhood days – albeit only recently have I discovered that the notion is far from universal. While a silhouette has been inscribed within the circle in semblance of Renaissance representations of the Vitruvian Man, it is anything but realistic. This is a well-nigh abstract avatar, constantly in motion, vibrating and undergoing morphic changes, expressing emotions and cumulated memories associated with the experience of individual seasons. The avatar’s movements appear to be forming a peculiar choreography, drawing viewers’ attention to selected sections of the circle. The clockwise motion of the silhouette’s head is due to animation, and changes to shape and form. Personal emotions associated with individual seasons are further affected by cultural conditioning: the education system, days of leave and holidays.
The contemplation of occultist renderings of a human inscribed within a universe-symbolising circle have made me wonder whether intellectual and scientific attempts aspiring to transcend the human point of reference are not, in all actuality, subjected to limitations arising from our perception, capacities and hypocrisy.
Piotr Kopik – multimedia artist working in installation, video, animation, machinima, VR, computer graphic and performance, as well as collage and drawing. Graduate of the Faculty of Painting Department at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Co-founder of the szu szu group. He has exhibited (i.a.) at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in War-saw, BWA Wrocław, BWA Zielona Góra, Museum of Art in Łódź, Arsenal Gallery in Poznań, Wyspa Art Institute in Gdańsk, Kunsthaus Dresden, Bat-Yam International Biennale of Landscape Urbanism in Bat-Yam, in Graz, lokal_30 gallery in Warsaw, Różnia gallery in Warsaw, Harbor Gallery in Boston. His films have been shown (i.a.) at FILE in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Planete+ Doc Film Festival, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, at the Muranów Cinema in Warsaw and the TVP Kultura television station. Lecturer at the Faculty of Media Art at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He runs 3D & Virtual Occurrences Studio I.
Andrei Chodera-Isakau
Tardigrada. Micro/Macro Fundamental, 2023
VR / generative 3D simulation, Unreal Engine
sound (ambient) by Stefan Węgłowski
sound effects by Agata Chodera
The presented experiment (endless recording) is a gaming engine-based 3D simulation. Generated entities have been fitted with entry-level parameters determining their behaviour: seeking a partner/partners, preserving energy, developing metabolism, exploring the local terrain. Immanent community features include motion, nomadic forays and permanent hunger. Built in real time, the environment simulates boundless resources with the capacity to satisfy the needs of entity organisms. All creatures adapt to surroundings and conditions thanks to a sonar sense which helps them detect other individuals, necessary resources, and system interdependencies. Virtual beings simulate micro-organism behaviours with a dual purpose of surviving as long as possible, and forming relationships. Encoded growth instructions are copies, combined and processed with intent to create solid conditions for new populations. Once the simulation has been launched on opening night, all system-generating variables will be handled by algorithms.
The experiment has been based on a gaming engine and object-oriented programming. The simulation operates on a dual level: the installation displayed in gallery exhibition space, and a high-capacity broadband connection stream.
Tardigrada is a perfect match for reflections on self-reproduction and self-control of newly generated realms using data downloaded from the real world. All information is processed and converted for Virtual Reality purposes. The work is also a metapoetic narrative, describing the pleasures of observing microorganisms and their living processes. A method known to man for decades, microscope examination is expanded herein for purposes of following a complex grid of living, moving, interdependent “entities”.
The title Tardigrada alludes to tardigrades, invertebrates extraordinarily resilient to adverse natural conditions. They have ostensibly been the only ones to survive all mass extinctions on Earth.
Inexsistens
Jakub Wróblewski, Andrei Isakov, Przemysław Danowski
LOVESTORY, 2020
VR experience, six degrees of freedom HMD, motion capture, audio system
choreography: Magdalena Przybysz
For viewers 18 years of age or older
Jakub Wróblewski, Andrei Isakov, Przemysław Danowski, Piotr Kucia
LOVESTORY. Postsexual telematic experience, 2021
Imagine Film Festival, Amsterdam Live VR performance,
support: HTC VIVE, Bones Studio, Bemix Media Group
Performed by: Liwia Bargiel, Bartosz Kiełbowicz
Lovestory is an interactive experience in virtual reality, participants given a high degree of freedom. Key concepts include simulation – intermediation of the physical body by its virtual version. Consequently, the body (defined as the user’s actual body and its avatar) becomes the main subject, object and carrier of the experience. Bespoke technology-captured motion engaged in by two performers (real people) is the main trope of the act.
Artists equate the idea of acquiring the body and taking over another being with tulpa1, a concept derived from the Tibetan mysticism and occasionally applied as a synonym for “phenomenon” or “thought-form”. The concept of an experience scenario arises from interest in early science fiction film adaptations.
Explorations within the project focus on VR and the transhumanist idea of a virtual connection between two people, studies of bodily structure, and the capacity for expressing one’s motoric abilities through a specific aesthetic. The project addresses interpersonal contact limitations associated with current pandemic circumstances (lockdowns, social distancing, controlled accessibility of shared functional space, travel restrictions, etc.), and the consequent pushout of social contact into virtual reality.
1The Collins dictionary offers a simplified definition of tulpa: “a being or object that is created in the imagination by visualization techniques such as in Tibetan mysticism”, see tulpa in: Collins Dictionary [online], https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/tulpa [accessed on July 29th 2021]. See also S. Veissiere, ‘Varieties of Tulpa Experiences: The Hypnotic Nature of Human Sociality, Personhood, and Interphenomenality’, in: Hypnosis and Meditation: Towards an Integrative Science of Conscious Planes, ed. by A. Raz, M. Lifshitz, Oxford 2016.
Justyna Górowska
Hydrosexual Call, 2024
Justyna Górowska in conversation with her AI alter ego @wetmewild
film, 9′54″, mp4, 2560 × 1440 px, 60 fps
directing, animation, and editing: Justyna Gorowska @wetmewild
sound: Agata Polak @polak_
tools: Unreal Engine, Metahuman, CONVAI
3D assets 3D: Fab Marketplace
Hydrosexual Call is an artistic exploration of Justyna Górowska’s dialogue with her digital alter ego, WetMeWild – Slavic water nymph embodiment. The animation combines art with technology, using advanced tools (Unreal Engine, Metahuman, AI) with intent to narrate water crisis-related issues in the context of progressing Artificial Intelligence development. Discovering the digital underwater world filled with natural and cultural objects is expanded to include an invitation to join the hydrosexual movement in art, which explores alternative approaches to our endangered aquatic incarnations in the face of dystopian reality infiltration.
Justyna Górowska (she/it) – hydrofeminist and performer collaborating with interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of art, technology and social activism. Adopted the Wet-MeWild pseudonym in 2017, focusing on water-related environmental challenges while using AR and VR technologies. Co-operates with assorted art collectives, such as Nerdka (Nerdess); is part of the cyber_nymphs duo (with Ewelina Jarosz); the duo published their Hydrosexual Manifesto in 2023. Curator of the (Blue Humanities Archive) project – an online archive combining art with water-related ecological education. Showed her works in Berlin, Jakarta, Warsaw and New York. Awarded a doctoral degree in 2020 at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań. Lives in Cracow, teaching at the Faculty of Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies of the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities.
If you want to learn more about the hydrosexual movement, visit: https://hydrosexmanifesto.cargo.site/
Rafał Dominik
On the Lake, 2024
video, 4K, 60 fps, 8′14″, loop
music: Heyah by Faron
The work depicts an early morning scene: a group of people riding a motorboat on a Polish lake, all in a frenzy, intensely animated, looped as if in a GIF, on a fine line between aggressive frustration and joyful celebration.
Interest in contemporary visual and popular culture, a sense of humour, thematic and aesthetic hyperboles, dexterity in referencing cultural texts and setting them against unexpected cheesiness and kitsch, ease of consistent advanced technology use – such is the domain of an artist scrutinising contemporaneity from a distance and with a grain of salt.
Rafał Dominik (b. 1985 in Warsaw) – visual artist. Graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw with a diploma in painting (2009) from Leon Tarasewicz’s studio. Fan of popular culture and understated beauty. A believer that visual arts and art in general are significant to social life, his practice involves introducing both to circulation beyond art galleries. Founder and vocalist of the Galactics disco polo group, author of a blog by a fictitious designer company Mebleks, member of the Czosnek Studio. Continues working with commercial clients on non-standard projects at the intersection of art and mass culture. While firmly rooted in analogue media, began expanding his field of activity to include digital technology: 3D models and animation to GIFs and renders. Fond of experimenting with the VR environment and computer game generating engines; author of drawings, sculptures, digital images and theatrical stage sets. Co-operates with galleries and other institutions in Poland and abroad.
Hubert Czerepok
The Beginning 3 (Karahan Tepe), 2017, three-channel video installation, 22′45″
Hubert Czerepok’s Beginning 3 is a three-channel production shot on an archaeological site in Karahan Tepe, Turkey, where the oldest place of cult (dated 10,000 B.C.) was discovered, which suggests that the area might have been the cradle of human settlement. Wall-joined megalithic pillars had been used to erect oval structures on site prior to the Neolithic Revolution, before the days of agriculture or animal husbandry. The civilisation capable of accomplishing the feat as yet remains unknown. Nobody knows who or why filled the sanctuary site with earth and gravel 1,500 years later. The artist explores a variety of theories regarding the extraordinary location, comparing the journey into the distant past to a trip to Mars, and referencing Andrey Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
The film narrative is delivered by three robots directly alluding to Tarkovsky’s characters: RED the Writer (man of art), NEXT the Professor (man of science), and MAG the Stalker, symbol of spirituality. Fiction blends in with science, the multitude of hypotheses and theories expanding our take on reality, complex and ambiguous, leaving the question regarding sources and origins wide open.
* Mars Rover similes built by students and teaching staff of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Białystok University of Technology were used in the video, the students and staff also present on set in Turkey.
Na podstawie: 16.09 – 19.11.2017. Hubert Czerepok. The Beginning, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, https://zacheta.art.pl/en/wystawy/hubert-czerepok-poczatek?setlang=1.
