Krystyna Jędrzejewska-Szmek, Paulina Mirowska: The Spore
2023, installation: object (carbon steel; dry plant matter: reed, miscanthus, sedge; juniper berry essential oil, 100 × 110 × 200 cm; collage (carbon steel, reed, bulrush and wild cucumber fruit, mix of i.a. water chestnut, oak, teasel, and burdock seeds; elm flower flakes
Collaboration: craftsmen from the Kowale Losu (Destiny Makers) studio in Warsaw
The Spore has been inspired by the phenomenon of a seed as a young plant form frozen in time, as it were. Botanical tropes have been set to an excerpt from Lęk (Fear), a book by Polish psychiatrist and philosopher Antoni Kępiński, who writes of awareness of future time, and of the anxiety-triggering unknown:
[…] in order to live, we have to constantly strive for a future unknown, converting it into a past known. Such transformation of the unknown into the known, of the future into the past, requires effort and courage. And occasionally man is found wanting. Sometimes he/she is too weak, at other times the situation may be inordinately tough. Man then fears the future, all he/she wants is to go back into the past […] or remain in the present at the very least, and that is impossible, as life is all about expanding into the future, one cannot come to a standstill, not even for a little while.*
The steel and plant form is a conceptual shelter, ready to protect us in times of conflict and crises, global and personal alike. A haven in times of threat, of feeling overwhelmed or overstimulated, of attacks of anxiety brought by an uncertain future. The artists explore the capacity for regeneration and self-soothing in a fast-flowing, technological world on the brink of extinction. For each of the two, working on The Spore was significant in terms of personal issues and challenges as well: the death of a parent; activist burnout.
The object has been lined with dry plant matter collected in urban wastelands and along woodland edges, and supplemented with a collage showing the progress of this art-and-research project. It comprises ponderings on the materiality of seed, an entity combining a soft interior concealing the fragile germ with a tough shell protecting it from the outside world, allowing it to survive periods of adverse weather conditions. When examining and observing plants, the artists have also discovered other options of operating in the present, while gently “leaning out into the future.”**
THE WORK IS VIEWABLE BY FLASHLIGHT. ENTER THE SPORE IF READY FOR REED SEEDS STICKING TO CLOTHING. THE INTERIOR HAS BEEN SPRAYED WITH TANSY AND JUNIPER BERRY SCENT.
* A. Kępiński, Lęk (Fear), Warszawa 1977, p. 14.
** See: J. Erbel, Wychylone w przyszłość. Jak zmienić świat na lepsze (Leaning out into the Future. Making the World a Better Place), Kraków 2022.
Jakub Woynarowski: Sol Salutis: The Language of Numbers
2021 ,multimedia installation, loop
music: Przemysław Scheller
The installation Sol Salutis is a commentary on the persistence of complex numerological, linguistic and meaning systems, and their influence on the conscious perception of reality. Basing on a reflection regarding Polish Romanticism as the point of departure, the work – once made part of an exhibition held at the Arsenal Gallery power station – blends in with the context of planetary consciousness, new realities, technologies serving both the realm of great narratives / systems and daily lives of individuals. It extends to issues of speculative potentials and giant idea and equity flow mechanisms, determining – and agitating– the world order. Emotionless calculations permeating with symbolism, individuals counting on strokes of luck and hanging their moves and actions on the language of signs – all of the aforesaid affects more than the real world; it tends to influence alternate universes and generative environments, self-propelling and self-governing. Sol Salutis is also the story of how codes interpreted as programming allow worlds to be reproduced and deciphered.
Quoting Zdzisław Kępiński (Mickiewicz hermetyczny [Mickiewicz the Hermetic], Warsaw 1980), Woynarowski points to options of translating words into numerical values, a potential Adam Mickiewicz saw as significant. In Sol Salutis, the narrative bases on the gradual decoding of meanings concealed in textual-and-numerical combinations, and revealing them to participants of an audio-visual occurrence. The artist follows Mickiewicz’s thought combining the metaphysical with the mathematical, ensconced nearly 200 years ago in A History of the Future, the poet’s unfinished work, preserved in fragments only, most of it lost. Using materials at hand, Woynarowski re-enacts individual directions alongside Mickiewicz’s potential (“futurological”, to quote the artist) visions, preceding J. Verne or H.G. Wells’ prophetic concepts by dozens of years. The writer predicted i.a. the existence of fibreoptics alluding to systems of Archimedean mirrors, intended to reflect the“fiery signs” of solar lettering. The Archimedean solution became the inspiration behind Sol Salutis (Latin for ‘sun of salvation’), the notion of transmitting “fiery signs” giving rise to ponderings regarding the prognostic of ever-changing language form, the installation itself serving as a “metaphorical apparatus” designed to decrypt signals from the future and map parallel realities.
Sol Salutis by Jakub Woynarowski, shown courtesy of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage
Dominika Wolska: Utopian Trajectory
video installation / generative environment, Unreal Engine
sound by Filip Kołodziejczak, running time: ∞
Contemporarily one of the most frequently discussed and most problematic issues, the notion of the Anthropocene as a novel geological era is the chosen point of departure in Dominika Wolska’s work. The artist explores the question of what the Anthropocene impasse – the phenomenon Bernard Stiegler called the Neganthropocene – actually is. While human environmental impact can obviously not be disregarded, we regrettably tend to downplay it, or simply refuse to remember that mankind is directly responsible for critical change to the natural environment. It is, however, high time that we begin considering our planet’s future, along with ways to preserve its safety. Wolska believes that the universal human species category comprising inherent biological tendencies to strive for technological evolvement and cause environmental crises ought to be deconstructed. After all, Anthropocene growth is impossible without technological development, the latter curbed by the absence of development-conducive policies, permitting inequalities in the workplace and turbulence in natural resources circulation.
In her work, Wolska develops a generative environment, a set of geophysics-reflecting simulations. She showcases a utopian vision of the world, wherein nature wins against “the human era”. Basing on its own geophysiology, the Earth strives to optimise living conditions, albeit the geological force (defined as intense global human activity with radical impact on geological processes) tends to distort the great cycles governing planetary trajectories.
Filip Kołodziejczak’s project score is a collage of synthesised sounds spread over time – reverberations and echoes emulating vast, open, empty spaces emitting isolated noises, deprived of melody or any sound resembling human instruments. The score was inspired by polar sounds field recordings.
* See: 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.
Ivan Svitlychnyi: Donate
2022/2023, installation, online activity, light, six-channel sound, website
Ivan Svitlychnyi’s work combines an interactive installation with online activity. Donate modifies the artwork-viewer relationship, shifting the latter’s position. Now an emitter/giver rather than recipient/taker, the spectator can provide the art object with a source of energy, keeping it alive. This is how Svitlychnyi makes his audience an active party to the process of preserving the object in a specific condition; notably, direct interaction between the emitter/giver and the object may never take place.
Donate alludes to war as a humanitarian and ecological disaster, to the direct environmental impact of military action, and to long-term outcomes of aforementioned developments in peacetime, local and global alike. The artist emphasises the need to develop a strategy for the future, pointing to the nature of crises and conflicts as extending beyond the local, and to the universal dimension of caring for the planet. A global sense of accountability, “consideration for future ecology”, and changes to consciousness all require a downshift to the individual, local level. The project was initiated in the spring of 2022 in Kyiv, the artist having found himself in the epicentre of warfare.
In the Donate project, exchange practices or the gift economy are not based on money. Electricity is the equivalent, one spectators can contribute to support the continued operation of Svitlychny’s installation (e.g. by reducing household electricity and heat consumption).
A calculator and table for symbolical energy “donations” have been uploaded to the website https://donate-wh.com. A maximum of three “donations” can be made during the exhibition. Detailed donation instructions have been displayed on a monitor screen forming part of the display.
Eternal Engine, Insider II
3D video (Unreal Engine, Unity), AI video (Stable Diffusion); object, wood, 3D print, PLA
Insider is a multi-episode dystopian science & theory fiction tale of evolving forms of awareness of matter and elements (oil, silicon, data, toxins, volcanoes, concrete).
Episode II tells the story of an evolving form of awareness developed from the combined relics of the many selves left behind by non-human and human beings who used to inhabit the Earth. In order to survive, they blend into an ethereal molecule, an anomaly functioning in planetary post-apocalyptic debris, the only living being on the globe. Once immersed in the narrative, we enter a non-anthropocentric perspective of curios – the main non-human protagonist of the episode.
The Insider series was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (79 A.D.): “The rising cloud resembled a tree (arbor), its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine (pinus) which rose to a great height”. The description of the incident becomes an open portal allowing journeys which – if spacetime were to be transcended – would make it possible to record the final moments of multiple worlds, both real and speculative. Pliny wrote:
We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room.
At last the darkness thinned and dispersed into smoke or cloud; then there was genuine daylight, and the sun actually shone out, but yellowish as it is during an eclipse. We were terrified to see everything changed, buried deep in ashes like snowdrifts.
A gleam of light returned, but we took this to be a warning of the approaching flames rather than daylight. However, the flames remained some distance off; then darkness came on once more and ashes began to fall again, this time in heavy showers. We rose from time to time and shook them off, otherwise we should have been buried and crushed beneath their weight. I could boast that not a groan or cry of fear escaped me in these perils, but I admit that I derived some poor consolation in my mortal lot from the belief that the whole world was dying with me and I with it.
The thickening of data, filling Earth’s surface RAM for years, causes eruption. Yet before it happens, the Earth and its ecosystems attempt to handle information and biological overcapacity, reduce the harmful outcomes of human activity. Yet there comes a time when volumes of existing data, active processes, circulating biochemical waste and contamination suspended in the atmosphere become too vast for the Earth’s memory to accommodate. The human species perishes in an apocalyptic explosion. The planet breeds an anomaly, a new form of post-collective awareness…
PREVIOUS EPISODES: INSIDER. The Prologue: The rising cloud resembled a tree (arbor), its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine (pinus) which rose to a great height was presented as an audiovisual performance at the SLUG Gallery in Leipzig (2021/2022), and the Queer S_P_I_T Festival in Vienna (2022); it also aired on Radio Kapitał (2021, 2022) https://radiokapital.pl/ shows/insider. Insider I: Geotrauma was shown at the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, during the exhibition “The Discomfort of Evening” (2022).
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.
Ernest Borowski: Convert
3D animation, audio recording, song, 6′22″
musical cooperation / song performance: Zosia Hołubowska
Taking advantage of SF (speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, scientific fact) tools, Ernest Borowski is projecting a vision of the world on the brink of an all-embracing collapse of life and system organisations as we know them – a world wherein the capitalist organisation of (over)production-based existence is bereft of all meaning. On the other hand, the same narrative may be interpreted as imminent (in time), allowing an insight into co-sensibilities occurring just beyond our line of sight.
In his artistic practice, Borowski frequently references queering ecologies, examining ties between nature, biology and sexuality – and queer theory. Covert core pillars include a song prepared in collaboration with Zosia Hołubowska / Mala Herba, with interwoven motifs of labour criticism (in economic terms), queer closeness and inter-species tenderness – components of radical and spec- ulative visions of the future. The artist expands his narrative to include more-than-human entities, inviting us to consider them a part of our queer family.
The Covert’s visual layer comprises series of virtual micro-landscapes, local settlers more-than-human, an imagery of species existent and imagined. Borowski embeds them in pre-renovation architecture of the Arsenal Gallery power station, approaching it as if a source of memory, of modified data, its traces, while present, well concealed. The artist believes that such images help accentuate the very essence of transformation occurring in human-and-non-human ecosystems.
Andrei Isakov: Tardigrada. Micro/Macro Fundamental
Tardigrada. Micro/Macro Fundamental, 2023
video installation / streaming / 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.
Tentatively Trained Entropy Generators
In my intervention, I intend to explore the connections between information and entropy, and context – in post GPT-4 (large multimodal language model published by OpenAI in March 2023) commercialisation reality. We will begin with a “return to cybernetics”, its creator Norbert Wiener having warned, “Cybernetics is a two-edged sword, and sooner or later it will cut you deep”. Cybernetics is indeed worth revisiting, as it has revisited us. The contemporary context of cybernetic “image-objects” (such as the automatic factory described by Wiener) has little in common with the way of producing science or technology in the early post-World War II days. Nonetheless, the “image-objects” designed by cybernetic engineers have become a reality, yielding machines whose workings would cross all boundaries of cybernetic imagination: Amazon’s warehouses, autonomous vehicles, or the aforementioned GPT-4. With regard to the latter, I will argue that this “generative and tentatively trained transformer” is a primary-level trained generator of entropy – social and information-oriented – and of mental entropy defined by psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński. Yet in order to perceive these entropies and describe their generation mechanisms correctly, critical revision needs to be applied to the interpretation of entropy in information theory, and to the calculative description of the mind as a cerebral property involving information processing. I will attempt to showcase the outcomes of such theoretical interventions, as well as its potential practical use.
