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.
