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.
