Info
The Project Charter is a video set accompanying the Not To Be Seen. The nemesis of the technological progress exhibition. The author’s selection reveals the specifics of the workshop and complements the exhibited objects. Przemysław Jasielski guides us through his studio, which is open for the audience. The objects fulfil their promise they made at the production stage and now they carry it out. They get their revenge on the artist.
Additionally to the set, there is a documentation of the curator-led guided tour through the Not To Be Seen exhibition at the WRO Atelier, which was an introduction and a peculiar project charter for the WRO Art Center showcase.
Works
Analog Immigration, 2013, 3:49
Analog Immigration is a specific back-in-time travel to the period when there were no digital devices. Viewers can experience the analog era – a place devoid of constant internet access and cell phones. The copper mesh and steel structure, like a Faraday cage, block and filter electromagnetic signals including wi-fi and mobile networks. Additionally, every person entering the show is being asked to leave all digital devices at a checkpoint at the entrance.
This work supports the viewer with a kind of a respite from modern technologies, surrounding nowadays all their senses. It can become a shelter, but also a space of deprivation, where we loose orientation due to decline of stimulus, that very often regulate our everyday experience.
Emotions Control Unit, 2015, 3:51
This installation is trying to negotiate nostalgia of the simple machine designed to resemble early radio receivers with typically human emotions. Based on the custom built wooden enclosure, equipped with distance and touch sensors, and the microphone it uses especially created program reacting to behaviour of the viewers in the gallery, and “showing its emotions” on set of meters. Viewers can switch on and off sets of sensors responsible for three dimensional seeing, touch and hearing and change the machine’s behaviour and fine tune the particular “emotions”. In addition machine’s ’emotions’ make them react emotionally. Viewiers anthropomorphize the machine by acknowledging its human feelings. This model holds that words such as ”anger”, ”sadness”, ”fear” etc. describe unique mechanism, which is triggered by discrete mental states, leading to unique, measurable outcomes. In this view exist a limited number of biologically determined basic emotional processes, which considering specific form, function an a cause, are different from mental processes like cognition or perception.
The project is the latest continuation of the Control Units series of works.
Global Warming Control Unit, 2010, 4:29
GWCU is the interactive machine able to produce very fine fog by spraying water particles into the air. The viewers are encourage to turn it on and off and limit amount of blown steam. The main intention of the project is rather to confront the viewer with the fact that even small action of the single man can affect (and in fact is affecting) whole ecosystem. The project is a dramatic Don Quixote gesture but it could deliver an important voice in the very intense and profound discussion about climate changes. This practical unpractical use of technology could be also very interesting in context of art.
Leviathan, 2013, 4:20
The Leviathan project combines the artist’s search in the realm of technology and sound with his fascination with the utopian visions of the world dominated by machines. It is an attempt to create an artificial electronic organism showing the features of a living creature. The object is covered with a sensors reacting to motion and emits various sounds and vibrations as a result of interaction with the audience. Leviathan contradicts the privileged position of a human being as regards technology and the utilitarian use of the machine. It grants the machine its own subjective identity. This unique object takes up a game with the economics of desire too. Unlike devices and gadgets purchased on a mass scale, which are to improve our lives or provide entertainment, Leviathan remains non-assimilated and in its own way – passive. It is an “alien/other”, a thing coming from a different order of reality, unpredictable and self-controllable.
Opportunity, 2011, 3:58
Opportunity is an attempt to explore the gallery space using two robots and is referring to the way the machine (called Opportunity) sent by America’s space agency NASA to Mars has worked. In the result of scanning the space with remotely controlled robots the huge panoramic image was printed, similarly to the pictures that were outcomes of NASA robot’s. The complex image made from hundreds small images was a very different interpretation from the space perceived by human eye. Changing perspective means also a transformation of cognitive competence.
Paper Bridge Over Stone River, 2012, 3:49
Fully functional bridge made entirely out of paper. The design was created basing on the traditional Japanese bridges built at the entrance to the temple grounds. It is a kind of a test for architectural, physical capacity of material, which is dealing rather with symbolical communication than the material one. In the same time it is worth seeing the function of connecting people and objects. While presentation viewers were invited to have a walk and test the strength of the construction.
Object was created during artistic residency at Tokyo Wonder Site in 2012.
Photo Robotoid, 2016, 2:45
A photographic robot with a built in choice making capability taking portraits of the audience.
Controlled by a custom software robotic arm it operates a DSLR camera with mechanical shutter release. All photos taken are immediately printed and dropped on the ground. Kinnect operated body and movement identification allows the user to precisely point the camera and take a perfectly composed portrait. However, because of it’s settings, the Robotoid seldom takes photos we normally consider to be usual. Carefully chosen parameters of the program steering the robot change constantly, making it’s actions different from a normal machine behaviour. However, unlike the human photographer it suddenly switches it’s attention from one object to another, releases the shutter at unexpected moments and concentrates on “less important “ actions and details.
What also makes taken photos very unusual is people’s behaviour in front of a camera which is not operated by a person. They are much more natural and less posed. They are naturally driven into a specific game when they act and move in front of the robot, trying to influence it’s actions when taking their photo.
about Not To Be Seen exhibition, 2017, 14:17
Przemysław Jasielski tours the “Not To Be Seen” exhibition at Atelier WRO on 9th of February 2017.