Info
The WRO Art Center has been invited to take part in this year’s Freedom Games, held in Łódź under the theme “A Time of Uncertainty.”
In the presentation “Poachers of Softness and Tender Monsters,” we will showcase selected works from the WRO Archive, highlighting media art as a space for exploring new forms of sensitivity — finding softness where we usually see rigid structures, and tenderness toward the technological “monsters”.
The presentation features works by Alicja Klich, Laura Grudniewska, Magdalena Łazarczyk and Zuza Golińska, Zofia Martin, Edward Ihnatowicz, Krystian Grzywacz, Kuba Krokosz, as well as the Austrian collective Karin Ferrari, Bernhard Garnicnig, and Peter Moosgaard.
The presentation was curated by Dagmara Domagała, curator and archive manager at the WRO Art Center.
In the EXPO Łódź space, visitors will also find Timeline – an installation by Paweł Janicki, Zuzanna Jaworska, and Dagmara Domagała, which presents resources from the WRO collection of contemporary art documentation in an interactive form.
Curatorial text
Soft Poachers and Sensible Monsters
Seen through WRO’s lens, media art reveals that in uncertain times, what matters most is not the search for stability, but the cultivation of new forms of sensitivity. It is a sensitivity that allows us to perceive softness where we see rigid structures and to befriend the monsters that first provoke fear. In this sense, WRO does not simply document media art—it enables it to act as a cultural practice that negotiates the future in the very heart of the present.
For over three decades, the WRO Art Center has been collecting, researching, and presenting works that test our ability to understand and feel within a media-saturated reality. The WRO Collection is more than an archive—it is a living body that keeps changing, responding, and resonating. Older works reappear in new contexts, opening up new layers of meaning. The archive becomes a time machine, reminding us that what once seemed experimental may now serve as a tender compass for navigating the present.
Through the idea of the active art archive, WRO approaches the collection not as a static repository, but as an ongoing process. It is a performative archive—close to what Diana Taylor (1) described when she wrote that archives are not only records but also practices and actions. By bringing past works into new constellations, WRO explores their relevance to contemporary questions and anxieties. In this sense, WRO and its archive become a space for exercising attentiveness toward the mediated world.
The sense of unease that defines our time resonates with Bernard Stiegler’s (2) reflections on cultural entropy and the crisis of attention. Media—and, along with them, media art—both shape our experience and capture our affects, reorganizing our relationships with time and memory. Artists working within media art can thus be seen as “soft poachers”—a nod to Laura Grudniewska’s work, but also to Michel de Certeau’s (3) idea of everyday practices as forms of tactical appropriation. They trace what is fleeting—the fragile tissue of affect that might otherwise be lost within the techno-capitalist machinery of overproduction.
At the same time, media art gives rise to “sensible monsters”, echoing Donna Haraway’s (4) thinking in the Chthulucene. Her concept invites us not to reject complex, unsettling techno-organic hybrids, but to learn how to live with them. Works presented within the WRO archive—from the documentation of Senster, the first Polish cybernetic sculpture, to contemporary experimental projects—show that media art has always negotiated our relationship with technological creatures. The aim is not to demonize technology, but to approach it with tenderness—to recognize it as an integral part of our shared condition.
In this way, WRO’s practice aligns with what Alexander Galloway (5) calls “algorithmic thinking about culture.” The archive not only stores images and sounds but also investigates the logics that shape their operation in a world where the boundaries between technology and society have become fluid. The nostalgia for the future that emerges in many works is not a sentimental gesture but a form of critical imagination—a way of envisioning other temporalities beyond the relentless logic of growth and acceleration.
In an age of constant acceleration—where data, images, and algorithms form the very fabric of social life—media art plays not only an aesthetic but also an epistemological role. It helps us sense and interpret the dynamics of a world that continually resists simple definitions.
Read more:
1. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, Durham 2003.
2. Bernard Stiegler,The Neganthropocene, translated and edited by Daniel Ross, Open Humanities Press, London 2018.
3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984.
4. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making King in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham, London 2016.
5. Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2006.
Dagmara Domagała – curator and archive manager at the WRO Art Center; researcher of media art. In her daily work, she engages with both analog and digital formats—digitizing tapes, organizing collections, and uncovering stories hidden in archival dust, giving them new life within exhibition and educational contexts. She leads activities within the Media Library, sharing insights about the archive as a living ecosystem of art. She is a co-creator of the television series WRO Codes, the screening program Rewinding the Tapes, as well as publications from the WIDOK series and the anniversary volume Resonance. Her interests include the materiality of media, the micro-events embedded in documentation, and the subtle exchanges that occur between medium and viewer.
Descriptions
Alicja Klich
Art Is No Longer for Me
video fragments and documentation of installation and silkscreen action
exhibition “Katastematic Pleasures” / Polish Pavilion @ Gwangju Biennale 2024
06:52
Alicja Klich methodically embroiders her artistic mantra, “Art is no longer for me,” using pink thread on a pink background. The work takes shape during her shifts as a museum attendant. Klich reveals a moment of exhaustion and detachment from the constant demand for creative productivity. Through intimate voice recordings, she shares her emotions and reflections on art education. Her gesture of withdrawal becomes a way of reclaiming tenderness toward her own practice and resisting the pressure of constant artistic output.
Laura Grudniewska
Soft Poachers / 2020
video, 06:49
Laura Grudniewska approaches the Internet as a sensorial space. In “Soft Poachers,” she uses ASMR-inspired and liminal imagery sourced from online archives to create a hypnotic, collage-like visual composition. In an era of repetition and overproduction, the work explores softness as a form of resistance to the rigidity of technological and social systems. Grudniewska proposes “soft poaching” — a quiet, non-aggressive act of reclaiming digital tools and restoring sensitivity in a world dominated by automation.
Magdalena Łazarczyk, Zuza Golińska
Nothing Twice / 2018
video, 06:24
“Nothing Twice” is a collaborative video work by Magdalena Łazarczyk and Zuza Golińska. The artists create fictional twin characters who traverse a real marketplace filled with countless identical, mass-produced objects. The piece reflects on how contemporary consumers sacrifice individuality for uniformity. It questions the notions of originality and duplication, truth and simulation, and examines the shifting boundaries between the real and the artificial in today’s culture.
Zofia Martin
A Trillion Has Eighteen Zeros
video fragments and installation documentation
exhibition AKCES @ BWA Studio Wrocław / WRO 2019 HUMAN ASPECT
07:19
For a year, Zofia Martin collected the bodies of dead insects, photographing and filming them before coating them with copper, nickel, and finally 24-karat gold. Each specimen received careful attention and time, turning into a delicate, precious object. The installation places these golden bodies in natural, discreet locations — where one might expect to find real insects. The project merges scientific precision with poetic speculation, transforming the abstract concept of a trillion into a tangible, emotional experience of scale and invisibility.
Edward Ihnatowicz
Senster
installation documentation at the Four Domes Pavilion / WRO 2019 HUMAN ASPECT
07:38
Senster — a fusion of the words sensitive and monster — is a pioneering cybernetic sculpture by Edward Ihnatowicz, created in the early 1970s. The five-meter-tall steel structure resembles a creature that responds to movement and sound in its environment. Controlled by a computer system of hydraulic actuators, the sculpture moves with surprising grace. Senster was one of the first artworks to interact with viewers in real time. Lost for decades, it was revived through the efforts of the Re:Senster team. Today, it stands as a tribute to early technological sensitivity and the idea of machines capable of empathy rather than dominance.
Krystian Grzywacz
Vacant Spaces / 2016
animation, 05:20
Krystian Grzywacz’s animation “Vacant Spaces” was created in collaboration between the artist and his computer. The work arises from errors generated by 3D scanning and motion capture technologies. These digital imperfections become the foundation for a reflection on the relationship between humans and technology. The piece captures a world where the organic and the digital increasingly overlap, portraying humanity as ever more entangled with its own technological creations.
Kuba Krokosz
I Love Gas Stations at Night / 2024
screen recording of VR experience, 12:32
Kuba Krokosz invites viewers into a nocturnal world of gas stations — places that, for him, become gateways between reality and dream. The VR experience allows participants to explore a virtual cityscape, a highway, and an open space built on a Sierpiński triangle pattern. The narrative fluidly transitions from the familiar to the surreal, echoing the dreamlike atmosphere of The Cinnamon Shops, referring directly to the online post from wykop about gas stations at night.
Karin Ferrari, Bernhard Garnicnig, Peter Moosgaard
m h y t n i x / 2020
video, 21:56
Three millennials — Carmen, Peter, and Gustav — embark on an absurd, psychedelic journey to trace the origins of modern civilization and to answer the age-old question: “Where does milk come from?” m h y t n i x takes the viewer on a hallucinatory voyage through a bizarre world of exploding Teslas, smart occultism, trash mysticism, and vaporwave aesthetics. It is a visual and sonic narrative about contemporary internet mythologies, the culture of information overload, and digital belief systems. The artists combine humor, parody, and remix strategies to create a vivid, surreal universe where technology and spirituality intertwine in unexpected ways.