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Every Saturday at 3:00 PM
guided tours of the exhibition On the Silver Globe III
Every Sunday at 12:00 PM
Syndays with WRO – family workshops with children and friends
Every Thursday at 6:00 PM
presentations and conversations inspired by the current exhibition and WRO’s collection
The installation series On the Silver Globe, begun in 2012 and continued in subsequent interactive projects, refer to the civilizational imagery of the 20th century, humanity’s aspirations to conquer space, and the history of cinema and television as a material and cultural phenomenon.
Like the moon, the convex surface of the silver screen reflects light and the visions it shapes. On the Silver Globe III combines images on the big screen with footage projected onto the surface of a television tube from the late 1960s and early 1970s, known as the silver screen, because of its characteristic glow. The installation is subject to interaction – the audience can influence the course of the projection.
The installation uses Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), a visionary work that belongs to the classics of cinema, which in 1902 launched the sci-fi film genre, long shaped visions of the conquest of space and influenced the ideas of modern civilization. Besides, the installation uses video documentation of the activities going on at the Apollo Mission Control Center during the historic lunar landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. It also employs white noise sequences typical of unmodulated TV signals, one of the first technical developments to show the nature of chaos.
A tape of miraculously preserved (after the artist burned all copies of his films, in an act of desperation, in the 1920s) film (actually an American duplicate recovered in the States) rests in the film archive, but its restored digital versions published online are now in the public domain. Such an internet download of A Trip to the Moon has become, in this installation, a matrix of pixels that create dynamic interactive images. The work of Méliès is here a cultural object, not only admired but also constantly modified by the viewers.
In this two-screen installation, viewers take control of the images using their mobile devices. Thanks to the interaction it becomes possible to change perspectives and traditional images: we see the Earth rising above the surface of the Moon, the surface of the Moon is shaped and changed by processing successive frames of Méliès’ film.
We see our planet as a blue dot steeped in the television interference, and instead of forever replayed videos of the astronauts’ first steps on the Moon, we watch the tedious work of the NASA flight controllers, who toil on far away from the splendour showered on the pilots-discoverers.
The third iteration of On the Silver Globe is a two-channel interactive installation controlled by a mobile device. The audience can influence its operations by means of any mobile device. It was premiered during the Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2017 as part of the BEYOND THE SEVEN exhibition at the Dom Słowa Polskiego in Warsaw – an event that symbolically closed the history of the venue (before its planned reconstruction).
WROcenter Group – a group with a changing membership established by Paweł Janicki and Piotr Krajewski in 2012. In their projects, they refer in a variological way to cultural themes and issues abandoned in the history of contemporary art. In their installations, actions, and objects they synthesize modernizing, anthropological, and cybernetic visions of modern societies. They have participated in exhibitions at WRO Art Center, Koszyki Hall (Warsaw), UAP Gallery (Poznan), Culture Workshop (Lublin), DSP (Warsaw), In Situ (Sokolowsko), Palace of Art (Lviv), Kunsthall Aarhus (Denmark), among others.
