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Last week we met the winner of the Main Prize in the 6th Competition for the Best Media Arts Graduation Project, and on Tuesday we invite you to watch the announcement of the new prize, awarded by the editors of Contemporary Lynx magazine.
This is the result of the constant, long-lasting cooperation between CL and WRO. As part of the first prize awarded for the first time, the magazine will feature an interview and a presentation of the work of the selected artist.
The meeting, broadcasted by Facebook LIVE on the WRO Art Center profile, will be attended by:
Dobromiła Błaszczyk – editor-in-chief of “Contemporary Lynx”, president of Contemporary Lynx Foundation
Marek Grzyb – Dean of the Faculty of Graphic Arts and Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw
Piotr Krajewski – curator of the exhibition, artistic director of the WRO Biennale
“CONTEMPORARY LYNX” MAGAZINE AWARD
“Contemporary Lynx”, after seeing this year’s exhibition, decided to award its prize to Krystian Grzywacz.
Still Life is a project which the artist depicts as a moving postcard from the “meantime” of technological evolution. Its stillness – indeed, deadness – lends itself to a dual interpretation. While this representation of nature indeed includes depictions and images of transience, dying, and decline, at the same time it thoroughly relies on artificiality. The film is not a camera recording of real plants or people. Instead, the entirety of the image was developed by the artist using graphic software. The nature shown in it is inanimate – it is dead, not because of its passing or its static quality, but because it has actually never been alive. Grzywacz even came up with a “synthetic” narrative. Specifically, he did not pen the poetic depictions of the situation, but selected pieces generated by a reduced version of the GPT-2 program, an AI system which is capable of producing texts by imitating the tone and themes of an input piece. The software was developed by an OpenAI research team led by Elon Musk. At the moment, OpenAI is managed by an organization comprised of the OpenAI staff (Greg Brockman, Ilya Stutskever, and Sam Altman), Adam D’Angelo, Holden Karnofsky, Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis, and Tasha McCauley. The software proved so effective that it was not made publicly available in order to prevent possible abuses of its potential. Later, the researchers decided to share its weaker, less educated version called 345M, a name derived from the 345,000,000 parameters it uses to anticipate successive words of the text it generates.