Info
T.h.n.k.n.g Screens by Mira Boczniowicz is an exhibition-project-practice resulting from long-term work on and co-creation of the WRO audiovisual archives as well as from experiences drawn from her individual artistic practice.
Boczniowicz draws primarily on the unspoken meanings of archival materials – hidden patterns, memeplexes, habits, and strategies of imagery, remnants of perception of platforms, media, and technologies. She reflects on what – and why – art theorists and practitioners thought about in the past when speculating about the future. This “past” covers calendar decades, but, in a timeline scaled by transformations in media art and the technologies enabling those, it encompasses several eras marked by at least two tectonic shifts: the transition from analog to digital and from pre- to already-neuromorphic media.
As she scans the WRO archives, the artist asks herself a fundamental question: what were the discussions about media and technology “back then” really about – and what are they about today?
Artistic practices based on archives and found materials in general have long fallen into established patterns. The encounter with AI has somewhat disrupted this order – until now, working with archival materials has involved attentiveness, a search for meaning, and understanding (though even in its traditional form, artistic work with archival materials has its own “sprinters” who get hung up on some intriguing find). AI has introduced a fast, ad hoc approach – an automated synthesis that doesn’t require in-depth understanding – in the hope that the involvement of machine processes will reveal previously invisible dependencies and patterns or at least generate an intriguing aesthetic. In this approach, archival materials are bulk-burned raw material, fuel, and content, and the final effect leaves only the impression conveyed by the equipment for projection, interaction, and audio…
Most critical approaches to AI and discussions about the cultural stagnation it induces tend to go in a similar direction – the externalization of reasoning, parameterization and proceduralization, and a global information cycle with a feedback loop. In other words: grinding the same things repeatedly and then grinding what was ground before. How can one stay online without feeding one’s time and resources to the insatiable monster of “generative” (degenerative) advanced statistical machinery? Boczniowicz knows and understands the WRO archives like the back of her hand – she has been co-creating them for three decades – but rather than forcing a deeper approach despite the use of neuromorphic tools, she simply does not play the game that others are playing. She does not abandon non-mechanized reasoning or the act of assigning meanings for which one is accountable; she proposes at least a few strong strategies (perhaps we should call them “de-universalization”?) fundamentally built on the premise that shortcuts should be avoided. Regardless of how cognitive machines operate, what matters are individual selection and individual decisions at every stage of the work. The presentation media – what can be seen and heard at the exhibition – should be designed independently. Build, don’t consume. Time is essential – certain types of understanding require time.
Paweł Janicki