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Not wholly autonomous, not fully self-sufficient, partly self-reliant. Such descriptors captured the status of man-made machines which were defined by their dependence – on conditions, on energy supply, on use regimes. This is also the position that moderns societies have recently discovered for themselves in and through their dependence on and experience of relationality and embedment in the world. Having some autonomy, be it even a relative one, is prerequisite for the capacity to engage in action. For its part, in order to be effective, action must by enclosed within definable and defined limits. This week, we explore civilization as a network of interdependences of mutual limitations, entropic destruction, and the human-machine relatedness in reciprocal subordination.

Dorota Walentynowicz constructed a cube which she filled with electricity. Powering technological development, precipitating social change, and fueling art, the electric current laid the foundation for modernity whose children we are. This is a basically invisible foundation, even though we all have it in our sockets. Inspired by Plato’s writings, Walentynowicz developed an installation which is not supposed to represent mimetic art, but rather to serve as a site for making ideas happen. One of such ideas tangibly conveyed by In Fear of Dead Enigmas is an invisibility – an illusoriness – of foundations on which we erect one pedestal after another, as they may well be underpinned just by emptiness filled with electric impulses.

Bristling with wires protruding in full sight, suspended magnifying glasses, and screens that form a spatial observation box, Karina Śmigla-Bobinski’s installation draws on the philosophy of perception and postmodernist reflections on the crisis of representation. Small magnifying glasses, which sprawl in tentacle-like extension of the installation, enable the audience to perceive what cannot be seen with the naked eye. Nevertheless, Simulacra is not a lecture on appearances and our deluded blindness, but an exercises in diverse modes of seeing which are a kind of prism. While we see various things depending on the intensity and position of light, what we actually perceive depends on us.

During the WRO Biennale in 2015, a self-destroying server was ushered into the Wroclaw University Library. User-Generated Server Destruction drove its own disintegration process, which could be watched on a website operated by a crumbling computer box. As the six hammers pounding the server chassis were only activated when ugsd.net was accessed, a human being watching the server on the Internet was needed for the destruction to happen. In this way, an interesting chain reaction was produced at the viewer-installation interface, as the piece could only be put in motion through an Internet connection, which at the same time made the server gradually disintegrate in an apparent self-destruction drive.

Tablespoons by Samuel St-Aubin consists of eight tablespoons which move, powered by an electric mechanism. The spoons rotate, exchanging four eggs at certain moments. The motions of the spoons are synchronized and mutually complementary so that no collisions occur and when the eggs are being transferred from one spoon to another, they do not fall cracking down. These exercises in balance make the installation perform a choreography of movements as carefully designed as the Vitruvian man, with the human matter replaced by machinic sinews in this piece.

In 2011, TheGreenEyl exhibited a table full of talking tableware. Each vessel shared a story of a different religious tradition. In this way, one table assembled narratives of various creeds, which the audience could listen to by holding a selected ceramic dish up to their ears. With metaphysics mediated in and through objects, no conflict unfolded among the various visions, and the table became a site of shared communication by inviting visitors to partake of the audio-food prepared for them.

PanGenerator’s kinetic Peacock works synaesthetically across light and sound, establishing a bilateral sensory relationship, as the audience activates and steers Peacock impressions, and the installation sends portions of feedback data in the form of photo-sonic signals, displaying the visitor-dependent color scales, movements, and opulent patterning of the electronic bird.

Andrzej Dudek-Dürer, a living and breathing legend of Wrocław’s artistic scene, is a human sculpture. With his career as an artist spanning over fifty years, Dudek-Dürer’s life work-in-progress is The Art of Shoes – The Art of Trousers – The Art of Andrzej Dudek- Dürer, a performance in which he invariably stages himself as an art object in time. Repeatedly repaired, unchangeably the same, albeit re-made time and again, the components of his attire are directly provocative vis-à-vis consumer culture, serving as externalized objects of meditation on the flow of life, the spirituality of objects, and the consequences of one’s attitudes.

 

MONDAY
Dorota Walentynowicz (PL)
In Fear of Dead Enigmas
installation documentation and an interview with the artist
The Rings of Saturn exhibition
former Ballestrem Palace in Wrocław
15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 Pioneering Values

TUESDAY
Karina Śmigla-Bobiński (PL)
Simulacra
installation documentation
Wrocław University Library
16th Media Art Biennale WRO 2015 Test Exposure

WEDNESDAY
Stefan Tiefengraber (AT)
User-Generated Server Destruction
installation documentation
Wrocław University Library
16th Media Art Biennale WRO 2015 Test Exposure

THRUSDAY
Samuel St-Aubin (CA)
Tablespoons
installation documentation
Wrocław University Library
16th Media Art Biennale WRO 2015 Test Exposure

FRIDAY
TheGreenEyl (DE/FR)
The Whispering Table
installation documentation and an interview with the artist
Entropia Gallery
14th Media Art Biennale WRO 2011 Alternative Now

SATURDAY
panGenerator: Jakub Koźniewski, Piotr Barszczewski, Krzysztof Cybulski, Krzysztof Goliński (PL)
PEACOCK
installation documentation
The Rings of Saturn exhibition
former Ballestrem Palace in Wrocław
15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 Pioneering Values

SUNDAY
Andrzej Dudek-Dürer (PL)
Live Sculpture
an artist talk
14th Media Art Biennale WRO 2011 Alternative Now