In the 7th edition of the project for distinguished students of the University of the Arts, Poznań, the participants decided to probe the vast expanse of the Internet. They stood face to face with the Moloch, within whose boundless depths the concept of THE OTHER acquires an infinite number of meanings. THE OTHER is a mysterious digital entity, artificial intelligence, etc.
Along the way, over several months of meetings and debates, the project participants wove their bold visions based on advanced technology harnessed in the service of young imagination. It was fascinating to accompany them through the process from the blossoming of their visions, through its expansion and necessary reduction, to the unavoidable final decisions. The two of them, Klara and Mateusz, supported each other as their dialogue was based on a parallel pursuit of a common goal. The two distinct but equally expressive personalities which met during the project never attempted to dominate the final outcome.
Klara Woźniak created a robotic figure of a whale, to some extent inspired by the words of Herman Melville, the author of the famous Moby Dick: “the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body”. Klara comments on the work she has created as part of the Polarities project: “If one were to visualize the Internet in material form, for me it would be a whale. A living giant whose interior is filled with an ocean of data and a sea of information. Entwined with veins and nerves like a well-organized server. Overgrown by colonies of seashell viruses. In its belly, I feel like a lonely explorer of the system’s depths”. The exhibition visitors are thus invited inside a modern-day leviathan, a gigantic robotic sea creature…
Mateusz Janik referred primarily to the culture of remix, which he finds fascinating. This phenomenon is both ubiquitous on the Internet and impacts numerous spheres of off-line life. Matthew comments on his work as follows: “The remix culture is based on reproduction and processing. The nostalgic spiral spins like a top composed of a vastness of cultural texts. It swirls and thickens; being at its core, we are unable to distinguish the new from the old. The M., a digital entity I created for the project, behaves similarly. With its help, I recorded an album that mostly consists of content appropriated from the Internet. I use this content to build an audio-visual landscape that seamlessly merges what is new with the foundations of contemporary culture. The EP is accompanied by a poster with lyrics written in collaboration with artificial intelligence, which sampled stereotypical associations with selected cultural figures to create lyrics in their style. I raise the question of how much of our identity is made up of unique characteristics, and how much is based on others and what has existed before. We consist mainly of water; how what about our digital personae?”
The result of their work is an intimate exhibition in which THE OTHER, in its many and varied forms, echoes digitally with whale songs and remixed music…
supervision: Bogna Błażewicz (Arsenał Municipal Gallery), Magdalena Kleszyńska, Piotr Wołyński (Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts, Poznań)
