Paweł Janicki’s show is a journey toward Point Nemo, a geographical construct denoting the spot in the Pacific Ocean which is farthest from land: the pole of inaccessibility. Navigation is based on protocols of dealing with autonomous evolving systems and experiments with AI, the Internet, patterns in huge data sets, code, and new materiality. Objects, installations, actions, and non-actions revolve around one center of gravity from which a new order of laws and intentionalities emerges or into which everything collapses.
Relatively near Point Nemo
Though replete with references to the history of humanity, scientific and geographical discoveries, and the history of reflection on the limits of human knowledge, Janicki’s Point Nemo is determined by posthumanist practice. The currently endorsed coordinates of Point Nemo are software-calculated, and the artist observes that both the infrastructural basis and the collective imagination that promoted the interpretation of technology as a site of liberating play barely exist any longer.
Models fail to take into account the cumulative, evolutionary growth of agentive potential and the complexity of knowledge – a growth resulting from the evolution that unfolds at the plane of abstract computational systems and black boxes of machine learning, increasingly redolent of alien intelligence. Given this, it is not progress, for progress is a human concept. Rather, it is evolution.
Preview Video
Timetable
Program
Credit: WRO Art Center (PL)
Credit: Zbigniew Kupisz
Credit: Zbigniew Kupisz
Biography
WRO Art Center
An independent NGO organization that initiates, develops and supports cultural and intellectual dialogue, research projects and collaborative undertakings with artists, theorists and art institutions around the world. WRO Art Center is run by the WRO Center for Media Art Foundation. WRO originates from the Sound Basis Visual Art Festival launched in 1989 in Wrocław as the first independent international manifestation dedicated to contemporary media art and cultural phenomena in Poland; organized in the form of biennale based in Wrocław, “the Polish cradle of new media art”.
Project Credits / Acknowledgements
Co-funded by
Municipality of Wrocław | wroclaw.pl
Minister of Culture and National Heritage from Culture Promotion Fund
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