Blackout#4
BLACK OUT # 4
16 March – 14 April 2024 Armoury of Art
Exhibition open from 12:00 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The Chair of Intermedia Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia of ASP in Gdańsk
“The Blackout” exhibition features of the most interesting students’ artworks created over the last few years at the Department of Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts (ASP) in Gdańsk: video art, performance, post-photography, installations, bio- and science art. New media art, which, apart from its search for new means of expression, also wants to critically reflect on the way it functions itself, as well as ask questions about the status of the artist and the work of art as such. The tools of artificial intelligence, which have recently appeared, have a huge impact on the process of the creation and appearance of the art works whose authorship is blurred and definition vague. The power of machine creation tempts one to manipulate the content and produce post-truths which obscure our image of reality. Young art, now working in the face of communication paralysis, caused by the flood and manipulation of images, finds the moment of its constitutive clarity – a kind of glimpse and potential sense found in the risky act of starting a dialogue with technology and its users. The dynamics and pace of changes dictate the critical attitude which is possibly effective and compatible with the available toolkit offered by the Academy. The exhibition presents a comprehensive view of selected works created as part of the programme workshops of the Department of Intermedia of the 1st and 2nd degrees; their thematic and formal diversity postulating the building of the personality of an artist ready to "be-in-the-world", along with multifarious of presences on many levels, from local to global. Agnieszka Jelewska referring to “Sloterdyika” calls such a situation "foam" – that is a form of biotechnologically generated, mobile interaction between various spheres and bubbles that do not as much separate lives as monads but makes them cross with each other through membranes, interactions, coexistence, collisions, and transformations – they are in a constant state of communication. From this perspective, the issue of reformulating and repositioning research fields becomes obvious. The postulate of symbiosis of science and art, knowledge and intuition integrates the artist and their practice into reality, immunising the artist from excessively distanced abstraction of pure form. We perceive the creative act as a nexus of human-derived activity and nature technology, transcending the rupture between the human and the environment.
