ENTER
Ksawery
Kirklewski
Every moment we use technology, or are even just nearby it – we participate in both conscious and passive uploading.
As we face-unlock our phones or curate our mosaic of photographs we become streams of data. ‘ENTER’ is a keyboard command, an interface saying “forward”. Using extra-sensory tools like infrared, the work locks-on and calculates your dimensions. Here, we are seduced by the possibility of seeing ourselves on a blown up scale – on this webpage/billboard. The work presents a gamified vision of this process – of seduction and absorption: an invitation to play in these glowing waters. This could be our 15 minutes of fame – as the web shimmers with our abstracted image. Will we follow the Greek myth of Narcissus – fall in love with our reflection and drown in the lake?
Technology is becoming more invisible: screens and phones are thinner, telephone poles – now buried optical fibres. These snaking cables on the floor remind us of this hidden infrastructure – a mass of wires revealing its objecthood, before self-arranging into the flatness of a screen. The visuals speak to an older time, when lower resolutions meant digital images were stylised versions of reality, requiring imagination to complete. As you are converted into data your actions cause a cascade of feedback. Here, you are glitched by visuals from video games in the 80’s as your movements cause the audio to react to your presence. Arkadiusz Krupiński’s soundsystem responds like an instrument, each layer of sound interacting with you and one another. Your actions cause malfunctions and modulations in the composition. The soundscape is a plastic to mould, each interaction builds new sonic worlds to be discovered. As such, each new visit is but one of many possible configurations – at each new encounter, find a new self and foreign world within an infinite multiverse.
For a moment you feel seen, your existence is confirmed by industrial tones that swell and jitter. Data is drawn from your expanded digital essence – before the lights slither away to a place beyond view. By accepting the invitation to ‘ENTER’, you offer up your body to feed the cyber-organism. We become merged with the virtual, an object assimilated in wires. As individuals are packaged into information they become an extractable resource; a virtual doppelgänger to be traded by conglomerates. This paranormal ‘other’ is often referenced in fiction and myths: as a ghostly twin and a dark omen of things to come.
Ksawery Kirklewski | b. 1988, Poland
Ksawery Kirklewski is a motion designer and creative coder. Graduate of the Graphic Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, PL. His diploma “Exhibition of Banners” (2015) received the Minister of Culture Award on “Best Diplomas of Polish Academies of Fine Arts” in 2015. Author of interactive installations, generative animations, music videos, phygital sculptures, and realisations in public space. In his activities, he uses new technologies, programming, advertising media and light/rtv equipment, focusing mostly on the generative, digital and internet art field. In 2019, he co-founded Fundacja(x), a foundation which deals with the broadly understood art of new media and its dissemination.