MQ Art Box
The MQ ART BOX in the Main Courtyard of MuseumsQuartier Wien features temporary installations by contemporary artists. The transparent art space interacts with the public realm. The exhibition program offers insights into contemporary artistic practices and fields of discourse.
daily 00:00-24:00h at the MQ Main Courtyard, free admission
CROSSLUCID & Natália Sýkorová
Dwellers between the Waters. Foldings
14.11. – 04.02.2024
Eröffnung Mo 13.11., 18.30h
The artist collective CROSSLUCID and the artist Natália Sýkorová present a multimedia installation that they developed together during their 2023 residencies at the MuseumsQuartier.
The installation combines sculptural objects and sequences from Dwellers Between The Waters, an interdisciplinary film project that was created in partnership with the poet and researcher Oxi Pëng and the musician Sayaka Botanic. It connects artificial intelligence (AI), magic, and alchemy to find answers to human trauma in the Anthropocene epoch.
The setting in the MQ Art Box is reminiscent of an aquarium, with the rhizome-like sculptures seeming to have escaped from the virtual world of film. They establish a connection between realities and entities and address the film’s polyphonic narrative structure, in which human and non-human beings, artefacts, animals, plants, spirits, forebears, gods, organisms, and technical protheses are interwoven. Linked together in a visual-narrative universe, they share apocalyptic fears and existential hopes.
The two film sequences Nostalgia For An Imagined Present and Synthetic Mournings are presented on two concave LED video displays that are surrounded by silhouette-like sculptures resembling plants. As two-dimensional as the screen itself, they appear to us in a three-dimensional form only through their relationship to each other. The artist collective explores the question of how translations between dimensionalities and dimensions, between material and immaterial objects, and between physical and virtual worlds function, and how appearances as well as perceptions are changed through this. CROSSLUCID points out the architecture of neuronal networks, which is inspired by the first images of human neural tissue. These images reduced the complex human neurochemical receptors of the human being to linear drawings of interconnected nodal points.
With the method of “procedural design,” they also refer to the relationship between organic and algorithmic systems: the elements in the installation are based on cut-out motives, and similar to CGI (computer-generated imagery) systems and microorganic processes in nature, an endless number of recombination possibilities of elementary components is used to produce perception.
Through procedural design, CROSSLUCID is able to create artificial life systems and ecosystems whose forms emerge through infinite possibilities of intelligent variation. No condition and no form is fixed; everything is in flux. The work transforms itself from one scene to the next, changing its significance before a precise image has crystallized. Drawing on K Allado-McDowell, CROSSLUCID understands AI as a kind of ecological technology that can enable us to have a deeper connection with the world we inhabit.
Curated by Elisabeth Hajek
CROSSLUCID is an artist collective engaging in highly collaborative cross-disciplinary projects in co-evolution with technology. Through filmmaking, poetic artificial intelligence, multi-layered techniques of collage, assemblage, and experience-led interventions, they create scenarios and build experiential formats that instigate prototyping and rehearsing potential futures and progressing metamodern values.
Their work has been exhibited at arebyte, IMAL, Vellum LA, EPOCH Gallery, Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Francisco Carolinum Linz, EXPANDED.ART, Art Encounters Biennial, AI Biennial Germany, NOWNESS, LUX Moving Image, House of Lobkowicz, and ARD Culture, among others.
Natália Sýkorová (b. 1998 in Slovakia) is an artist researcher, sculptor, performer, and everything she needs and can become. Her work is situated on the premises of conjectures and speculations; notions which she investigates through the study of spatial behaviors. Her sculptural work examines technological agencies of objects and their inner dependence as naturecultures. She treats these narratives as myth-making territories, self-programming, self-alienating, de-stabilizing.
Photos: Simon Veres
