panGenerator: New Media Art, Rituals and Icons.
New Media Art, it’s self-fulfilling. There’s always something new with which we can dissect the old. Maybe every generation thinks this, but it seems to me at least, that our notions of present and future are so melded together with technology that a digitised life is the only option we have. How then do position ourselves, our bodies and our minds amid the ore and data streams rushing past and through us?
Our old world and its habits have found themselves prey to wholly new forms of almost micro-manipulations. Their presence having been designed to be as invisible and as coercive as possible. So what happens when this virtual world is made tangible, with cursors jutting out of floors and selfies melting into black gravel for shrimp (a level of detail and description that will be explained later).
What are the results when the old world butts up and clashes with the new, like it does every second of every day? Old habits new devices; new technologies old bodies; old systems new rituals; new icons new gods. So far it’s a losing battle between dopamine and liquid crystal. It’s within this constellation that we find the exhibition Icons by the Warsaw based new media collective panGenerator. A trio of artists and technologists taking things out of the digital realm and giving them a “physical form, a kind of tangibility, and searching for ways to connect this tangibility with the virtual.” Hence the physicality of this exhibition at the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw. Their approach is real virtuality rather than virtual reality.
Walking in you’re struck by sound and scale. But the sound isn’t that of whirring laptop fans, like one might expect, but the mechanical clanking and clinking you’d more closely associate with a computer by Alan Turing; a contraption with its guts on display and the antithesis but intellectual relative of our slick black boxes.
Their pieces Anticipation and Conversation materialise the digital icons we so often associate with stress and frustration. These emotions are usually also closely followed by a sense of helplessness and dread that emphasises our lack of agency when facing the spinning wheel of death. Clawing back some of that agency, and talking about guts on display and shrimpy gravel, panGenerator have made it a point to list everything that goes into each of their works.Demystification via listification:
DC motor,
neodymium magnets,
canvas,
gold-plated frames,
Arduino Nano,
addressable RGB led strips,
3d-printed elements,
code: C
Their decision to focus on our modern digital icons and the rituals associated with them reminds me of a quote from the arch ritual maker and mass manipulator Edward Bernays:
Touch a nerve at a sensitive spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism.
Our organism is between worlds, and this exhibition of panGenerator’s work has created a space where we can almost collectively imagine, and then conceptualise, our collective sensitive spots. Is it our worship of the infinite scroll, as with Infinity? Or with the web’s parasitic relationship to advertising, materialised in almost-Constructivist prints in Persuasion?
But how do we move past the ‘making the invisible visible’ approach? How does new media art stimulate actual action outside of the museum circuit? When discussing potential regional and cultural approaches to critical practice panGenerator mentioned piracy and hacking in Poland in the late 80’s and 90s as something that could counter our lack of agency. What was an act borne out of scarcity now takes on a critical edge in our current over abundance of platforms and devices. All of which we don’t actually own: intellectually or physically.
panGenerator’s approach of bringing our digital world into the physical and listing its inner workings, combined with the actionable element of piracy can help us reclaim aspects of our lives that we willingly gave away in the acceptance of an imposed image of progress. But now we know we gave away more than was written in the T&Cs.
panGenerator is Jakub Koźniewski, Krzysztof Cybulski, Krzysztof Goliński.
Icons: Our Daily Rituals is on show until 11.05.2021, lockdown restrictions dependant. For more information see the exhibition guide and the Ethnographic Museum’s website.
