Wiktor Gałka - The flowers in my garden are in full bloom, their pixels have a distinct smell

     

Wiktor Gałka - The flowers in my garden are in full bloom, their pixels have a distinct smell

curator: Paweł Witkowski
Mazowieckie Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Elektrownia, Radom

exhibition 10.02.-12.03.2023

The flowers in my garden are in full bloom, their pixels have a distinct smell

A livestream from a Thailand beach watched in Norway at 3 a.m., a three-thousandth

photo of a friend's dog running in the park on an Instagram story or a query about

what Jupiter's moons look like pasted into Google's servers; inexorably, the

technology of the Internet has become the default mediating tool in the construction

and circulation of images that inform how we see and experience the world around

us.

Just as individual organs make up a human being, so our digital footprints - photos,

videos, messages, present in virtual space - are the components of our new,

multiplied identity. Barring some cataclysmic event wiping humanity off the face of the

planet (despite the efforts of some, fortunately, such has not yet happened), our

digital footprints will continue to exist unchanged long after we disappear.

As our lives continue to expand to include a virtual layer, our relationship with our

own bodies and nature continues to transform. More and more tightly surrounded by

the Internet, we perceive the world through filters - enhanced, edited, adjusted. The

digital worlds in which we immerse ourselves deeper and deeper every day offer

possibilities far beyond analog reality. Like plants grown on the fertile ground of

petabytes of data from the digitized resources of every scrap of the planet, they

branch out endlessly, entering into simultaneous tensions with nearly all the cultural

codes, histories and meanings we have produced, are producing or are about to

produce. Ecosystems of data disregarding time and space, all instantly available,

always ready and updated in real time, representing neither a singularly defined

space nor meaning. In these constantly pulsating, overlapping realities and the

multiplicity of equivalent narratives, the dizziness is limited only by the speed of the

network connection.

This parallel existence and mutual entanglement of man and machine, the hybrid

corporeality of the 21st century with the vision of artificial intelligence and non-organic

life forms looming on the horizon, is for me an inspiration evoking distant associations

regarding a new potential kind of symbiosis. A transgressive relationship suspended

in the elusive space between data centers and our psyche, permeating and

functioning within the structure of both. Impossible to fully separate, never-ending

construction, a constant tension between us and the digital reflection fed by endless

streams of data.
Wiktor Gałka

Photos Rafał Korzeniowski

                                                          

https://www.instagram.com/nocnyartpatrol/