IDEA

Neil Postman describes contemporary reality as Technopoly, the situation when technological progress went so far it is impossible to imagine other possibilities, i.e. return to the traditional lifestyle.

Technopoly redefines what we mean by religion, art, family, politics, history or by the truth so they fit to the requirements of totalitarian technocracy. It shapes us, shaping new forms of creative research in the same time.

Neil Postman – Technopoly.
The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Nonsense Technology is an artistic concept and strategy executed through series of works and exhibitions. It combines science, art and technology on many different levels.
Its outcome is always the physical object available for the viewer in the real world created in opposition to finality, productivity, effectivity and including a serious dose of sense of humour.

When used in art practice it allows some scientific distance without falling into indiscriminate fascination with technical novelties.

Technology becomes here a method to ask questions, process of research without a need for the unequivocal answers. Devices and objects shown by artists make no sense from a classical perspective of technology, they don't work or result of their work is unpredictable. Nonsense Technologies reveal new sense of research beyond mainstream systems and well defined solutions.

Przemysław Jasielski
Rainer Prohaska
Przemysław Jasielski

Oracle / MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow / 2017

Palm reading machine foretelling the future of the viewer.

In a perverse manner the installation brings an experience of a myth of oracle, which in an enigmatic way can predict our future. The work recalls subconscious cultural traditions such as chiromancy and ancient Greek oracle, whose foretell is difficult to verify.

The whole installation is a programmed machine that randomly reveals its personality – sometimes its prophecies tease the viewer directly (presenting messages like “how about a date tonight” or “you have such a beautiful eyes” from time to time).

This is yet another author’s experiment with the emotionality of machines, or rather the emotionality roused in a human being due to contact with a machine. The artwork also encourages reflection on trust in technology and our dependence on it, as well as the fear of its domination.

 

Emotions Control Unit / MONA Innerspaces, Poznan / FRIEZE, New York, USA / MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow / 2015

The machine is based on a custom built wooden enclosure, equipped with distance and touch sensors, and a microphone it uses specially created program reacting to behaviour of the viewers in the gallery, and “showing its emotions” on set of meters.

They can switch on and off sets of sensors responsible for three-dimensional seeing, touch and hearing and change the machine's behaviour and fine tune the particular “emotions”. In addition, machine's 'emotions' make them react emotionally.

The machine is anthropomorphised by acknowledging its human feelings. Words such as ”anger”, ”sadness”, ”fear”, etc. describe unique mechanism, which is triggered by discrete mental states, leading to unique, measurable outcomes. In this view, there exist a limited number of biologically determined basic emotional processes, which, considering specific form, function and cause, are different from mental processes like cognition or perception.

 

 

Leviathan / Transnature Is Here, Poznan / Le Guern Gallery, Warsaw / MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow / 2013

Leviathan, is an attempt to create an artificial electronic organism showing features of a living creature. The object is covered with sensors reacting to motion and emits various sounds and air oscillation as a result of interaction with the audience.

It contradicts the privileged position of a human being as regards technology and utilitarian use of the machine. It grants the machine its own subjective identity.

This unique object also takes up a game with the economics of desire. Unlike devices and gadgets purchased on mass scale, which are to improve our lives or provide entertainment, Leviathan remains non-assimilated and in its own way – passive.

It is an “alien/other” – a thing coming from a different order of reality, unpredictable and self-controllable.

 

Photo Robotoid / The Sculpture Center, Cleveland OH, USA / MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow / 2016

A photographic robot with a built-in choice making capability taking portraits of the audience.

Controlled by a custom software robotic arm it operates a DSLR camera with mechanical shutter release. All photos taken are immediately printed and dropped on the ground. Kinnect operated body and movement identification allows the user to precisely point the camera and take a perfectly composed portrait.

However, because of it’s settings, the Robotoid seldom takes photos normally considered as usual. Carefully chosen parameters of the program steering the robot constantly change, making its actions different than a normal machine behaviour. Though, unlike a human photographer, it suddenly switches attention from one object to another, releases the shutter at unexpected moments and concentrates on “less important” actions and details.

What also makes taken photos very unusual is people's behaviour in front of the camera not operated by a person. They are much more natural and less posed. They are naturally driven into a specific game when they act and move in front of the robot, trying to influence its actions.

 

Map of Activity / MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow / 2017

Map of Activity, is a compilation of large-format photographs’ fragments depicting the remnants of creative processes.

Some shreds can easily be linked to specific works of the artist, while others are a mysterious trace of artistic creation.

According to Western art traditions, it is assumed to display the final, perfect version of the work. Jasielski exposes the whole creative process, reflecting a new relationship of scientific research and artistic experiments. Hence, the final work consists of a multitude of errors, wastes, leftovers or fragments, which free fall determines the composition.

 

 

Hi-fi / MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow / 2017

HiFi, is a form of play with a fetishization of technology gadgets. The intriguing design of the mahogany cylinder has size of a satisfactory volume of audio equipment. Its form refers to tam-dam - a primitive, African musical instrument.

The hammering strike frequency can be manipulated by the viewer with a voltage relay. Minimalism of the beaten rhythm does not satisfy the desire for aesthetically pure sound - mahogany serves only visual reasons.

In addition, the recipient's patience is overwhelmed by its never-ending sound, so the emphasis is on the gap between expectations arising from the visual sensation and the hearing experience.

 

 

Rejected Projects / MONA Innerspaces, Poznan / WRO Art Center, Wroclaw / MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow / 2015

A series of engraved plates presenting projects accumulated through years by the artist in multiple processes of concept creation and its implementation.

Preparing artistic projects is often subjected to external judgment, for instance, during applying with project proposal for grants, residencies and exhibitions. Of course proposals are usually rejected - only small percentage is accepted by different kinds of juries. Even ideas are sometimes cancelled at the very beginning by the author because they are too difficult or too expensive to execute.

Rejected Projects is an act of maintaining difficult, inconvenient or seemingly failed concepts by immortalizing them with a precious technique of engraving. Something that was meant to be discarded is preserved as a striking concept.

 

 

Technical Drawings / MONA Innerspaces, Poznan / MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow / 2015

A series of works made in situ, which form is inspired by machine elements.

This is a pawky kind of technical drawing, rising to a three-dimensional form, using graphite grease on paper. A technological element is used in an absurd way, denying its original function: grease, as opposed to its typical appliance, acts as a binder in this case.

Technical Drawings demonstrate a remark of the relationship of art and engineering, in the form of an object taken from the field of technology subjected to artistic analysis.

 

 

Analog Immigration / CSU Galleries, Cleveland / 2013

Analog Immigration is a specific back-in-time travel to the period when there were no digital devices. Viewers can experience the analog era – a place devoid of constant internet access and cell phones.

The copper mesh and steel structure, like a Faraday cage, block and filter electromagnetic signals including wi-fi and mobile networks. The combined blocked signal is displayed on the old analog oscilloscope.

Additionally, every person entering the show is being asked to leave all digital devices at a checkpoint at the entrance.

 

 

Unplaced / MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow / 2017

The photographs present found objects - imperceptible objects in a received situation, extracted from reality by the artist.

A welder, compressor or switchgear, found in a non-workshop environment, draw attention to their visual aspects and design, but also intrigue by their application methods.

This is an observation of the world, focused on the entering of technology into everyday life, from which machines are not pushed away and hidden in the space dedicated to specialized work, but they somehow “crawl” to the surface.

 

 

Rainer Prohaska

Enlightenment / All-Russian Decorative - Applied and Folk Art Museum / Moscow, Russia / 2013

For the 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, an installation at the ‘All-Russian Decorative - Applied and Folk Art Museum’ was realized. Essentially, the installation was a simple power-plant, which produced electricity out of movements of the audience, who were visiting the exhibition. The audience had to move water from a ground to a top basin.

Then, the water in the top basin functioned as ‘potential energy’, which was frequently transformed into ‘kinetic energy’ and furthermore into electricity, by powering a turbine, which was connected to a generator.

A physical process, which can be found in ‘reservoir power stations’.

The whole generated electricity was used just to enlight the note, which described the artwork and the artist in a dark blackbox.

SAN LUN CHE featuring the TERRAPLASTIC ARMY / Anni Art Gallery , 798 Art District / Beijing, China / 2010

‘SAN LUN CHE featuring the TERRAPLASTIC ARMY’ is based on experiments and observations during Rainer Prohaska’s residencies in Beijing.

While building modifications of the ‘SAN LUN CHE’, the typical Chinese three-wheel-cargo-bikes, in winter 2008, he configured this show, which exhibits variations of modified ‘SAN LUN CHE’-vehicles. Returning to Beijing in 2010, Prohaska additionally started to squat a dirty room behind his exhibition space.

Compared to 2008, when he used the whole city as an artistic playground, this process now turned out to deal with the atmosphere and the restricted contingences of a single room, an off space in the 798 art district in Beijing.

At ‘ANNI ART Gallery’, Prohaska shows modified ‘SAN LUN CHE’-vehicles and their construction graphics.

Additionally to these elements, he shows also an installation in the dirt-chamber behind the Gallery with objects, documents and photographs, created under the climatic influence of a deserted space.

Enter Beijing / Performance in Public Space & Exhibition / Anni Art Gallery, 798 Art District/ Beijing, China / 2008 & 2009

‘Enter Beijing’ is an experiment to approximate the city Beijing by using artistic methods and to get a more intense approach to this ‘planet’.

‘San Lun Che’ is the name for typical Chinese three-wheel-cargobikes, which Rainer Prohaska used for his trip across the area of Beijing.

During this journey, the vehicle expanded, got larger and absorbed materials and objects which were discovered during transit.

The bike mutated into a collage and into a media, which altered communications and situation

Unplugger / Readymade for a Media Attack & Exhibition & Lecture / Ars Electronica Ars Electronica Center / Linz, Austria / 2002

‘Unplugged’ was the theme of the ‘Ars Electronica 2002’ in Linz/Austria. As a result of the artistic examination of the topic, I created the ‘Unplugger’ – an efficient device to prevent most communication and social interaction.

Unplugger Manifest:
“Use your personal ‘unplugger’ to break some circuits. As soon as someone puts the ‘unplugger’ into a socket, a short-circuit occurs, and all electronic equipment, which is in this electric circuit, fails. By using this ‘Mobile Socket-Virus’ it is possible to transfer the surrounding into a state of conflict. Join the Art Of Unplugging!”