Aditional information

• CreArt Dual Exhibition ‘Techno-Illusion’.
• Venue: Ars et Mundus Gallery (A. Mapų st. 20 Kaunas, Lithuania).
  Opening show: 19.09.2019.
• Duration: 19.09.2019 –09.10.2019.
• Artists: Rimantas Plunge (Kaunas) and Robert B. Lisek (Katowice).
• Curator and text author: Prof. Ph. D. Remigijus Venckus.
• Transl. Assoc. Prof. Ph. D. Kristina Stankevičiūtė.

Conception of the exhibition. 

Robert Lisek’s art

Living in the environment based on technology we encounter daily problems that the use of the technology provokes. But we also encounter a certain change of our reality. Information about our own selves – what we do for work and play, our needs and worries, even our looks – is fragmented and multiplied, which encourages us to explore the realness of reality. It has become common to work while staring at a computer screen, to entertain ourselves by browsing the Internet, and to kill the time in traffic jams by watching on social media the messages of friends and people we barely know.

The developing technologies encourage professional artists to look for new means of artistic expression, for new combinations, innovative realization of artistic ideas and original revelations of the problems of reality and virtuality of our time.

We invite artists to interpret those changes, applying various means of artistic expression, expressing their attitude to what they perceive as real reality and what, according to them, is an other reality, artificially created by means of technology, with possible contraversial influence on the society.

Abuot the artists

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Rimantas Plungė (Kaunas, Lithuania). The language of his photography may be considered a research of photographic technique or analysis of audiovisual media. His work is based on topical issues that the artist has been concerned with for a number of years now: the problems arising from the discourses of media ecology and environment psychology. Smart innovation and development of his characteristic style allows Plungė to apply as well as analyze various means of image creation and combine them harmoniously. Searching for an unexpected, unusual visual effect the artist combines techniques of image creation and reproduction from various time periods. All technical solutions are acceptable for the author, who is not afraid of artistic experimentation. By adopting those means Plungė is looking for an organical, surprising image. Every technology leaves traces on the imprints, representing itself in a meaningful way. We see here the physical imprint of a phototape, its mechanical processing/ intentional destruction, realizing at the same time that the photo-collages we observe have been scanned. Plungė’s creation shows that different artistic means of expression may co-exist next to each other in perfect harmony, while a minimal shot may reveal a great variety of unexpectancies and reticencies…

On the one hand, the artist is producing his own poetry that requires from the viewer to discover their own meanings. On the other hand, his photography is putting to question the change that the contemporary techno-culture induces upon us. Thus the change from analogue to digital images speaks about our own participation in the discourse of the present: for example, technology changes our daily rituals, new machines transmit a digital signal taking up the place of the analogue, integration of apparatuses into the body changes its looks, as well as – in some cases – the interaction between/ among bodies. In this way Plungė is talking to us about the changes that we are going through, subtly asking whether they are what we really want…  

Prof. Robert Lisek (Katowice, Poland) is a representative of experimental media art. Artistic research into contemporary technologies is at the centre of his work. He manages to combine perfectly the interests of an artist with those of a scientist. The main instrument of his work is self-generating technologies. The produced visual acoustic effects incite fright as well as curiosity of the viewer. That happens because technologies, generating images on their own, producing mistakes and combining them together, seem to ignore our wishes and intentions. Thus the work of Lisek seems to imply what we understand as coding and decoding, creating visual associations with genetics

R. Lisek’s art

and distortions of genetic codes. Our attention is riveted by what is known as Artificial Intelligence (AI). We may perceive it as a supervised, but at the same time a resolutely independent ‘subject’. Lisek demonstrates conceptual media art in which generation of a mistake and the new unexpected structures that follow it may be regarded as an advantage of creation. Art represents the creator’s interests as varied as post-conceptual art, tactile media, present environment and social problems. Lisek may be regarded a pioneer of art which involves and analyses the AI, where topical questions are indivisible from the concepts of Human Machine Interface and Human Computer Interaction. Lisek’s artworks demonstrate synthesis of image and sound, determined by the generated and specifically applied algorithms. In this way art based on technological innovation shows that the narratives it produces define the characteristics of the self-same art imposed by the technologies; it is a form of art that speaks about itself and for itself, being responsible to itself only. So if you wish to learn more about art that speaks of itself and to itself, or a technology that demonstrates itself to itself, you should follow the work of Lisek. Here beauty and aesthetic admiration open up within the technology, marking harmonious techno-aesthetics in the practice of art.