Przemyslaw Sanecki
This work summarises my latest investigations into aesthetics of abstract video, auditory perception, and what it means today for the digital visual artist to remain radically autonomous without losing the critical voice.
There are multiple threads present in this work. Some of them are strictly of the formal type, like for example an examination of repetition as a method of rationalising a temporal structure of an artwork. Another thread, of the more political tone, concerns the impoverishment and ruptures in consumer sensory apparatus and its impact on narrowing epistemology of colours. Thus all colours used in the work have their origin in everyday consumer experience, being recycled from packaging of products found in my household and rigidly transferred inside the code.
Intensity, for some even brutality, of the stimulus fabric of this work should be understood as an intrinsic effect of a contrast. Contrast here is an artistic equivalent of a dialectical method. I like to think of it as a procedure to introduce into a work a play of confronting ideas, and in this particular piece I use it extensively. For example, one can think of a confrontation of trompe-l’oeil with reality as a generalised, metaphysical contrast, similar to a crude approximation of non geometrical structures of clouds in a computer game texture. Another example: regularity and arrhythmia are obviously contrasted. A kick and a handclap are another slightly surprising contrast. Obeying and ordering is another. In fact, most elements of this video can somehow find its dialectical partner next to each other.
Saying all that, and ironically in contrast to what a title of the work might suggest, I rather pose questions than try to find answers. This is because I don’t think artists should be yet another expert in solving problems and this is where my obsession with rough, far from smoothness of modern UX, aesthetics comes from.
All visual material is created programmatically by code written using an open source framework OPENRNDR, sounds are composed using a hybrid software-hardware modular system (Pd, VCV). Programming is not only one of the available mediums of expression, but more importantly a radical means of production that profoundly changes social hierarchies, thus it should be creatively appropriated by artists and become the subject of their critical scrutiny.
Przemysław Sanecki is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with code, video, sound and ai. Originally from Poland, he lives and works in Paris (FR).