Mindaugas Gapševičius: New Interfaces 02/ Machines and non-machines: Interfaces to Experience the Other

MEDIUM Gallery, Hviezdoslavovo námestie 18, Bratislava

Humans invented computing machines to use them as tools. However, these tools have developed to such an extent that, what not long ago was thought to be unimaginable, for example, computational generated texts or machines creating new machines, is now common-place. On the other hand, we still deal with "non-machines" - actors or tools that are not yet embedded in a network of machines, such as a creature evolving freely in nature, or a human not connected to digital networks. We can see a certain disconnect or barrier between them.

In this lecture I will approach machines and non-machines as interfaces between actors in the setting. I propose to think of the following questions: How can and should machines and non-machines relate to each other? How can the use of new methods and tools help us experience the environment? And more specifically, in relation to the exhibition, How can a machine (or non-machine) help avoid physical or mental barriers?

Alongside well-known examples in art and everyday life, and less well-known examples in science, I will show and discuss some of my work, including "Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics," "Microorganisms & Their Hosts," and "You and I, You and Me." All of these works act as interfaces between two or more actors in the setting. By proposing an artwork as an interface, I aim to create methods that help to experience the Other. These interfaces can be technologically advanced, but also very simple, like those used by humanity thousands of years ago.

Mindaugas Gapševičius explores the impact of non-human actors on human creativity and the impact of humans on the umwelt. He completed MA studies at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1999, received a MPhil from the Goldsmiths University of London in 2016, and got PhD in Media arts from the Bauhaus University Weimar in 2022. He has been a creative fellow at the same university since 2015. Gapševičius was one of the initiators and founders of Institutio Media, the first Lithuanian media art platform (1998). Along with colleagues from the TOP association, he initiated the first TOP community biolaboratory in Berlin (2016). In 2019 he established Alt lab, a laboratory for non-disciplinary research in Vilnius.

Gapševičius’s works have been shown at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz (2019, 2020, 2021), the Lithuanian National Gallery of Art (2019, 2021), MO Museum in Vilnius (2019), and Piksel festival in Bergen (2018, 2021).

The interdisciplinary lecture series New Interfaces 02 in the dramaturgy of the head of the MEDIUM Gallery, Miroslava Urbanová, focuses on topics affecting our conditions of cognition in the interfaces of constantly updating technologies and in contrast to the desire for an authentic, visceral experience of the escaping here and now. It focuses primarily on the investigation and reflection of different types of spaces, their meanings, transformations, cohabitation within spaces: public space, digital spaces, topoi, spaces that remain seemingly untouched by people, or are totally and irreversibly transformed. The aim of the lectures is to provide a comprehensible approach to aspects of our lived online present in circles that reflect the posthumanist discourse, transformations in the perception of time and temporality, new artistic interfaces such as game art. At the same time, the lectures reflect the themes that appear in the dramaturgy of the exhibition plan of the gallery (and the reading club for VŠVU students What's the Point?), which carries a certain line of tension between the subject reacting to the new interfaces of technological progress, its effects on our perception of living and virtual reality and escape to the corporeality of experience.

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.