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Link to full video: https://vimeo.com/800496736

KAJE, New York
Ignas Krunglevicius
Spawn
Site-specific audio installation as part of exhibition Just About in the Round, curated by Elizaveta Shneyderman (US).

Do you remember Twin Peaks, season 3, episode 8, when the Trinity nuclear test was depicted? After the camera zoomed into the mushroom cloud, the audience was finally introduced to the origin of Bob, where the antihero of the whole Twin Peaks saga was unleashed from the fires of the bomb. I like this little TV moment to function as a MacGuffin for us, a narrative onto which we can attach what will happen sonically at KAJE through “Spawn”. 

We often recognize patterns in seemingly chaotic or nonsensical events, moments when we find meaning in the noise: Do you see faces in the clouds? This is an illusion, an apophenia – a brain glitch inherited from ancient times. But at the same time, I get a feeling that maybe there is something behind the mess. A kind of secret math. A god, or a possessive entity like Bob.

Tactile sonic rage is a prime component of the site specific installation that will take over the entirety of KAJE. Here I’ll be chasing the feeling of the ephemeral, that which happens right at the moment, in the space where the bodily senses are overloaded. Right when one can almost touch it.

– Ignas Krunglevičius

Ignas Krunglevičius (b. Kaunas, Lithuania) currently lives and works in Oslo. He received his MA in music composition from Norwegian Academy of Music in 2010. His installations, videos, and sculpture often combine sound, and text, where he explores the intermix between the agency of power, economy, nature and existential realities generated by global technological development. Krunglevičius’ works have been exhibited at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai, China; Kunsthall Oslo, Norway; Ultima, Oslo, Norway; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, USA; Transmediale, HKW, Berlin, Germany; La Biennale di Venezia, Nordic pavilion, Italy and The 19th Sydney Biennial, Australia, amongst others.

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BETWEENNESS: Technoculture and the Baltics

24.02 – 08.04.2023

Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga

Participiants: Becca Abbe (US), Uģis Albiņš (LV), Valdis Celms (LV), Jānis Dzirnieks (LV/NL), Flo Kasearu (EE), Oliver Laric (AT/DE), Deimantas Narkevičius (LT), Norman Orro & Joonas Timmi (EE), Adriana Ramić (US/PL), Tarwuk (US/HR), Evita Vasiļjeva (LV/FR). 

Curated by: Riga Technoculture Research Unit (RTRU) (Zane Onckule and Elizaveta Shneyderman)

Project Manager: Evita Goze

Executive Director: Elīna Drāke

Betweenness: Technoculture and the Baltics explores production and technicity through a gathering of Baltic and international artists. Over the past thirty years, the Baltics have experienced dramatic geopolitical upheavals and shifts in power; once bound to the Soviet Union in quasi-political isolation, the region is now more opaque and free-floating, with a cultural atmosphere that always seems to be in search of solid ground. The exhibition imagines cultural identities as technocultural and networked epistemes, binding them through their broken histories. Intergenerational and operating across mediums, this group of artists, scholars, programmers, and designers trace the effects that technoculture has had on Baltic art and life by showcasing their creations—new and old—made over the last fifty years.

“Technoculture” refers to the interactions between technology and culture, as well as the politics of those interactions. Starting from the presumption that art and emerging media don’t pre-exist culture, but rather emerge from it, the exhibit unearths a feedback loop between particular media and their reception, between technics and its looped-in culture(s). It is through these curatorial engagements with—and mediations of—contemporary culture that we can effectively investigate and observe the technocultures that augment and shape our world. 

The exhibition borrows its title from Oliver Laric’s video work Betweenness (2018), which models a commitment to the interstitial through its own indexicality, hybridity, and peculiarities. As animated media, it exemplifies this exhibition’s central critical disjunction—one between cultural aftershocks and the artistic and technical possibilities that can emerge from them. Like the infinitely shifting time-lapse movements of the video, works manifest through a series of  vignettes—display materials, cultural ephemera, archival objects—in their investigations of technoculture. Betweenness: Technoculture and the Baltics is a procession from one animated space to another—a gathering of artworks deeply concerned with the morphologies of animism and animation, as well as their potential to speak to new imaginaries in cross-cultural dialogues. ​Betweenness: Technoculture and the Baltics champions the credo that construction and deconstruction are interrelated functions, experiences that must share one another. Betweenness: Technoculture and the Baltics looks for movement within and beyond contemporary modes of visualization in the Baltic cultural landscape, as well as its interchange with the world.

What might this work signal for the future? Are we attuning ourselves to more dynamic, expansive possibilities in spite of ongoing geopolitical instabilities? Is there a shared approach in these cultural contexts that more pervasive or popular imaging strategies embody? How could those renderings influence or describe a broader international development? This exhibition connects transformations across industries while evoking the entanglements of our contemporary moment through abstract forms and material instantiations from the Baltics and beyond.

Partner institutions: Temnikova & Kasela Gallery (Tallinn), Artnews.lt and Echogonewrong.com (Vilnius), Rupert (Vilnius).

Suppporters: Baltic Culture Fund, Culture Ministry of Latvia, State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga City Council, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in the Republic of Latvia.

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Online: RTRU Season 1 launch
Under The Hood
https://www.rtru.org

RTRU Season 1 contributors/participants: Dana Kopel (New York), Eltons Kūns (Riga), Rio Roye (New York), Līga Spunde (Riga), Candice Strongwater (New York), Alise Tifentale (New York/Riga), Viktor Timofeev (New York), and Jessica Wilson (New York).

Part research journal, part art and writing publisher, part hub for developments in emerging media, RTRU brings an interdisciplinary and technicity-centered approach to the status quo of contemporary art programming. Season one, Under The Hood, looks at the technical processes and economic and social structures of production that profoundly shape visual culture. Our first season considers the museum without images; the effusive “student body”; labor history; “the factory of phenomena,” the paradigmatic worksite of contemporary media culture; and much more.

In order to understand how imaging strategies produce the aesthetic effects that we frequently and unconsciously observe in the world, we must first understand the infrastructure for how these images are made, or go “under the hood.” The way visual culture comes to be constructed is at the center of these investigations: the real-time simulations and the skeletal rigs that form the underwire of thrashing corpses, the labor laws which structure capitalist workflows, the technologically dependent student body, the visible signature of video art tropes and their affective contours, many of which have become increasingly prevalent. All of these examples belie their beginning as metrics, inputs, algorithms, and other coding languages assigned by animators, programmers, and policymakers. The images produced by these original technical apparatuses thus introduce a new level of estrangement wherein the major referent is no longer the physical world, but the technical culture behind the curtain.