this site is always under construction
a sketchbook of works and ideas by Agnieszka Pokrywka
street art intervention, print 15 x 225 cm sticked on the wall, Nottingham 2012.
The stories evolve to suit the needs and aspirations of each situation through the centuries. This happened with the Robin Hood legend who from the rebel living in the Sherwood Forest became the mascot of the Nottingham Castle which actually used to be an estate of Sheriff of Nottingham, the biggest enemy of Robin. That is why “The message from Robin Hood” encourages to look for the traces of Robin Hood rather outside of the Nottingham Castle grounds.
A coin-operated telescope located on the Nottingham Castle view terrace is fixed. The telescope is discreetly marked by the label: “Message from Robin Hood. Don’t move the telescope. 20c”. Potential viewer after paying 20 cents can see just one distanced spot of the city landscape where is placed the sentence: “I steal from the dishonest & help those whom I please”. The sentence which represents Robin Hood’s believes and motivation is readable from this distance just by the use of the telescope, not by the naked eye. The small money collected from the visitors during “The message from Robin Hood” was planned to be donated for the purposes which I please. Meaningfully it was not possible in this place, time and circumstances*.
Special thanks to Elisa Fernández for mental and practical support.
*Made in association with ParkinProgress.
performance and printouts, 5th International Research Seminar on Salutogenesis, Trondheim 2012
None walk the shore safely, so the nature of one’s river and the things that shape one’s ability to swim must all be considered.
Aaron Antonovsky
We (Irene Domínguez Márquez, Inger Margrethe Hove Laustsen, Wioletta Anna Piaścik and me) started our collaboration from exploring the term of salutogenesis coined in the 70s by the medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky whowhowas interested in the origin of health – even under difficult and stressful conditions instead of questioning the origin and treatment of diseases. Aaron Antonovsky stated that we are all born in the River of Life and instead of preventing people from falling into this river, people should learn to swim in it.
My personal reason of participating in this project was to express during 5th International Research Seminar on Salutogenesis in Trondheim how ridiculous is to organize debates similar to this one and aim to study the stream of life by systematized methods characteristic for scientists in order to find out „what facilitates the capacity to swim well and joyously for some and, for others makes even staying afloat a constant struggle”.
Our work related to this concept consisted of a five minutes long performance (combined with video and voice-over) in which we drew parallels between sophisticated nature of stream of life and formal structure that airplane crews show safety procedures during take-off; instruction sheets that were used in the performance and given to the audience as well; and a poster displayed together with a small pile of visit cards.
For more information, please visit: http://how2swim.tumblr.com/.
vj set for Disquiet, Prague 2012.
Staring, being a director
The story shines out as a reflector
And although you are the selector
You are the star
The footage of the VJ set for the concert was, as well as the songs of Disquiet, brought out of the rough documentation of the life-ways of us – Farcasters. Agnieszka proved incredible intuition and braveness to use raw and straight material from the archive of Farcaster and/as her personal footage, conneceted with the life-events, whose reflection gave the meaning and ideas for the songs of Disquiet band. Having the free entry to the visual footage she had chosen the right things to be shown during every each song. – Being guided by the music, lyrics, pictures and our life-stories. But she didn’t use the power of rough document as the base and peak of the impact for viewer. That would have built up gutter only.
The process went again the way in which she, by composing and enriching the footage, remixing it in the wake of her aesthetic taste, manner, finally of her personal approach to the footage, accumulated the meaning of the image far much more. And she lead it through the stream of time from history to the actuality. To be something at the time.
The connection between the music and the picture here is not set by any stylish rules or cliché, but by the source – experience – and the same approach to transposition of it into art piece. Thus this non arbitrary connection of origin made the performance strong as a storm.
For the same reason it couldn’t become just an nicely formatted motion graphic which you can watch, see, leave and forget. Being, as an creative act, intuitively done by a step further from the experiences documented within the photos, videos, e-mails, skypetalks, and coopting them, it couldn’t be but an step into the life with the necessary impact on events and experiences which came after, being influenced and co-caused by them. She made the pictures being crucial moments of our lives.
So there is at least double time-layer within the VJ screens: Transformed the past from documents to be and injection of meaning into the actuality of the concert, and then nowadays they additionally remind about the event of screening which was so strong, that we still deal with its effects and we can not go over them ignoring… We played us there, we have seen us there and we had to deal with ourselves as we were. For Disquiet as a band it was fatal. For our lives it was the only way through.
(written by Ondřej Cakl)
site-specificlight installation, 150 white lights on iron celling construction bar, Tbilisi 2012.
Legend says that wishing upon a shooting star makes the wish come true. To do not wait for such rare phenomenon citizens of Tbilisi who randomly passed Rose Revolution Square underground during The Night of Shooting Stars had opportunity to throw their own star. Each of 150 stars was constructed by taped together 10mm diffused white LED + CR2032 3V lithium battery + neodymium magnet 10x3mm and aimed to be placed on the iron construction bar located few meters above one of the entrances to the underground passage. The sum of LED stars recreated the dark celling of the place in to the starry Milky Way.
The Night of Shooting Stars involved many unexpected reactions of randomly participating in its creation people as e.g. spontaneous help in stars’ construction, development of original ways of stars usage, tries of getting the stars back from the few meters high celling. Natural and not restricted behavior of Tbilisi’s people added to The Night of Shooting Stars liveliness and truly site-specific value.
More photos of Undergo. The Parallels event which The Night of Shooting Stars was part of can be found here.
The Night of Shooting Stars is inspired by LED Throwies originally developed by the Graffiti Research Lab a division of the Eyebeam R&D OpenLab.
computer art workshop, Prague 2012.
The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real is a children’s novel from 1922, written by Margery Williams and illustrated by William Nicholson. It is both the story about a stuffed rabbit and his quest to become real through the love of his owner and about the owner who was making the stuffed rabbit alive by the power of imagination.
Inspired by this novel, the idea of reusing childhood’s dreams and implementing them as a core of Velveteen Rabbit project came in to being. This workshop aims to stimulate creativity of the people who are not used to express their feelings by the mean of programming and to reflect on stereotypical opinions about unemotional appliance of computer technology.
The project aims to collect group of people who are familiar with Arduino, an open-source single-board microcontroller (or any other hardware programming language which could make possibly easy retraining to this platform), and are not used to express their emotions and personal experiences by the mean of computer technology.
The idea of Velveteen Rabbit workshop was preliminary implemented during workshop in the frame of Art.on.Wires (Oslo, 4-5 May 2012) and then in Brmlab Hackerspace with CIANT cooperation (Prague, 18-19 May 2012).
More photos can be found here.
DISQUIET-VIVIEN’S SHADOW
split album design of two bands: Disquiet and Vivien’s Shadow
“The idea was to let two different musical group record their songs under DIY conditions and then to confront the results on one CD medium. In the old days such a strategy was called “split”, as two or several bands split the expenses connected with the recording studios and paid together. Vivien’s Quiet was much more about the curiosity for the sound and expression reached in home-recording by the bands, which share the style and attitude.” (source: http://farcaster.webnode.cz/)
The content of the album can be found on:
http://soundcloud.com/viviensquiet/sets/viviens-quiet/
and
computer art workshop and exhibition, Trondheim 2011.
“Smoke on the Water” is an open source software based touch pad installation constructed out of the tank filled by water. The webcam located under this aquarium, thanks to Community Core Vision (CCV) tracker, detects movements of the object (e.g. small paper boat named Smoke) placed on water surface and illuminated by the projector’s stream. Control data from CCV are encoded thanks to TUIO protocol. Depending on the position of the tracking point the projection changes its colors defined by application implemented in Processing and spreads smoky lights around the dark exhibition room. “Smoke on the Water” in its name refers to this visual effect. Moreover, this interactive installation aims to provide for a public simple and organic feeling of ability of changing water’s tone just by touch.
The idea of “Smoke on the Water” was implemented during 3-day workshop (20-22 September 2011) ) with five art students from the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
clock made out of mechanism ruled by Arduino (servo motor, diode, light sensor), magnet, metal ball, sand, plywood box, Copenhagen 2011.
“Sand Clock” is an installation build together with Shoko Tanaka and Wen Lei Ng during Physical Computing workshop with Massimo Banzi in the frame of Summer School of Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.
Sand Clock is organic interpretation of time by the use of electronics.
Outside: Every minute the ball placed on the sandy surface of the box moves leaving rounded track. First minute counts one step, second minute counts two steps, third minute counts three steps and so on. After 60 minutes the ball starts to move continuously. The movement is anticlockwise. The mechanism is packed in to the plywood box.
Inside: The mechanism, ruled by Arduino, works thanks to the laser cut plate, with twelve holes, which reminds clock face. Below and under the plate two important parts are respectively placed: the light sensor and the diode. The light sensor counts amount of light inputs which were visible through the plate’s holes moved by servo motor. The magnet placed on the the plate’s edge moves the metal ball.
computer art workshop, Poznań 2011.
The idea of “Vanishing Point” (pl. “Znikający punkt”) was implemented during workshop series titled “Meeting with…” (“Spotkanie z…”) in the “Castle” Cultural Center (Centrum Kultury “Zamek”) in Poznań, Poland. “Meeting with…”, coordinated by Sylwia Chudy, was the title of seven monthly meetings with seven different artists which took place between November 2010 and May 2011. Each one-day meeting contained two, two-hour workshops (one for children and one for adults).
“Vanishing Point” is a computer art workshop, designed both for children and adults with small or no computer user experience. The workshop concept translates a traditional technique of drawing into a digital medium with an emphasis on time-dependent creative act. The main idea is to encourage participants to draw on the special surface which functions as a drawing pad plugged into computer. Thanks to Community Core Vision (CCV), the OSS process of creating each drawing can be watched live as a projection and recorded. The workshop for youth and adults additionally covers a theoretical and practical introduction to the DIY touch technologies and OSS which can make CA even more attractive. The aim of the workshop is to present possibilities of computer technology and advantages offered by OSS in artistic use.
“Vanishing Point” refers both to one of the techniques used during the workshop and a famous cult film from 1971.
Detailed description and reflection of the workshop was published in the framework of the 2nd International Conference on Culture & Computing (20-22 oct 2011, Kyoto, Japan) and can be found here.
experimental film [08:58], b/w, 25 FPS, PAL, screen ratio: 4:3 (1:1:33), sound: stereo, Poznan 2009
„The End” is inspired by piece of “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut. Main character of this book (Billy Pilgrim) thanks to his special skills watches documentary about 2nd World War backwards. Quote which describes what he saw during watching this TV program is kind of scenario for “The End”.
Someone said that war creates reality of reversed rules. The rule of “The End” is to reverse the war. Viewer by watching historical facts backwards (without clear feeling of certain time and space) sees almost unreal reality and doubts about purposefulness of history.
Whole movie is based on documentary footage and inspired by films (feature and propaganda) from ’40s. Soundtrack consist fragments of reversed “The Valkyrie” by Richard Wagner. Out of it, with use of new technologies „The End” was created.
video [03:58], color, 25FPS, PAL, screen ratio: 4:3, sound: stereo, Vilnius 2008
Video contains series of static shots which show ballet steps according to piano music. The final scene exposes somehow the real meaning of this “performance”: floor turns out to be a wall, ballerina is not professional dancer, pianist is a cat*. This video is kind of reflection on the relation between the destiny and the way which everyone chooses by his own. Trying to find what is a measure of success and satisfaction it’s better to find balance between pleasure and quality of everyday life.
* Nora- cat who has become famous for “playing” the piano [http://www.myspace.com/norapianocat]
