Animal. Avatar. Machine.
Svavarssafn
2024/2025
Kolbeinn Hugi, Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir, Panja Göbel, Sasa Lubinska, Jo Pawlowska
Animal. Avatar. Machine. is an exhibition that wonders about the future of our bodies. The line between self and cyber-self is blurring. And as it fades, we are left to question who we have become, and who we will be, in the fluid worlds of technoculture.
Computerized systems have changed how we engage with others, relate to the world, consume information, and connect to our own bodies. Entire lives can be lived in the digital ether. Our devices can simultaneously inform us of our loved one's vacations, last night's sleep patterns, world news, and irregularities in our heartbeats. As we try to keep up with rapidly growing new technologies, we expand - or perhaps mutate - into half-physical/half-digital hybrids, fluid beings, bodies-as-avatars.
In the exhibition the audience is presented with "Technoflesh", a video installation by artists Unnur Andrea Einarsdöttir and Panja Göbel.
The film captures a cult-like performance staged in 2024 at exhibition space Babel, Trondheim, where the artists harnessed brain data of participants using a Muse brain headband, a custommade face app and a tablet. In an imagined sci-fi bio lab setting, participants were tasked with competing for a livelong ownership of reputable metaverse avatars by embodying them with their brain waves whilst holding their technologically enhanced flesh.
BeastQuest, an Eco Futuristic Sci-Fi film by Kolbeinn Hugi moves even further beyond human-ness. The film follows a non-human Hive Cluster Manager working on the fringes of the sacred GAIANET. The protagonist builds hardware infrastructure and navigates the WildWeb to activate a new Server Cluster for the Zoocratic Internet. The film, set in the world of Animal Internet and shot in both Iceland and the Azores, features Jules Elting and frequent collaborators of Young Boy Dancing Group.
The final work or the exnibition narrows its focus beyond community or body to the speculative desire of a single organ. In "Organ 3000," a video work by the artist duo Jo Pawlowska and Sasa Lubinska, a nameless, bodiless organ-avatar spins slowly. It is a forgotten object that is simultaneously painfully alone, and a symbol of a utopian queer-trans future, a relic from an imagined world in which low-cost hybrid sex organs could be grown in any shabby home lab.
The work is part of the duo's ongoing investigation of virtual encounters and digital spaces, where non-binary avatars multiply, queer kinships are divine and bodies are fragmented.
Curator: Jo Pawlowska