8th March, 14.00 Arturas Bukauskas, doctoral student in Fine Arts, will defend his art project ""Suddenly They Came to Life and Began to Rush in, Intending to Eat My Brains." On Recursive Animation" (Fine Arts V 002) at the VAA exhibition halls “Titanikas” (Maironio str. 3, 01124 Vilnius)
The accompanying exhibition "Untie him and let him go" will run from 15 February to 9 March 2024 at the VAA exhibition halls "Titanikas" (Maironio g. 3, Vilnius).
Art project supervision:
Prof. Žilvinas Lilas (Vilnius Academy of Arts, Visual Arts, Fine Arts V 002)
Thesis supervision:
Prof. Dr. Natalija Arlauskaitė (2019 – 2022) (Vilnius University, Humanities, Philology H 004)
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vilius Dranseika (2022 – 2023) (Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland), Humanities, Philosophy H 001)
The Artistic Research Project will be defended at a public meeting of the Academic Board of Fine Arts at Vilnius Academy of Arts composed of the following members:
Chairperson:
Prof. Alvydas Lukys (Vilnius Academy of Arts, Visual Arts, Fine Arts V 002)
Members:
Dr. Mindaugas Gapševičius (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Germany), Visual Arts, Media Art)
Dr. Tania de Leon Yong (Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Germany), Visual Arts, Animation, EX-Media)
Prof. Dr. Gintautas Mažeikis (Vytautas Magnus University, Humanities, Philosophy H 001)
Prof. dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius (Vilnius Academy of Arts, Humanities, Art History and Theory H 003; Social Sciences, Communication and Information S 008)
Abstract
This work is a Convolute - a collection of separately published notebooks that are recursively related to each other, bound into a single volume. The work posits that animation is an integral phenomenon of consciousness self-organization, through which we, as material systems, settle among other systems that are organizing themselves at the same time. Animation manifests in models of negotiated time, where matter continuously affirms the distinctions between the living and the non-living. From there, it bursts into our consciousness with images that belong to no one.
The notebooks discuss various cultural territories and their forms of animation - cinema, theatre, moving image, culture of memory. Asserting that animation is immanent to consciousness, reading the text itself becomes an act of animating and reviving. In the work, the animatable text operates with various text-to-image-to-text formations, incantations, hints to machine models, prompts, and video phantoms. It is in mutual communion with the presented art objects and is constantly being reinterpreted to create inconsistency, rupture, catastrophe.
The main premise is that in the reality created or referred to by animation - the Reality, such identities of time are created where the living seeks to recognize itself as living and is alive only for that reason. This does not deny the fundamentality of time, but rather distinguishes its rhythmic forms characteristic of matter that declares itself alive. Recursive "traveling in time," i.e., constantly referring to oneself and experiencing different forms of time simultaneously, is a way for matter to organize itself as alive. Thus, in the animated crash of a drawn airplane, it is not a specific airplane that crashes, but the Real airplane. And it crashes incessantly.
