About WRO 2017

WRO 2017: DRAFT SYSTEMS

The WRO Media Art Biennale is the major forum for new media art in Poland and one of the leading international art events in Europe. Since its inception in 1989, WRO has been presenting art forms created using electronic and digital media for artistic expression and communication, exploring current creative territories and building a critical perspective toward emerging issues in art, technology and society.

The subsequent editions of the WRO Biennales have raised a variety of questions about creative approaches to new technologies and the creative crossover realms that arise where art and science, and creative and social abilities intersect.

Every two years, Wrocław becomes a place of presentation for the most recent artistic practices, combined with talks and meetings of artists and scientists with the participating audience, oscillating in variable dynamics between contemplation and consideration, experience and confrontation.

The context for the Biennale’s presentations and meetings in 2017 comprises a series of observations of the irreversible nature of some phenomena of the present. As some of the critics point out, the felt casing of the unsustainable welfare has overheated. “The Earth has virtually shrunk to a single point – it rotates, as a temporally compact orb, in an electronic layer that surrounds it like a second atmosphere” (Peter Sloterdijk, “In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalisation”, Cambridge, 2013). The technological development – considered at all its stages – has proven costly to the planet; in the social processes and incorporated systems, we can see that the barely established synergy is getting dissociated again, democracy as best of the worst systems (“Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all other forms that have been from time to time”, Winston Churchill, 1947) seems to no longer be sustainable and loses its followers.

Broader access to information did not protect us against stereotyping notions about the world and did not free from prejudices.

Former systems of social organization are losing their meaning, democratic mechanisms of negotiating meanings fail, and the sense of community gives way to community platforms. We give our privacy, dexterity, immediacy right away with no regret. Common efforts give way to motivations advocated by algorithms. We are trying to express our individuality by distributing images of our own satisfaction.

As participants of the data exchange in the social network while seeking makeshift alliances, do we pledge allegiance to communication procedures and accept shaky, precarious and temporary positions? (post-media?)

The system infrastructure that shapes us and works us out does not come into sight. One cannot embrace the new systems, even though they’ve turned into environments, as they lost their visibility through the presence of “individually” used devices.

“Organization seizes man wherever he enters the field of technical progress. Technology not only supplies the demand; it also organizes it.” (Friedrich Georg Jünger, 1944)

How does artistic outline this movement? Does it seize these variable conditions? Does it fully capture them and frame in the form of communication? To what extent does contemporary art reflect/express/drifts apart from these processes: always between draft and action, concept and manifestation? (DRAFT SYSTEMS)



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