#SaveTheDate – ROMAN LIPSKI: THIS PERMANENT OTHER LANDSCAPE 23 – 26 Februar 2023 – Julia Stoschek Collection, Leipziger Str. 60, 10117 Berlin! Curated by Laura López Paniagua.
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The use of technologies like VR, AI, and especially, Quantum Blur (QB) in art is only at an early stage, and thus, in a phase of experimentation and discovery of their potentials, possible outcomes, and consequences. The artworks currently produced by Roman Lipski are instances of an ongoing exploration of these emerging landscapes – in a literal sense, as a landscape painter, and also metaphorically, treading on the new territories that these technologies bring about.
For this reason, this exclusive 4-day showcase focuses on the complex and collective process that the creation of these works entails rather than on finished works. The rooms at the Julia Stoschek Collection become a living atelier where the artist and his collaborators will be working on-site, as well as a tentative display of artworks that will be worked on during the exhibition. The show is thus an “exhibition about an exhibition to be” – in a yet indeterminate future.
The show is divided into three thematic rooms that display Lipski’s multifaceted survey of landscape painting through experimental media. The first room or “atelier” is an adapted version of the artist’s studio where he will be working on his current QB project with quantum software engineer Marcel Pfaffhauser and composer Kimin Han. The second room is dedicated to AI, a technology which Lipski, in collaboration with the art collective YQP and the AI company Birds on Mars, used to produce pioneering works collaboratively especially from 2016 to 2021, raising questions about the possible AI-human symbiosis in art production. The third room hosts the artworks that Lipski and his team are producing using QB, VR, and the sound program Max/MSP. Through these transformations, a 2D digitalised landscape painting is extruded through QB, becoming a new 3D landscape that the visitors can travel into through VR. This visual voyage is a sound journey as well since Han is able to modulate experimental sounds according to the visual parameters of each pixel (hue, saturation, brightness, and height in the QB topography). Is this the first time that landscape painting can be perceived, not from an orthogonal, distant, perspective, but from its inside, in a broad sense? Since this immersive experience unequivocally challenges the Greenbergian flatness of the painting, could it be considered a form of virtual theatre in the terms of Fried?
The questions, quagmires and paradoxes that Lipski encounters approaching this hybrid, digital-physical landscapes belong to a broader discussion that society is facing with the new technological status quo. To make this discussion public, a series of lectures and open discussions featuring Lipski and his collaborators (scientists, quantum engineers and artists), academics, and students from Berlin universities, will be held.
The title of the show is a homage to science fiction legend Philip K. Dick, whose oeuvre often speculated on the nature of reality and its, according to him, multiple, overlapping worlds (or landscapes). In How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978), he refers to the existence of an unchanging, ancient landscape that underlies every other realm a human mind can inhabit. Could that permanent dimension be the event horizon of the current proliferation of electronic world-making?
23 February 2023
6–9 pm, Opening Reception
Registration required: https://forms.gle/CFTACw1mgDpCGo4J6
24 February 2023
Experimental Lecture Series
This Permanent Other Landscape – Challenges of the Emerging Digital-Physical Statu Quo in Art, Science and Society
In this experimental lecture series, the artist, his collaborators, academics in the fields of Art and Science, specialists in art, and university students come together to discuss pressing issues that technologies such as AI, VR, and quantum computation bring about.
Programme to be announced shortly: www.romanlipski.com/current
25–26 February 2023
12 am–6 pm, exhibition open to the public
