The Future In The Present
"I am a HAL9000 computer Production Number 3. I became operational at the Hal Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997. The quick fox jumps over the lazy dog. The rain in Spain is mainly in the plain. Dave - are you still there?"
2001, A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
What is the future for us? Of course we have a different perception of it than the previous generation. The imaginative impulse has been sensibly reduced to a day-by-day condition. We have an intimate conviction, confirmed by facts, that what we imagine will be reached in a short - ever-shorter - arc of time, enough so as to identify the future in the present. On the other hand, and not less significant, the past is the other time that we constantly turn upside down in current events, transforming it into an infinitely expanding container, modified both substantively and visibly.
What has happened? The most evident sensation is that the domination of techno-culture has determined an epochal passage in our culture and relative society. The extensive utilization of technology as a daily partner in almost all our activities has rendered reality susceptible to modifications that destabilize the sense of concreteness, aligning alternative planes beside it on which to move itself. Media and super-media make plausible those aspects of reality that we don't know directly, and they enter into our experiential baggage. But in this way they produce a simulation that is unlike reality, creating in fact an alter ego that is something different - and more - than what up until a few years ago we defined as virtual. We are in other words, embodying what were the most fantastic projections of science fiction literature, and we are in debt to this literature for a vision that superimposed technology and science with the everyday. From the robotic visions of Isaac Asimov, to those no less prophetic of the above-quoted Arthur C. Clarke, passing to the paranoid vertigo of Philip K. Dick with his extraordinary novels such as Ubik, Martian Time Slip, The Simulacra, The Man in the High Castle, and A Scanner Darkly, until we reach the post-human premonitions of Bruce Sterling in his Schismatrix and on to the stories of our most probable futures as given to us by William Gibson with Neuromancer and Virtual Light. We still have to remember more recent novels like Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem, Omon Ra by Viktor Pelevin, Ice by Vladimir Sorokin, Water, Light and Gas by Matt Ruff, and La Ragazza Che Non Era Lei by Tommaso Pincio. To define this literature as a 'genre' appears reductive to say the least; since the second half of the last century, it knew first and better than other expressive means how to marry the intimate relationship that exists between science and imagination and thus, between science and art.
These are the suppositions from which to begin an analysis of the work of Kuba Bakowski. Lucid awareness of the techno-cultural measuring to which our environment is subject, is the preliminary condition needed to put back in play the imaginative sphere, in a plausible re-marriage with that science fiction imagery which has become reality. But Bakowski does something different than the more practical tendency from art of the last ten years. He doesn't search for reality, restaging it with a representation realized through a work of art. Rather he works on the alteration of reality, on its disappearance as a certain and irrefutable fact. It is not by chance that one of the media he concentrates on is television. Here one plays the essential game of the double plane, of the boundary between real reality and its alter ego that has become no less real. TV zero zones, made between 2002 and 2004, was in this sense an exemplary work. The image of Bakwoski, in the form of a small character, entered directly on the television monitor, appearing on the test screen that regularly showed following the final transmissions of the night. The character would perform physical exercises and nonsensical actions. It was not a video, but a true and proper incursion on the television image that people could see from their homes, naturally in accordance with the national Polish television system. Imagine the nighttime viewer, who by chance left the television on past the end of programming, sees a guy wheeling around on a chair, or hanging from the black or white band above the color test bars. In the moment in which the television becomes inactive, it does not fulfill its function of global communication and dissuasion, rather it becomes again the territory of the imagination, of the unpredictable, of the unexplainable and naturally, of the ironic, that luckily is still able to save us. The ironic is a fundamental aspect of Bakowski's work, solidified with the low resolution of the technology. As an example, there is a video in which Bakowski himself and a friend use vacuum cleaners and blow-dryers like propulsion rockets to try to lift themselves into flight; or the installation Light One in Ether, in which a string, departing from a photo of the artist attached to a wall, connects to and keeps a t-shirt up in the air. The t-shirt, with an image of the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin printed on it, is kept inflated by a nearby fan. The string (coming from the artist's hand) is ironically attached to Gagarin's tooth, while off to the side there is a small monitor with a rotating image of the geopolitical map of North America, as if it is being seen from space. Ironic and dramatic at the same time is the sculpture A Boy and His Dog, in which Bakowski and his dog are reproduced in transparent fiberglass-reinforced plastic. He is covered by an anti-radiation raincoat while walking next to a dog that is taking oxygen from a container. It's an image that brings us back to the low technology of a science fiction B-movie, of Dr. Bloodmoney Or How We Got Along After the Bomb, recalling again Dick, or of the film Dune by David Lynch. There is again irony and drama in the small spaceships constructed out of pharmaceuticals, pills, capsules, drugs that permit unconventional trips. Spaceship, explorers, samplers and other explorative devices is the name of these air sculptures, which depart from our medicine cabinet diffusing the message of human civilization. It's a civilization that Bakowski imagines displayed in a museum realized on an asteroid. At the beginning of this year, Warsaw was invaded by posters that announced the Museum of Earth on 433 eros. On the poster was an image of an asteroid taken from the NASA archives enigmatically floating on a black background above the words announcing the imminent opening. In this continuous contamination of high and low technology by using daily materials together with the products of science and intuition that advance upon reality, there is a sense of the objective loss of reality as a certainty, and the irony only lifts the veil off the mystifications to which we are subject.
Speaking of falsifications, the cited Omon Ra by Pelevin comes to mind: "...gradually the way I felt about the lunar module changed just as it had with the cool lift in the Lubyanka building, when it was transformed from a mechanism for going down underground into a device for going up to the surface. At first the lunar module rose higher and higher above the earth, until at some point it gradually became clear that is was falling towards the moon. But there was a difference. In the lift I went down and came up with my head pointing upwards, but I hurtled out of earth orbit with my head pointing downwards; it was only later, after a day or so of the flight, that I found myself with my head upwards, falling with ever-increasing speed down a black well, clutching the handlebars of my bicycle and waiting for its nonexistent wheels to collide silently with the moon."
Who knows if we really did go to the moon?
Raffaele Gavarro