Mikado

Mikado, a Japanese game that I refer to in my work, resembles pick-up sticks. We throw the sticks that later need to be gently lifted without interrupting the whole.

Mikado

The inspiration for this series has been spontaneous installations created by my 9-year-old son, Ignacy. He has been using various wooden elements to build structures. I was fascinated by his vitality and creativity, a primordial energy of creating that leads to making an object. In the case of such a young child it is hard to talk about conscious usage of the visual experience. He is guided by a sense of harmony and elementary principles of composition which have their roots in the structure of visual perception. It is a kind of a play that becomes a form of interference in space and object. The sourcing creative imperative is a vibration and energy that manifest themselves through creation of a new form.

We approach computer technologies with a distance and distrust. While we understand them as not belonging to the biological world we exclude them from the circle of nature. This understanding, in which we strongly differentiate between technology and nature, is based on a conviction of mutual isolation of phenomenons in our world. We forget the fact that technology is a creation of a biological human. All the inventions are constructed basing on and resembling our senses and possibilities to use them. In this way, technology is an extension and evolution of biological world. Interestingly, human as biochemical phenomenon has a tendency to marginalise inorganic phenomenons. As if the universe only included life. It is an egocentric and constrained thinking. I see a man as a biological machine. If we reflect on it, we can come to the conclusion that we are a limitlessly complex, evolving mechanism that has uncomprehensive construction complexity.

The world we look at is just like our face. We cannot see it without a mirror. We can never see ourselves. We base on forwarded theories and follow beaten paths. The reality constantly goes out of our control. The subsequent scientific discoveries and philosophical ideas reveal endless areas of our ignorance instead of bringing us closer to a stable truth. What is looking into a mirror? Is looking equal to knowing?

Mikado emphasises, through manipulation and (immaterial) digital record, the relocation in the direction of mental motive powers. The crisis of photography and bygone ideas can lead us to a broader and more actual perception of reality which is a form of a complex, multi-layered, fluid structure, in which all models of understanding the world and physical arrangements coexist. Eventually, our perception and consciousness excerpt/create what is available to our perception and understanding at the given moment.