Ewa Aksienionek. Relacje na baterie (Battery-powered Relationships). Painting
On November 4th, 2008, at 5 pm, the Brda Gallery, working under the patronage of Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz – the opening of an exhibition of painting by Ewa Aksienionek, titled Relacje na baterie (Battery-powered Relationships). The exhibition will be open till January 28th, 2009.
The Battery-powered relationships cycle is a starting point for deliberations on the relationships that can take place between products of engineering robots, and living creatures, especially human beings, but also animals or plants.
Since robot engineering, genetic engineering and nanotechnologies are the most dynamically developing sciences nowadays, the subject of my painting exhibition seems to be extremely relevant. Recently, it’s becoming possible to create a human double (an artificial organism containing both the characteristics of a machine and of a living creature). These days, scientists pay even more attention to combining digital mechanisms with the biology of living organisms. Even now machines are created that can move, change their own construction, react to the changes in the outside world, get food, communicate with human beings in a highly intelligent way. Since robotic individuals are being constantly perfected, it seems that what is impossible for the scientists now: to equip a robot with living items allowing it to „self-reproduce”, will sooner or later become a fact. (…)
|The cycle that I present consists of eleven paintings made in oil and acrylic on canvas. One of the paintings presents an already existing robot AIBO, the image of which has been put into a new context. Sensor-equipped artificial dog walks by itself, plays, emits different sound, and even mimics urinating, even though it doesn’t excrete any liquid. Many Japanese families decided to buy those mechanical dogs, which don’t require feeding, bathing or walking. An interview by Faith DAlusio with a Japanese family owning the robodog shows that both the adults and the kids treat AIBO as a normal house pet, sometimes feeling it’s a member of the family. The only difference is that AIBO can be turned off
Most of the paintings present the machines that I designed using a graphics editing program &; they’re my own vision of what will robots look like in the near future. When designing them, I was inspired by movies, cartoons, street art, computer games and the latest scientific news concerning the development of robotics.
(Ewa Aksienionek)
Ewa Aksienionek was born in 1983. She graduated in painting at the
Faculty of Fine Arts at the Mikołaj Kopernik University in Toruń. She
received her diploma with honours in 2008. At the moment she is a
postgraduate student at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Mikołaj Kopernik
University in Toruń. She paints, draws, photographs and makes stained
glass works.
Exhibition – 2008.11.04 – 2009.01.28