?, 2020

STUDENT SECTION
curators: Wojciech Pukocz, Kasper Lecnim

The 1981 IBM PC simulator is “talking” to Eliot, or, in fact, to Eliot’s The Waste Land. It is a parody of the poet’s style and his way of perceiving the world, of the historic moment and his understanding of the role of culture in the contemporary world. The phrases selected by the artist from the piece Waste Paper. A Poem of Profound Insignificance by H.P. Lovecraft are met with answers – unfinished and incomplete sentences, parroting the quoted lines. The work is reminiscent of an abandoned, broken piece of AI, which is taking its role too seriously, like HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. A Space Odyssey. Like HAL, the 1981 IBM PC simulator just can’t get the job done; it crudely imitates the interlocutor, desperately trying to keep up with an experience that is inaccessible to it.

photo: Małgorzata Kujda