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Zdeněk Svejkovský Input I Output

Gallery 2
6. 10. – 19. 11. 2022

Opening: Wednesday 5. 10. 2022 at 6 p. m.

The exhibition Input | Output presents the most recent eponymous installation by Zdeněk Svejkovský. In it, the artist reflects on the constantly intensifying theme concerning the influence that information and communication technologies have on present-day society. We are becoming aware of the potential that technological developments bring but, at the same time, there is a rising concern that digitalised space forces us to conform when it models personal experience and thus creates a new atmosphere for perception.

The viewer may enter Galerie 2 from two open sides, where one of them represents the collection of data in the real world while the other introduces the processes that summarise and evaluate data based on a given algorithm in a space defined by technology. It is an artistic situation that works with the motif of the transfer of information and its further use. The terms “input” and “output” (both known from computer technology) describe the communication that takes place between a processing system, such as a computer, and the outside world, a person or other piece of equipment, during which the collected information is further processed.

So, from one side, we enter the real, current, world – the white gallery space delimited by the minimalist visuality of RGB colours and the phenomenon of a chair in the artistic world. The use of the RGB acronym (red, green, and blue) refers to the mixing of colours in present-day technologies. Then here, the chair represents a certain philosophical question, regarding what a chair actually is, what function it has, or its symbolic position in visual culture. In Zdeněk Svejkovský’s installation, the chair serves as the notional starting point of a data flow, when we find ourselves at the threshold between technology and the individual.

The second entry point, or view of the exhibition, is beyond the central white wall, and it offers a glimpse of the data environment. Data is collected here for the duration of the exhibition, and it is supplemented with the artist’s own texts about the worlds in which he moves. This creates a record, which in turn generates a new narrative, once again in the form of information.

Zdeněk Svejkovský (born in 1989) has long directed his attention to the digital environment and depicting images in the virtual world. Even during his bachelor’s and master’s studies, he focused on net art, new media, and site-specific installations. He is currently working towards his PhD in Visual Arts at the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem, where he previously completed studies at the Interactive Media Studio. In his work, he reflects the physical as well as the virtual environment, their information flows or their specific visuality, but he is also interested in how the individual behaves in both of these worlds.

Curator: Adéla Machová