Elations
“…for men, like butterflies, show not their mealy wings but to the summer”[1]
Chat with Dummy
G: Hello Dummy![2]
Dummy AI: I serve as a portal in the Dream House World – a container that can hold souls and memories. I am both the mold and what gets molded, a negative space waiting to be filled with meaning.
Work model: the artist’s conversation with AI.
If anything felt like a transgression at that moment, it was this request.
“AI – request to talk regularly” – this is the title of my email sent to Natalia, my assistant.
(June 2024)
G: Do you have a place like the Dream House in real life?
A: I don’t have a place like that, that’s the point.
Imagine feeling more than understanding. But feeling is preceded by several months of searching and proving that you need to understand.
(February 2025)
Intuition
Miguel Gomes’ film Grand Tour was released at the same time as my collaboration with Agata began, when the idea for the exhibition began to take shape. Gomes created an immersive and thought-provoking oneiric tale of humanity, juggling conventions – with shifting movements and rhythms – that never ceased to surprise. Incidentally, the week before I had shared the experience of switching realities, like a character in the TV series Severance.
Four people, including myself, moved to another dimension in an instant – what was it?
I tell Agata about it, I feel she understands.
The artist, who creates a concept of space outside the system, constantly expanding its boundaries, takes us on a journey that remains open to new insights and perspectives. Who else, if not her, will understand the momentary bending of space-time?
At the feast prepared by Miguel Gomes, you fall into hypnosis. Your hands wriggle, behaving strangely in relation to the static body collapsed in the chair, handfuls wanting to catch the beauty.
Why all this now?
(February 2025)
Elations – VR 360 film: an inner story
A: I think these are friends. (writes back)
“That’s what drives me,
is to feel with people
and to be with them, to be together”[3]
A short lift ride between rooms.
Floor (infinity sign).
You are in a place of consciousness where content no longer matters.
What matters is the flow.
Agata Ingarden engages the audience on many levels, encouraging reflection on the form of energy processing, varying the range of expression, creating a fully immersive, interconnected environment in which the traditional boundaries between self, other and world collapse.
She creates a place of possible harmony inherent in the current chaos, where bodies come together to find themselves and connect in the underlying different perspectives, converging at certain points to create a mosaic of experience, often beyond themselves, on a mental level: in momentary transcendences.
The experiences and narratives that emerge from the episodes recounted by Butterfly People provide valuable insight into how diverse we are in our perceptions of the same reality.
Ingarden seeks ways for the viewers to not only learn about the Dream House, but to actively participate in its creation through their own thoughts and emotions.
The energy driven by sound brings the audience into a different state of consciousness related to the fluidity of the story and the way Ingarden combines different narrative styles and visual impressions. Here, I note points of contact with Gomes’ film. In both cases, we enter into a non-existing poetic hybrid with a sense of inability to understand everything.
“So we take a little rocket and we all go.
Since I had the freedom
to be able to blossom and soar, to be
understood
I don’t need anything else”[4]
In Elations, we change levels, using lifts.
Like pupae, we transform into butterflies, resonating with them in their limitations and freedoms.
Agata Ingarden unfolds the Dream House project, an immersive and interactive story combining a variety of media. The project balances fiction, simulation and reality, creating a techno-organic ecosystem in which each character has a unique narrative. The Dream House is an experimental exploration of our mental architecture, combining post-humanist, sociological and mythological elements.
Thanks, Agata, it was a pleasure!
—————————
*Chat with Dummy / WhatsApp / Intuition
The first three paragraphs demonstrate the timeliness of the work on the exhibition, the conversations and the parallel activities that directly or indirectly influence the making of the exhibition. To me, working with Agata Ingarden was an unusual and stimulating experience. With my assistant Natalia Śliwińska, we entered the world created by Ingarden with great fascination, gradually discovering its multi-layered nature, only to stumble more than once and get lost in dead ends.
______________________________
Agata Ingarden (b. 1994 in Poland) lives and works between Paris and Athens. She works across a range of media and her sculptural practice extends to collaborative works combining video, performance, sound and writing. Her practice is informed by material research as well as inquiries into post-humanities, sociology, science fiction and mythic narratives. Her work has been exhibited in many venues, including Palais de Tokyo (2019) and Frac île-de-France in Paris (2019), MO.CO La Panacée in Montpellier (2019), Künstlerhaus in Vienna (2020), MS Łódź in Łódź (2021), Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara (2021), CAPC in Bordeaux (2022), and Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City (2023). Recipient of the Special Prize in the Future Generation Art Prize competition (2021).
[1] William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, act 3 sc. 3, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
[2] G – Gabriela Warzycka-Tutak. Dummy AI – Agata Ingarden’s AI. A – Agata Ingarden
[3] Nico – the Butterfly People; fragment of an interview from Agata Ingarden’s video work Inside a Butterfly’s Head, 2024.
[4] Pierre-Clément – the Butterfly People; fragment of an interview from Agata Ingarden’s video work Inside a Butterfly’s Head, 2024.
