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Kolorobloki

By All Works, architecture, modernism, photomontage

Emalite glass is a synthetic opaque and multicoloured glass that appeared in the 1950s. Inserted in aluminium frames, it is used to cover the facades of buildings with modular panels of any requested colour. Its simplicity of use as well as its modularity account for its popularity in the 60s and 70s in Western Europe and in the countries of the socialist bloc. However, emalite glass does not age well, and is often replaced by other covering material, not as colourful.

Kolorobloki comprises a series of photographs of emalite glass covered buildings. These photographs are composed in a modular way, i.e. using the modularity of the emalite glass panels as they are used as a construction material. Thus, although all the buildings are, in real life, different, their photographs have been manipulated so that their facades have all the same proportions and the same number of floors. Some buildings have been shortened, while others have been enlarged, by adding the required number of modular panels. The only unaltered motif in these photographs is the colour of the façade. From a certain perspective, emalite glass panels are one of the last heirs of the modernist tradition in architecture, where simplicity and functionality are cardinal values. Modularity, from this point of view, is one architectural feature best suited to building something functional and cheap, but also maybe elegant. Nevertheless, as far as emalite glass is concerned, given the poor quality of the materials used, one often faces a kind of degenerate modernism.

However, Kolorobloki is not a criticism of modernism in architecture, on the contrary. It is a project that uses the grammar of modernism to show its limitations, but with a great dose of sympathy for that architecture as well as for the buildings photographed

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Aleph

By All Works, catoptric chests, mirrors

Aleph is a work whose direct reference may be the short story of the same title by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, the Argentinian author describes the Aleph as “the point in space that contains all other points”.

At the same time, Nicolas Grospierre’s Aleph has a second, less evident source of inspiration, and which lies in the tessellated structure which develops upon the viewer’s eyes as he gazes into the work. This structure reminds indeed of the so-called “space-frame”. In architectural engineering, a space frame is a rigid, light-weight, truss-like structure constructed from interlocking struts in a geometric pattern. It is capable of bearing huge weights in comparison to its relatively light structure.

The space-frame technology was developed, among others, by Buckminster Fuller, or, later by the avant-garde architectural groups Archizoom or Archigram. These architectural groups saw the space-frame as a way to emancipate architecture from geography and place. Because it was lightweight and easily assembled, the space-frame was seen as the basis of a nomadic architecture, but also progressive, egalitarian and non-hierarchical.

However, these utopian ideals proved, in the long run, quite illusory. The space frame, as an engineering technology, was used primarily in the design of malls, airports, commercial warehouses – in a word, in the architecture of social control of late capitalism. In effect, instead of being the instrument of architectural emancipation, the space frame produced the contrary – the architecture of invisible oppression and control.

Nicolas Grospierre’s Aleph is, by itself, quite contradictory, as it seems to contain a limitless space in a limited box, but it also reminds of this paradoxical and contradictory phenomenon that the space frame is.

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Giant Inscrutable Matrices

By All Works, catoptric chests, mirrors

“Giant Inscrutable Matrices” is the term coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky to qualify the machines that embody Artificial Intelligence.

Giant – the massive servers used to host the petabytes of data needed to create AI.
Inscrutable – AI as opaque systems, that no one, including its creators, is really able to understand the ways it functions, and has even less control over it.
Matrices – the orthogonal, vertical and horizontal limitless rhizome of endless floating-point numbers that gives birth to AI.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is, among the specialists dealing with AI, one of its most potent critics, as he believes that AI will simply wipe out the human race, as soon as it becomes sufficiently intelligent. It is not a question of “if”, but a question of “when”.
The debate about the balance between the benefits and threats caused by AI is, obviously, raging. While AI is discussed in nearly any possible manner, and the quasi-miraculous operations it is able to perform, practically no-one has wondered about the way Artificial Intelligence may look like.

It is this question that Nicolas Grospierre is asking in Giant Inscrutable Matrices, precisely by using Eliezer Yudokowsky words to describe AI, whose strange poetry and evocative para-scientific terminology accurately but also metaphorically opens up our imagination to AI.
To tackle this visual riddle Nicolas Grospierre devised a double strategy.
On the one hand, he created works based on his huge collection of vintage negatives from the 1960’s, and among which he found beautiful photos of electronic boards – in a way the ancestors to AI. These splendid images, showing the intricacy and sharp abstraction of electronic boards, are used either per se, as simple yet potentially representations of the beginning of AI, or in an intricate photographic object. This work, making use of mirrors and miniature light-boxes, presents AI as a kind of abysmal yet quasi living organism, made out of electronic boards endlessly sprawling.
On the other hand, Nicolas Grospierre, has reached for help from Artificial Intelligence systems themselves. Working with the AI image generator Midjourney, he asked it to create images based on the prompt “Giant Inscrutable Matrices”. Many different iterations and avatars were produced, until the machine spat an image so striking that it stood out as the right answer. It represented huge orthogonal monoliths made out of mirrors in a Northern, barren yet beautiful landscape [Giant Inscrutable Matrices #1]. The most uncanny thing about this image is its total lack of humans. It shows the world of AI after it has annihilated humanity. It is the world post-human civilisation. And it resembles Nicolas Grospierre’s sculpture in a strange fashion.

Ultimately, Giant Inscrutable Matrices deals with the awe, wonder but also existential fright AI stirs in all of us.

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The House which grows

By All Works, anthropocene, architectural fantasies, photomontage

However, these houses very often also continue to expand. After a few years of use, the need for additional space occurs, and the owners decide then to enlarge their homes. This enlargement is implemented in the same fashion as the original construction: the house is nearly-finished, but the façade remains bare. And this process may happen several times.

The House Which Growsis a photographic series which is inspired by this phenomenon, but also exaggerates it. The first image shows a nearly finished house, which, in the subsequent images, appears to be growing, with the addition of new wings, walls, and even turrets to the original building. Eventually, in the last image, the house has become a huge chaotic and shapeless construction. The series is open-ended: although six images were originally created, there is always the possibility of placing additional walls to the façade, so that the house can be, literally, ever-growing.

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The Self–Fulfilling Image

By All Works, conceptual photography, mise-en-abyme, site-specific

The Self-Fulfilling Image aims to create a photograph that is both the result and the cause of its own existence, bringing to life this photograph through a performance. Conceptually, the project takes its cue from the idea of the “self-fulfilling prophecy”, which creates the conditions that makes it become true. At the same time, this photograph takes its inspiration from the “one image story” in the manner of the Renaissance tradition depicting different sequences of the lives of Biblical figures as a visual narrative for a complete story. The Self-Fullfilling Image merges both propositions into single project: a large photograph placed into a specific venue and brought to life through a performance.The “hero” of the photograph is the artist, Nicolas Grospierre. The Self-Fullfilling Image appears at first glance like a simple urban landscape photograph, but is in fact an intellectual game and a commentary on his own situation as an artist in New York. The photograph depicts a wide-angle landscape of a street of Chelsea seen from a bird’s eye view. Chelsea as the heart of the NY art scene. In the first sequence, Nicolas Grospierre is seen walking in the street carrying a huge framed photograph. This photograph is the same one that the viewer is looking at, and which is currently being described. In a second sequence, further down the street, the artist is meeting with someone, a gallerist, to whom he is presenting the photograph. The third sequence represents the opening of Nicolas Grospierre’s exhibition in a gallery: the photograph hangs on a wall of the space, and Nicolas is in discussion with a person, possibly the gallerist. And, finally, in one of the windows of the street buildings, one can distinguish a reflection of a person taking a photograph from the other side of the street: it is the artist taking the picture.The performance is what is actually happening in the third sequence of the photograph, i.e. a real opening of a show, in a Chelsea gallery, with the actual photograph hanging on the wall of the gallery where it is seen hanging in the picture. The actors of the performance are the viewers that came to the opening: they are part of the picture which they are looking at.

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Not Economically Viable

By All Works, anthropocene, architecture

Poland is littered with unfinished houses. Each of these houses stands for a tragedy but also an aesthetic experience. They stand for tragedies, because one can imagine the different reasons that have led to the abandonment of the house: death, loss of a job, loan refusal, all stories making the current owners «economically not viable», according to banking terminology. But they are also aesthetic experiences, because this architecture, most of the time lacking originality and ugly, mutilated by its empty windows, is in a way sublimed by the very exterior signs telling about these personal tragedies.

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The Afterlife of Buildings

By All Works, architecture

The Afterlife of Builings was an exhibition shown in the Polish Pavilion during the 11th International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2008. This exhbition showed pictures of Nicolas Grospierre and Kobas Laksa, and was curated by Grzegorz Piatek and Jaroslaw Trybus. It was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.

The Afterlife of Builings is an attempt at tackling the issue of durability of architecture in changing economic, social and aesthetic conditions. It features 6 tryptichs showing prominent buildings raised in Poland in the last 2 decades. They display, on the one hand, the way buildings currently looked like, through solemn photographs by Nicolas Grospierre. On the other hand, photomontages by Kobas Laksa showed the way the same buildings could look like in a not so distant future when the conditions having led to erect these buildings will have changed.

Furthermore, The Afterlife of Builings also changed the Polish Pavilion itself, which was, for the time of the exhibition, transformed into a hotel. This was done on accounts that the Venice Pavilions are most of the time empty, while the city, is on the contrary, most of the time overcrowded and lack places to sleep. The pavilion was thus used as an additional sleeping venue, and hence the exhibtion’s second title Hotel Polonia.

The Afterlife of Builings was shown in 2009 at the Zacheta National Gallery under the title Disco Zacheta. For the time of the show, Zacheta’s austere interiors were trasnfromed into a discotheque.

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Lithuanian Bus Stops

By All Works, architecture, modernism

Lithuanian roads have one, very typical, architectural feature: it is their countless bus shelters, with their clean, simple and multicoloured design. These bus stops are spread all over the country and were built in the 1960s and 1970s. There are approximately 30 different models of bus stops to be found in Lithuania. Built from prefabricated materials, they were then placed in the countryside, and painted in vivid colours.

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Kunstkamera

By All Works, collections, conceptual photography, mise-en-abyme, photomontage

Kunstkamera is a photographic installation consisting in an imaginary collection of photographs, shown in an especially designed hexagonal room, and creating a visual and intellectual game for the viewer.The title, Kunstkamera, refers on the one hand to the “Wunderkammer” and “Kunstkammer” of the Renaissance: cabinets of curiosities and art, typologies of extraordinary exhibits aiming at showing the world in miniature. On the other hand, the Kunstkammers were also paintings representing these very cabinets, where the painter would include hidden meanings only readable by the initiated. The Kunstkamera installation contains both the collection of curiosities, in the form of various photographs, and the photograph representing the collection, thus creating a mise en abyme, with the photograph of the collection inside the collection, which is itself represented in a photograph, and so on. Practically, the installation consists of a hexagonal room, with two entrances opposite each other. The room is thus divided in two: the photographs are symmetrically organised with respect the line created by the two entrances.

Each half room contains two side walls, on which are hanging the photographs of the collection, and a central wall displaying the image representing the room itself. The game begins when the viewer gets acquainted with the photographs, the way they are organised on the walls, and what they represent. As in the “kunstkammer” of old, this one contains all sorts of visual and narrative riddles. The topics of the photographs are the keys to these riddles. On the one hand they refer to tradition of the “kunstkammer”, the very fact of collecting, and the narcissistic obsessions related to it. On the other hand, they refer to my own private obsessions as a photographer: my tendency to create symmetries and repetitions, and to use a creative instrument which I felt prisoner of, which is the idea of series in photography.

The very fact of taking pictures in series is a form of collecting and also an obsession, and Kunstkamera is an attempt to embody this idea of series in photography, and ultimately exceed it. That is the reason why the central photograph representing the collection shows different images than those physically hanging on the walls: these are all series whose subsequent images appear only in the mise en abyme of the central photograph. A final and invisible motif consists in that most of the photographs are hoaxes, either visual (what they show is impossible) or narrative (the description I give them is false). Mystification, through digital manipulation, has indeed become an integral part of photography today, and it seemed necessary to me to include some in Kunstkamera, as ultimate riddles for the viewer to discover.

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