MANIFESTO by Dmitry Kawarga – Radical of Biological Morphs

By naming myself a biomorph radical I have delineated an imaginary circle of my creative endeavours and distanced myself from any mainstream art.

I like to see myself as an experimental research scientist immersed into my own experience, as a biological instrument of art capable of bringing into life unseen psycho-physiological mechanisms, by ‘dragging’ their three-dimensional projections into reality.

The object of my study is the area accessible to tuning – consciousness, perception, thinking process as well as the psycho-physiological arrangement of other beings, including inanimate objects. I have had special, ‘intimate and warm’, relationship with art since I was a child. Each new artwork gradually changes my perception of reality and alters my reaction to life. These changes, in their turn, transform my priorities in art. I am curious where this chain of interrelationship will eventually lead me…

Up to 1999 I mostly painted, but my paintings were getting more textured, as if they were inflated and swollen, as if the surface of the painting ceased to be flat and developed reliefs. While a part of the surface remained to be flat, the other – the textured and raised one - strove to break free by turning into a three-dimensional sculpture. The moment it happened with the painting, my own imaginary obstacle was swept away. I realized that in the same way I could ‘drag out’ into three-dimensional world not only the images and symbols of visible material world while staying within the traditional framework of visual art, but also what lies at the very source of it, what causes it – materialized fragments of abstract thought forms, stream of consciousness, thinking process, fragments of perception, reflexes, Gestalt. And these would not necessarily be sculptures and installations, but peculiar artefacts extracted through immersion into consciousness and subconscious. My works are a synthesis of art and science and presuppose a bio-reversible contact with the beholder, they emit noises of various frequencies, tremble and react to the human touch and the rhythm of the blood flow.

The new series of interactive sculptures is titled ‘Unfulfilled intentions’ and includes amorphous and intentionally uncompleted structures containing robots inside them. They react to the touch of the beholder’s palm, to his/her voice, breathing and pulse by shuddering, moving, pulsing and humming as if being impregnated by each human contact, as if accumulating information from human bodies. Thus my creations are inexhaustible and ever changing, they absorb the energy, thoughts and rhythms of human contact.

The central part of the installation is equipped with a special device that transforms low audio frequencies into vibrations of various amplitudes causing resonant vibrations of the whole installation. It turned out that I exposed my biological structure by dragging it with hooks and chains and than animated it... All other sculptures sneaked upon by thin filaments of a vibrating and animated construction also represent certain materialized metaphysical processes, part of my own psycho physiological reactions.

My installation is an attempt to make communication links material. Not the global common links where all of us are interwoven and built into, but the model of it that is crystallized inside each of us. I tried to realize and examine the „structure“ that allows me to be tuned into society and be adequate to its demands.

If one comes to think about it, one can talk about self-determination of a human being in space and about the sprawl of information links. With the increased transparency and penetrability of our world, the aura distances contract as well since the compression of the living space is directly related to the increased speed of traveling between places. Paul Virilio said that in epoch of globalization with its increasing pressure of world time, the risk of an event disappearance becomes the very essence of our history.

When habitual models of world order are being split up, our individual consciousness changes too. A human being in a globalized world is next to impossible to be conceived as an independent and key figure of the universe. He/she is more likely to be perceived as a part of media field which is a cellular structure with no centre and boundaries being constantly compressed socially, politically, financially and, what is most important, in terms of information, while an individual escape from it seems to be not feasible.

Any action of an individual has repercussions along the chain, though this chain is already under a permanent pressure that causes shock reactions. This pressure has a global character as if it is inherent in all ties, structures and human connections.

An individual turns into a minute biological element – a tiny brick or a molecule in superhuman social mechanisms...

Dmitry Kawarga