Interview with Lenka Klimesova./ amber09
Which art project do you attend the Amber Festival with?
Future Kiss
Award
2009 Prix Ars Electronica – HONORARY MENTION / Interactive Art
It was exhibited:
2009
FRIEZE ART FAIR / Impossible exchange – Brina Thurston (16.10.) – Londýn (UK)
ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL / Human Nature – OK Center, Linz (A)
OPEN FOR TECHNICAL REASONS – Nitra gallery / Gallery for Youth, Nitra (SK)
CONTAINERS OF ART – The Brno House of Arts, Brno (CZ)
ALL AND NOW / Majolenka – MUG, Trento (I)
2008
TOUCH ME FESTIVAL 2008 / Feel better! – Student Center, Zagreb (HR)
ECSTATIC BODIES – 13m3, Bratislava (SK)
What is your aim with your art work?
Project Future Kiss addresses a problem of epidemic attacks (pig flu, bird flu,…) nowadays and also in the future. It prevents a loss of personal intimacy due to the spread of technology in our material world. The art work tries to find new way of intimacy by using new technology. Future Kiss works with a specific situation, when we wouldn’t be able to touch each other because of health purposes.
How does your project works?
Future Kiss is an interactive object. It contains one couple of special hygienic masks. There are more ways of its presentation. Mostly it was presented as happening or installation. You can see an installation in Amber Festival. Participants kiss each other with the mask on their faces. The mask here serves as a mediator in the sensual, but also emotional exchange: on ‘detecting’ a kiss, the sensor activates a gentle vibration that is also an emotion in abstracted form or a simulation of emotion. The mask is capable of vibration only if participants find truth love. In other case it doesn’t work and you have to seek again.
Could you describe your process of creation?
Usually I spontaneously decide on a topic and start processing it immediately. Then improvise at the very creation, because I most influence the process. During the improvisation I think the concept of why I’m doing, and what I basically mean. Sometimes I find that it is better to leave so that the process is strong in itself. Sometimes I have to better make their intention to apply scenario, but even that is mostly just a schematic and again leaves space for improvisation. Personally, I think they are important both procedures. Improvisation can not function without the concept and vice versa. Works have a clear mission, which always identifies the concepts work. Rather I try to make up for the visually compelling works of the audience thought about different life situations – over himself.
How long have you been producing digital art?
As long as a digital art has been producing myself. It’s inevitable influence. Digital technology is mesmeric for me.
How do you describe your art as an artist using technology?
I contend: “Technology in the visual arts has to show, invent or anticipate its own future impact on the earth and life. Anything else is only an embarrassing demo of technology’s dexterity.”
What made you choose digital media as medium?
It is not about choice but about internal voice, destiny, period and space. I use various media, not only digital, and still research new discourses for making art.
Do you have aesthetic concerns while producing your art?
Concept of my works often includes a moral aspect and deconstruction of aesthetic paradigm. Aesthetic is very intricate term. By working with the topics as body, gender, feminism and role models compile an aesthetic targeted in its basis.
What do you think about the literal and figurative integrations of the human body and technology?
Integration between human body and technology is an inevitable process. It is already quite common nowadays. As a perfect example but not only bring the modern practice of medicine today.
What we may become as a result of our increasing engagements with technology?
Representation of the future person may be a mobile, individual, cybernetic human who is at the same time dependent on other people. This dependence makes the difference between a human and a robot.
Links: http://www.ok-centrum.at/ausstellungen/cyberarts_09/cyberarts_09.html
http://www.kontejner.org/kiss-future-english
Video: http://www.vimeo.com/2468588
