CROSSLUCID (Sylwana Zybura & Tomas C. Toth)
CROSSLUCID is an artist collective, co-founded by Sylwana Zybura and Tomas C. Toth in 2018, Shanghai, that engages in highly collaborative projects in co-evolution with technology. Their work and research converges around the exploration of the self as a network; intimacy and the potential for pleasurable actualisation through the digital sphere, and the re-imagination of our alliances with technology seen as part of a sympoietic biosphere and universal post-material consciousness. Through filmmaking, poetic Artificial Intelligence, multi-layered techniques of collage, assemblage and experience-led interventions they create scenarios to rehearse potential futures. Their work has been exhibited by iMal, Google Arts & Culture, Boiler Room and many more institutions. They have also been published by Vogue Germany, Modern Weekly and Slanted among others.
Since we first caught sight of our reflections in still, dark waters, we started chasing self-image – driving us to refine the technologies we use to do so. At each step of this evolution, from silver-nitrate mirrors; to explosive flash powders and today’s one-eyed “selfie” cameras, new fables have emerged. These tales speak to the fragility of humanity and the fluidity of its values – each new reflecting pool becoming a site to question and play, or a means to entertain and bully guests at festivities. Mirrors – from those inhabiting the luxury salon to those in our linted pockets, each carry their own functions and emerging fairytales.
As new technologies create new opportunities to distort, beautify or otherwise adjust ourselves, in pursuit of self-knowledge, we become the protagonist of our own fantasies. Face filters engage us in a new daily ritual: the timeless ritual of masking – until today, these rituals take place in front of our phones. Through the screen of our phones we challenge binary structures and experience the prism of the self – while we train exploitative algorithms for ambitious startups, the development of neural networks and Artificial Intelligence. With every technological development, a slice of fiction becomes a reality. These fictions are a state of identity that emerges temporarily as we pursue freedom of movement and expression. Along the way, this occupation with ourselves generates new stories to immerse ourselves within.
The exhibition Screen, Screen on my Phone, Who’s the Fairest of Them All? is a follow-up on research that Doringer has conducted on the ritual of masking (2007-2018) known under the title FACELESS.