Solo exhibition “HIBRIDAI” in Palanga Resort Museum in villa “Anapilis” (“The Otherworld”).
When at least two elements come together, a hybrid is born. Different parts intertwine, their properties forming something else, interacting in new ways. In this manner, hybrids can tell us about what was while also paving the way for what could be, playing with the relationship between truth and speculation, material and technique, realism and fantasy.
In the 16th century, Sigismund Augustus, the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, collected tapestries—large, figurative textiles often depicting animal motifs. At that time, few weavers had seen the exotic animals they were supposed to depict. The weavers had to speculate on their appearance. The results were products of imagination, surprising and magical. Hybrids of different animals were portrayed as if they were real rather than creations of the weavers' imagination. The relationship between weaving and technology is yet another hybrid—the data and coding are digital descendants of dimensions and wefts.
In the exhibition "Hybrids," Kristina Austi drew inspiration from the mysterious 16th-century tapestries and incorporated them into an artificial intelligence algorithm and her own textile samples. "Free" from the physical world's limitations, artificial intelligence collects information and generates unseen images of new hybrids, thereby creating connections between Austi and the 16th-century weavers. The digital mind lacks a sense of touch. It can develop visions but cannot feel the roughness of a surface or the fineness of a thread. The human hand remains the most dangerous weapon and the most beautiful tool. Austi opens up the infinite world of ideas created by artificial intelligence and, with her hands, translates the results into digitally woven new creations. These tapestries depict universes detached from the world's logic, where wolves bite their tails, and limbs and body parts intertwine according to the principles of weaving. The fabric's structure becomes landscapes and cities; mythological creatures dissolve into horizons of clouds and waves. With an outstretched hand, she grasps the wonder of the past and the intuition of the future, merging and weaving them together, giving birth to new generations of hybrids: between human and machine, past and future, textile and technology.
