Photos by Runa Halleraker.
Description of the exhibition by KRAFT.
It is in the encounter of at least two elements that a hybrid is born. Different parts intertwine, their properties form something new, their potentials explored in interaction with each other. In this way, hybrids can tell us something about both what has been as well as opening towards what might be, playing with the relationship between truth and speculation, material and technique, realism and fantasy.
In the 16th century, the Polish-Lithuanian king Sigismund II Augustus collected gobelin tapestries – large weavings often depicting animal motifs, frequently associated with religious stories. At that time, few weavers had seen the animals they were tasked with portraying, forcing them to speculate on their appearance. The freeform results were imaginative, surprising, and magical. Hybrids of different animals were portrayed as if they represented reality, not figments of the weavers’ imagination. The relationship between weaving and technology is another hybrid – data and coding are the binary offspring of warp and weft. In Hybrid II, Kristina Austi has drawn inspiration from tapestries and fed them into an artificial intelligence model along with examples of her own weavings. Free from worldly considerations and limitations, the artificial intelligence absorbs the information and generates wild suggestions for new hybrids and combinations, drawing connections between Austi and the speciously diverse speculations of the 16th century weavers. Digital brains lack a hand’s tactility. They can conjure up adventurous visions but cannot feel the inherent quality of the thread, nor the sensuous aspects of the textile. The human hand remains the most dangerous weapon and the most beautiful tool. Austi’s hand unravels artificial intelligence’s boundless world of ideas and translates it back into her own practice in the form of large, digital tapestries. These depict universes detached from the logic of the world, where fearsome wolves bite their own tails, limbs and body parts changing wildly. The fabric’s structure becomes landscapes and cities, mythological creatures dissolve into horizons of clouds and waves. A hand reaches out and grasps around the wonder of the past and the clarity of the future, weaving them together and binding them tightly, giving birth to new generations of hybrids at the intersection of human and machine, past and future, textile and technology.
The exhibition is supported by KIN (Association of Art Centers in Norway) and Arts Council Norway.
