Adaptive Breathing

Technologies are increasingly less often tools that we consciously reach for. They have become an environment. They organize the flow of information, regulate the pace of work, support decision-making, learn our behaviors, and record traces of everyday life. They operate in the background, often remaining invisible, yet they influence the way we remember, communicate, and imagine the future.

The works presented at the Adaptive Breathing exhibition do not ask where the development of technology is leading. Rather, they are interested in what it is like to live within systems that constantly analyze and optimize. What can be negotiated within them? What can be reclaimed? What can be reinvented?

Slowness returns repeatedly in the exhibition. In Anemochory by Lennart Lahuis, information exists only for a moment, dependent on atmospheric conditions. Tempo-Imagem by Luiz Zanotello reveals how computer models observe the climate, and Bora: Bora by Zhao Zhou shifts attention from the image to air, sound, and movement. All three works remind us that technology always operates in a specific environment and is never entirely independent of matter.

At the center of several works are algorithms and infrastructures that organize everyday life. Game of Possible Lives by Tomo Kihari shows how language models reproduce social imaginaries of biography, while Navigating Militarized Futures by Marek Cinkevich reveals the political dimension of algorithms and data infrastructure. In Backups of War by Marcin Korbus, immersive technologies are not used to escape reality, but to allow one to get closer to the experience of war through places preserved as digital testimonies.

Alongside systems, relationships emerge. Fragmentations of Unity (So Kanno + Takuro Yonezawa + Yutaro Kyono) explores how community is born between simple, interacting organisms. Sarah Seunghyun Park shows memory as a process that, like a storm, transforms space and leaves new configurations behind. In The Eight Spirits of Flesh, TZUSOO creates a fictional ecosystem where questions about corporeality, care, and reproduction extend beyond biological and social norms. In turn, Piece for 12 Scrollers by Gregor Różański takes the most common gesture of modernity as its starting point: scrolling, transforming scattered attention into a collective performance.

This is not an exhibition about the future. Most of the presented technologies are already with us. Language models, surveillance systems, and augmented reality operate alongside us every day. Artists do not propose simple alternatives. Rather, they examine where in these systems there remains room for one's own pace, memory, body, and imagination. Perhaps this is where adaptation begins, not as consent to existing conditions, but as a practice of defining one's own way of being in the world.

Jury members: Michał Grzegorzek, Karolina Hałatek, Paweł Janicki, Ksawery Kaliski, Ksawery Kirklewski, Norman Leto, Rosa Menkan, Günseli Yalcinkaya

Works presented at the exhibition:

Anemochory – Lennart Lahuis · Installation