APTEKA janicki gallery

Π-xel is an interactive, multimedia installation based on AR technology.

It is a progression of a project - “Tōkaidō - the Eastern Sea Road” presented during an exhibition in the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology. The exhibition was created to celebrate Manggha’s 20th anniversary back in 2014. It was the result of the first Polish-Japanese expedition initiated by Janicki, along the traditional Japanese trail of places immortalized in woodcuts by Hiroshige Ando. Trips in the spirit of Roland Barthes.

The result was, among others, a series of video notations from 53 stations on the road from Tokyo to Kyoto combining registration from the Google Street web application with fragments recorded in specific places reached by the expedition. Therefore, it is a video-patchwork made of what is virtual and what is real. It is also a type of a thought experiment based on the concept of a map as an idea of mediation on a path where the system of signs – has no context meaning. Therefore, it is a supplement for reflection of a phenomenological nature, where the world is perceived as a set of phenomena, the way they are in their essence, being the subjects of experimental cognition.

The use of AR technology - augmented reality takes us a step further, this time relating to memory built on the experience based on a multimedia message and clues echoing the experience of "reality". Memory, for which media reproductions, images, and sounds become prostheses, or rather implants.

The installation was first presented in Poland during the PatchLab 2019 festival, and will eventually be presented as a part of the "East - West - Infinity / Poland - Japan 2019" exhibition at the Treasure Gallery in Tokyo, organized to celebrate the 100th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between Poland and Japan.