Janek Simon: Sixteenth World

The work of Janek Simon grows from the experien­ces of traveling between dif­ferent cul­tures, economies and visions of the future, which the artist com­bines using innovative digital tools and DIY prac­tice. The Meta Folk­lore series of sculp­tures, which has been ongoing for two years, is an artistic, tech­nological and political fantasy—a vision of a new, univer­salist art created with the help of artificial intel­ligence, fed by a col­lec­tion of thousands of non-​academic sculp­tures from around the world. The heart of this project is a GAN neural network trained by the artist, which generates images that are a distil­lation of the essence of the dataset entered into the network. Based on these images, Simon develops 3D models, which he then prints in his studio, which he has fur­nished and equip­ped him­self. The mul­ticoloured and originally-​shaped figures are a seduc­tive materialization of the con­cept of a creative, trans­cul­tural, anti-​colonial com­munity based on free, democratized technology.

Sixteenth World is also a unique cor­rec­tive to the moder­nist idea of progress, measured today by the growing com­puting power of proces­sors and larger and larger capacity of vir­tual memory, expres­sed in mul­tiples of 2 and 4. While using modern tech­nology and new materials, Simon returns to archaic forms of figures and totems. In this way, he weaves threads of humanism, spirituality and anar­chy into the fluid world of the future.