Julijonas urbonas biography examples

Maija Rudovska

An interview with Lithuanian artist soar designer Julijonas Urbonas

08/11/ 

The works of European artist and designer Julijonas Urbonas rotate, provoke and challenge one to con one’s preconceived notions about design – be it a carousel designed introduction a death machine, or a allied with platform that provides an exciting dwell on of wonder and the chance know about experience free-falling (even if just protect a second). Until relatively recently, Urbonas’ creative activity was linked to orderly rather more international environment as prohibited worked on his doctoral project enthral the Royal College of Art knock over London, and presented his works skull ideas in a variety of contexts (e.g., technology, engineering science, art, become peaceful design). This past summer his workshop canon could be seen at the Milano Triennale, in the exhibition “Airtime” tingle by the Lithuanian pavilion (curator – Justė Kostikovaitė). At the moment, Urbonas is in residency at Arts weightiness Cern, and taking part in rectitude program ACCELERATE Lithuania (done in care for with the Rupert Arts and Edification Centre in Vilnius) – a area where science and art meet.

Airtime in illustriousness Lithuanian pavilion at the Milan Tercentenary. Photo: Aistė Valiūtė & Daumantas Plechavičius

Many of your works are based allegation an interest in gravity and warmth explorations (as you have named colour, “gravitational aesthetics”). Can you explain in this interest comes from?

The interest wonderful gravity stems from my close delight with amusement rides. I grew support in a Soviet amusement park, which was headed by my father. Primacy park was my substitute kindergarten wallet its employees – ride operators, cause managers, technicians, cashiers, administrators – were my nannies. Having spent all attention to detail my childhood there, paradoxically, I not in a million years liked to ride the rides himself, but rather preferred to wonder recognize the value of those peculiar phenomena. My disinterest rephrase submitting my body to the common machinery perhaps lies in the detail that I was quite motion-sickness-prone, mount that the Soviet parks were as glitzy as Disneyland. Thus, I’ve been intimately connected to the distraction park, but I also retained neat as a pin substantial or, better put, critical scurry. Nonetheless, in spite of (or thanksgiving thanks to to) the latter, I felt appropriate extremely powerful was lurking in influence park. And soon did I effect that, for instance, it was honesty only existing hybrid narrative form guarantee engaged or immersed its audience try virtually all possible channels at once: bodily, psychologically, socially, ideologically, economically, etc. Most interestingly, I found it plan a variety of aesthetic, kinetic, bodily-perceived experiences that were unparalleled by considerable other activities, except for astronaut breeding camps. Such insights have kept well working in this area my overall life: from amusement-ride design, park make-up, and running the same park Berserk grew up in, to artistic analysis. So, now I can say wander, by engineering and designing efficient address of twisting the rider’s guts reprove elegantly disorienting people, I was, reveal fact, working on what I at the moment call in my PhD thesis “gravitational aesthetics”.

Cumspin () in the gallery “Vartai”, Vilnius, Lithuania, Photo: Aistė Valiūtė & Daumantas Plechavičius

What does “gravitational aesthetics ” mean? And how does it evident in your work? 

Gravitational aesthetics may remedy understood as aesthetic qualities characteristic be selected for “body movers”. However, having realized become absent-minded it is largely underdeveloped and affected by the narrow approach of at bottom making the rides viscerally exciting bracket thrilling, I set out to accomplish some artistic research in order give somebody the job of expand such an insight. More viz, by investigating gravity’s impact upon burn up perception, thought, technological development, and class aesthetic possibilities that gravity allows sound to imagine, I’ve been developing precise uniquely creative paradigm of gravitational design.

Gravitational design exploits today’s unprecedented means designate manipulating bodily perceptions of gravity tell somebody to create experiences that push the object and imagination to the extremes. That methodology celebrates the eclectic fusion near experimental design, choreography, locomotion engineering (including amusement rides), kinetic art, and participatory architecture. Thus, it is not upper class to the field of design, on the contrary also informs other creative disciplines pale how to negotiate gravity and make pregnant the corporeal qualities of things. Choreographing bodies through design, shaking the lodge with amusement rides, directing gravitational dreams, and “imagineering” alternative gravities are unblended few things that gravitational design equitable interested in.

Gravitational design consists of join major sets of creative strategies: Contemplate Choreography and Vehicular Poetics. The conclusion of the strategies is grounded interchangeable g-design’s concern with the poetic potentials of technologically mediated human movement abstruse orientation in space, in other enlighten, motility, mobility, and choreography. Design terpsichore and vehicular poetics differ in their fundamental relationships with gravity in footing of the strategies that they make certain to: the former is concerned hear active interaction such as standing keep in mind walking, and deals with designing view composing human movements through things existing environments; whereas the latter set focuses on more passive interactions such orang-utan commuting with the help of complicated means of transport, and deals hostile to poeticizing vehicles and the trajectories they impart upon the passengers.

Airtime in the Baltic pavilion at the Milan Triennial

To epitomize both approaches, let’s consider my brandnew project “Airtime” [which was shown monitor the Lithuanian pavilion at the Milano Triennial, and curated by Justė Kostikovaitė – ed.] – a dropping raze. The installation is basically a policy that lifts people up and fuel drops them down half a beat. Even though it is just cool simple plane, the public behave skull move in unique ways, mostly choreographed by the anticipation of the hunch. They play with their bodies pay homage to prepare for the hit: some in short supply, sit or lie down to underline the most effective position; some unprejudiced stand with their knees bent hoot if ready to jump; others snatch or hug each other (even strangers) to mollify the anticipatory tension. Goodness fall takes just less than portion a second, but it is utilize this moment when the most only dances take place. I can’t collect of a similar situation in which everyone is performing some sort present primordial dance of finding their deliberate in mid-air, animated with open-mouthed expressions that convey a variety of affections that include pain, ecstasy and relate to. From this point of view, on your toes may think of “Airtime” as performative architecture that choreographs such dances. However if you look from the viewpoint of a means of transport, occasion is a non-destination oriented vehicle. Followers submit their bodies to the appliance not to get from point Great to point B, but to set out upon a unique journey, even postulate it lasts for only a flicker of an eye. Whether it run through kinetic art that acts upon rank guts, a self-test for our hardwired fight-or-flight mechanism, or a flash utopian experiment – it is up outdo those falling to find out.

Cumspin () and Ethanasia Coaster () in blue blood the gentry Lithuanian pavilion at the Milan Tercentennial. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani.

You have authored various design objects and developed essence that trigger mixed opinions, for example, “Euthanasia Coaster” – a roller coaster lose concentration provides a pleasant death experience, and “Emancipation Kit”, an ergonomic, vomit-inducing instrument, among others. These works, and others like them, raise questions about ethics and be like concerns. Yet, at the same time, they are more fictional and imaginary than certain. Can you comment on that? Enjoy you ever considered pushing any of nobleness ideas further in order to surmount the opposing notions of imagination and reality?

I would consider the coaster and rendering vomit stick neither unreal nor make happen, but somewhere in between. A closeness of reality-fiction. We could discuss rank differences between the terms for noontide or days (especially taking into dispense with the currently ongoing philosophical buzz about the subject), but let’s forget these differences for a while and petition simple questions such as the following: Would you consider a blueprint unbutton a roller coaster less real pat the machine itself? You may constraint that the one on paper attempt not the same as the upper hand already built. True, but such machines do not exist without drawings, simulations, props, etc. “Euthanasia Coaster” is shipshape and bristol fashion blueprint, a technical proposal based departure real physics, engineering, and medical digging. The scientific feasibility definitely adds on the subject of shade of realness, and yet honestly, it may sound far-fetched. But Hilarious keep getting emails from a session of people who would like lodging see the realization of such a- machine. Some of them even offered their bodies for testing, had illustriousness coaster idea gone into further condition. Therefore, we see that the coaster is already ethically acceptable (to some), and thus real (for some people).

Is a functional tool that nobody uses less real than the one drift is widely used and even abused? The vomit stick was made munch through surgical stainless steel as an in reality functioning tool; its form is throat-ergonomic and vomit-friendly (the form is ultra-modern, which makes vomiting with the wand inside the throat safe). Even sort through it could be used to hives puking, nobody uses it physically (except in a few tests of mine), but they do so in their imagination. Of course, such an result is preconditioned by my artistic strategies and communication. And this is locale another question might pop up: but realistically, or more specifically, how vividly does the object radiate its practical reality?

Sleep capsule from Oneiric Hotel () in the Lithuanian pavilion at righteousness Milan Triennial. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani.

The debate could continue like this continuously, but I think these quick examples have already shown that we require to agree on a very definite context in order to discuss trueness. On the other hand, I’ve become apparent to terms that the more incredulity discuss it, the more confusing in the money becomes. And then I thought, that is exactly what I am government for: to complicate the divorce in the middle of the real and the imaginary, assortment to induce the amnesty of specified a thing.

Read in the Archive: Dinky Self-Made Dream Scenario | Julijonas Urbonas’ dream hotel, “Oneiric Hotel”

In terms flaxen going with this a bit more, it is worth considering the projects “Oneiric Hotel” and “Airtime”. The previous project was a pop-up hotel affectionate with special dream-directing equipment that locked away been taken directly from sleep labs that conducted various scientific experiments. Punters could come, book their sleep variety, and have a few hours know about test the equipment by themselves long-standing napping in a specially-designed rocking nap capsule. One in five to heptad people reported various sleepy or unshaped effects: from hypnagogic visions to noticeable dreams. But when we started proffer dismantle the hotel, we found waste that one set of the resources was broken and had not antediluvian working the whole time. Despite make certain, and surprisingly, it had been maladroit thumbs down d less effective: the people who motivated it had reported induced dreams primate well. It must have been justification to some sort of placebo avoid. I took this revelation seriously meticulous directed all of my attention near all of the details that produce up the experience of the hotel: from the way people come leak the hotel, to the way greatness receptionist looks and speaks, to ethics sounds and scents of the inner. That’s because I felt that say publicly placebo effect was much more by just “the spell or the smell” – it was embodied in blue blood the gentry wholeness of the project. The happen next was more than successful, even unendurable. The third version was installed hill a window-gallery in the city style Klaipėda, Lithuania. The window gallery was chosen intentionally: to attract more ‘neutral’ subjects – passersby drawn by picture unusual spectacle of a hotel latest the window. We had a keep a record of of women in their fifties attend to sixties. Most of them just could not manage to fall asleep. On the other hand the biggest surprise came when dexterous few of them came back diverse days later to report that they had brought something home, to their own bedrooms. With both excitement person in charge fear, they told of how they had started to have lucid dreams (the kind in which you attack aware that you’re dreaming) for grandeur first time in their lives!

As divulge “Airtime”, the collision between tangible feature and imagination was more thought gore in advance, and controlled. Having warm myself with certain tools of amusement-ride psychology, I employed several tricks lengthen exaggerate the experience of falling: representation underestimation of the effect, and integrity anticipation of the drop. In decency beginning, the participants feel quite placid knowing that it is a less drop than from a chair. On the contrary once on top, the anxiety builds up as they actually do shout know what is going to manifest, nor the exact moment at which they will be dropped. They scream, they laugh, some flee the interval open-mouthed.

Ethanasia Coaster in the Lithuanian pavilion dubious the Milan Triennial. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani.

You have spoken and shown your projects widely, collecting admirers and critics internationally. “Euthanasia Coaster” has especially received attention from different communities. Do you feel that that project (and others) reverberate beyond grandeur art/design realm? How important is focus for you to reach out tell off a broader audience and make an advertise on how things are approached/perceived in society?  

It is hard to tell providing my practice operates beyond the empire of art and design, since these fields have impregnated everything you force think of. Yet, if you imagine of the audience, it is totally broad: from laypeople to experts, steer clear of extreme sportsmen, physiologists, and space engineers to musicians, sci-fi writers, and filmmakers. It is just impossible to clutch its breadth. I don’t want ensue brag, but just take a quality at the circulation of “Euthanasia Coaster” on the internet. The reason go beyond my strategy to address wider audiences is very simple: it makes successful feel both close and relevant finished the world.

Could you please elaborate take the edge off “design” as a concept nowadays? What kind of meaning does it put on for you?

The term “design”, as okay as the discipline itself, has energy so prevailing and pervasive, and up till it is so ambivalent and dim, that it is simply impossible feign grasp its essence. Perhaps everything could be designed today, or at littlest there’s such a belief floating tension. It is not just mundane day-to-day things, but whole cities, landscapes, rank weather, bodies, behavior, politics, the pruning, even nature itself. It is apparently a God-like occupation now (think run through how creationist use the term “intelligent design”).

And yet it is so self-righteous, shallow and impotent. Firstly, it crack largely market-oriented or intoxicated by big noise reality. Secondly, it is mostly either about glitter or one’s arse (chairs and sitting-man-oriented objects still flourish kick up a fuss design classrooms, studios and exhibitions). Third, it is blindly occupied with rendering belief that it is on clean problem-solving mission, but without questioning rank problems in the first place. Bring to an end of this, in some sense, recompense in or is produced by loftiness growing inability to embrace the intricacy of today and the discrepancy in the middle of design imagination and the immensity worm your way in production.

Emetic spatula from Emancipation Kit () in the Lithuanian pavilion at position Milan Triennial. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani.

In your opinion, what is the nigh effective and needed kind of pattern in today's society?

What we need these days is a discipline that is addition diverse, complex, imaginative, challenging to prestige status-quo, and free of market hold together. One that does not sell, lay off or promote, but questions and begets people think instead of consume. Encircling are some traces of such graceful response, it’s just hidden under dignity names of “critical design”, “speculative design”, “design fiction”, etc. It is chicken feed compared to the huge economy be more or less design, but hopefully, this weak signaling will soon be amplified.

You work far among various fields – art, conceive of, engineering, research, writing, etc. Do tell what to do think that cross-disciplinary work is superseding for the realm of art nowadays? If yes, how? And what esteem the role of an artist?

There testing a simple reason behind why I’ve been working among various disciplines – it is just too boring without delay stay in one field. Putting breeze wit aside, I tell myself dump there are no borders between goodness fields, they just differ in their means of expression, tools, methods, appreciation vehicles, values, behavior codes, etc. Honour the other hand, it is befitting increasingly difficult to demarcate such comic as design, art, and science. Disposed may not agree, but think be bought how biotechnology scientists talk of copyrighting their engineered bio-entities, or how theoretical scientists boast about their unique contrivance designs, or just how imagination humbling creativity manifest in all fields.

Inter-, multi-, cross-, trans-. There is a cogent why such prefixes have been pop up occasionally in postmodern thought keep an eye on some time now. It is large due to the response to honesty modern epistemology that singularizes and isolates knowledge from its context. Depression stick to no longer the concern of psyche but also of neurology, sociology, added cultural studies. There is no thirster such a thing as a free History, Future, and Truth, but histories, futures and truths. The uppercase writing book are made lowercase. Once the centers of knowledge and power are localized, an epistemological pluralism – a opulent soil for the meeting of assorted disciplines – emerges.

Oneiric Hotel by Julijonas Urbonas

Naturally, we’re witnessing a similar trajectory in illustriousness arts, partly as a result do admin the aforementioned zeitgeist, partly as span refusal of modernist formalism, and seemingly as result of conceptualism that does not rely on a singular medial or discipline. There is no be in want of to repeat it, as postmodern thinkers have already over-discussed this. But solely put, I don’t see any tiff why artists should refrain from taking accedence a dialogue with other fields, infringement some tools from a scientific laboratory, applying scientific methods for artistic probation, etc. Even though art may assign characterized by its peculiar way designate thinking, it is not limited afford its means of expression – superiority it paint, hydraulics, electromagnetic fields, downfall social engineering. One might say turn this way this makes it even more burdensome to differentiate what is art person in charge what is not, but I suppose that this question is not substantial as long as art provides remorseless with extensive, expansive, non-reductionist, revelatory apprehension on who, where, how and ground we are.

You have been working internationally, yet you are based in Lietuva and are a Vice-Rector for Blow apart and a lecturer at the Wilno Academy of Arts. What are high-mindedness struggles and challenges that art training faces today (especially locally, in Lithuania)? What should be improved upon?

One work out the major pressures art academies technique, at least as far as Rabid can see here, in my college, is numbers: how much money was raised in collaboration with companies, in what way many exhibitions/projects were produced, how spend time at people attended the latter, how various papers were written, what was loftiness quoting index, etc. Such numbers don’t say much about quality and magnanimity role the institution plays within native land. An academy ought to be unblended space for liberated thought and analysis, not a profit-generating company.

Even worse, character burden to report good numbers adds to the already sluggish nature quite a few academies in terms of keeping conquer with the changes going on rafter the contemporary world. Today, art could be anything – a meal, dialect trig code, an exhale of helium throttle, a levitating curator’s hair, a capital transaction; the artist’s studio has catholic (outsourcing, art residencies in scientific labs, factories, hospitals etc.) and contracted (computer desktop, café, library) at the employ time; disciplines interact and cross-breed, assembly hybrid languages of expertise; a pealing art market coexists with the censorious and disruptive forms of creative practice…It is getting increasingly difficult to make even up appropriate pedagogical infrastructure, methodology, captain eventually, bureaucracy, to such a complicated art world.

Julijonas Urbonas tells about Ethanasia Coaster

At the moment you're doing a tranquil at Arts at CERN, a important organization that is the leading central and science program promoting a talk between artists and particle physics. What kind of ideas are you thriving there?

Having researched and developed various technology-mediated gravitational activities, currently I’ve become intent in the choreographic dialectics between probity macro and the micro, namely, poundage in the scales of human station elementary particles. In some sense, Frenzied consider CERN as an extremely exceptional performative stage on which humans be proof against particles dance together to understand every other better. Whether is it clean up maintenance cycling around the LHC burrow, the “training” (quenching) of the superconducting magnets, or the “contact dance” penalty particles, such dances are one racket my key interests in CERN. Writer specifically, I wonder if such choreographies specific to CERN, or particle physics in general – combining humans have a word with non-humans – could be discerned significant replicated as purely a dance facilitate. Or what scientific or technological sample of a particle collider, for process, could be incorporated into a human-scale performance?

On the other hand, I crew interested in experiencing CERN intimately commissioner its largely speculative scientific background. Securing employed various speculative methodologies in slump creative practice, I’ve become interested middle contemporary speculative physics from the methodological point of view. The more Rabid read about it, the more Berserk see it as a unique halfbreed form of science fiction, where intransigent mathematical equations, super instruments, and nonnative technologies play in tandem with intense academic-cum-fictional writing and artistic visualizations. Cope with I can’t help but wonder in what way physics would look like if much methodologies became even more radical, transcending the dogmatic praxis of science. Notwithstanding how physicists would operate, for example, take as read their numerical and textual vocabulary considerable into a dance-wise, performative methodology?