FUTURE MANIFESTOS
TEKS.studio, 10. APRIL – 31. MAI 2026
Åpning: 9. april, kl.18.00
Kuratorer: Zane Cerpina, Espen Gangvik
Toxicity. Driven Breathless. [2021]
Toxicity. Driven Breathless translates the silent noise of pollution and digital networks into a tangible, aesthetic experience, confronting viewers with the hidden systems we live within.
Toxicity. Driven Breathless channels the rhythm of urbanisation into a living, generative composition. The rectilinear forms echo city blocks, road systems, and data grids, yet they are unstable, shifting with the flows of pollution data. The result is an evolving “toxic modernism”—a dynamic grid where the purity of abstraction collides with the messy realities of environmental collapse.
The work situates itself within the broader discourse on technology and mass urbanisation. Cities are engines of growth and innovation, but also sites of immense environmental strain. Here, the invisible infrastructures of air quality, carbon emissions, and digital surveillance are revealed as central forces shaping daily life. The artwork acts as a mirror: it shows not only what the city is, but also what it is becoming under the weight of technology-driven expansion.
By turning real-time data into a visual experience, Toxicity. Driven Breathless exposes the feedback loops between humanity, urbanisation, and machine intelligence. Every breath becomes data, every behaviour a signal, every pollutant a mark on the evolving canvas. It is a portrait of the contemporary city: beautiful, overwhelming, and suffused with the toxicity that sustains and endangers it.
Toxicity. Driven Breathless makes visible the often-overlooked infrastructure of environmental damage. It translates the silent noise of pollution and digital networks into a tangible, aesthetic experience, confronting viewers with the hidden systems we live within. The piece explores the monitored city, where every breath, behaviour, and signal is data—mapped, stored, and reflected back through code.
Using a custom-built electronic system, the work scans real-time pollution data from 120 cities worldwide. An embedded AI, trained through machine learning, interprets these data streams to reveal patterns of toxicity—rendered visually as dense, traffic-like flows.
Stanza [UK]
Dr Stanza is an independent artist based in London who has been exhibiting worldwide since 1982. His work lives at the intersection of art and potential futures of disruptive and opportunistic nature, delving into scenarios of observation, invisible agency, and the changing human environment. The artworks demonstrate how humans are complicit and thus entangled in the technological layers they survey and monitor. They fit seamlessly into what he calls ‘panoptic aesthetics’. The technologies incorporated in his digital artworks can include custom-made sensors, networked cameras, robotics, and computers. What becomes real are the art installations, sculptures, websites, software systems, and paintings Stanza exhibits. Stanza’s artworks have won twenty international art prizes and art awards, including Vidalife 6.0 First Prize (Spain), SeNef Grand Prix (Korea), Videobrasil First Prize (Brazil), Cynet Art First Prize (Germany), Share First Prize (Italy), Video Formes (France), and Next Nature Prize.
His art has also been rewarded with a prestigious STARTS Residency (EU), Nesta Dreamtime Award (UK), an Arts & Humanities Creative Fellowship (UK), a Clarks Bursary (UK), and numerous international arts residencies. His artworks have been exhibited in over one hundred exhibitions globally, including the Venice Biennale (Italy), Deutsches Museum (Germany), Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), Tate Britain (UK), Rijksmuseum Twente (Netherlands), HNF – Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (Germany), Bruges Museum (Belgium), Fundación Telefónica (Spain), TSSK – Trondheim Center for Contemporary Art (Norway), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico), Plymouth Arts Centre (UK), ICA London (UK), State Museum, Novosibirsk (Russia), Biennale of Sydney (Australia), São Paulo Biennale (Brazil) amongst others.
His most recent work connects data streams from ‘Smart Cities’, speculating on ideas for merging various types of data using methods of artificial intelligence AI and ML learning to create new artistic scenarios. The thrust of these artworks aims to show what happens when the public is allowed to make their own mixes and visualisations with the data, reclaiming ownership and representing data in new and different ways. Stanza transforms abstract data into dynamic, living artworks. These pieces reflect the complexities of surveillance culture, raising questions about agency, control, and the ethical dimensions of our connected existence. His concept of panoptic aesthetics describes this merging of data systems with visual culture, where technology not only observes but becomes part of the artwork itself. Projects like The Nemesis Machine imagine the city as a self-governing entity, powered by the very data it produces. In this vision, the artwork becomes a responsive ecosystem—an expressive, evolving map of urban behaviour.
