What is it (not)?
A sci-fi film?
A game?
A story?
A landscape?
An organism?
A lens?
An eye?
A pulse?
A footpath?
A voice?
An ocean?
A blank space?
There are no answers.
Observed and unobserved, it continues to exist.
Observed and unobserved, it changes.
At the heart of "What is it (not)?" is "Solaris", Stanisław Lem’s cult science fiction novel (1961), its subsequent film adaptations: from 1968 (Nirenburg and Ishimbayeva), 1972 (Tarkovsky) and 2002 (Soderbergh), and my series of watercolor paintings inspired by Solaris, the enigmatic extraterrestrial ocean-like entity from the novel — all in an intertextual/intermedial dialogue with each other.
"What is it (not)?" explores the blurred boundaries between the source text of "Solaris", its film adaptations, and paintings inspired by it, but also dissolution of video as a (fixed) medium, the way it is usually shown and experienced, in fixed, inflexible spaces, sitting still in the assigned seat, with no closer contact with the projection screen, screening space, fellow viewers, or even one’s own body in relation to all of the above.
This intermedial experience allows blurring of the boundaries between the video, audience, and the screening space, where the audience becomes an intrinsic, organic part of the video, and the projection screen and screening space become more fluid, their fixity transcended.
"What is it (not)?" does not impose either questions or answers, and it does not require of the audience to have a background knowledge of either the novel or film adaptations — it simply asks of you to be there with it. Additionally, it encouraged the visitors to move around freely throughout its duration and experience it from as many vantage points as possible — as far or as close as they wish.
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“’But what am I going to see?’
‘I don't know. In a certain sense, it depends on you.’”
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“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”
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“Is a mountain a very large rock? Is a planet a huge mountain? These terms can be used, but the new scale of magnitude brings with it new regularities and new phenomena.”
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“What am I then? A dream?”
— Stanisław Lem , “Solaris” (1961)
