Janek Simon: Synthetic Folklore

Essays, conversations, and documentation map the work of the artist Janek Simon.Artist Janek Simon tends to say he is interested in many, even too many, things- from globalization and political geography to artificial intelligence and financial speculation, from DIY strategies to postcolonial theories within Eastern Europe. This reader decodes fifteen years of his work. It opens with the world of synthetic folklore, a speculative visual language between particularism and universalism, created with the help of AI and composed of mosaics generated by algorithms combining motifs from India, Africa, South America, Europe, and Poland. Simon’s work asks if AI can protect us from the traps of homogenization, xenophobia, and essentialism, and what a new universalism would look like in the era of the identity politics. Essays, conversations, and documentation map Simon’s footsteps, extensively presenting for the first time his work and life, which has been from time to time supported by art institutions such as the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, where he held his survey show in Spring 2019. Contributors Inke Arns, Max Cegielski, Ekaterina Degot, Lukasz Gorczyca, Nav Haq, Virginija Januskeviciute and Monika Lipsic, Nina Katchadourian, Joanna Kordiak, Lev Manovich, Daniel Muzyczuk, Sina Najafi, Lech Nowicki, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Aleksandra Przegalinska, Mohammad Salemy, Sumesh Sharma, Jan Sowa, Joanna Warsza and others.