MARIJA AVRAMOVIĆ and SAM TWIDALE
Marija Avramović, born in 1989
Sam Twidale, born in 1988
The collaboration between Marija Avramović and Sam Twidale, which started in 2017, focuses on the exploration of the world of Artificial Intelligence and story-telling, in the meeting of algorithms, objects, networks and the human dimension. Often starting from pre-existing literary or cinematic works, the artists highlight—through installations, paintings, videos and animations— novel aspects of human interactions and feelings. Their real-time animations, in particular, explore the boundary between real and artificial in the context of independent virtual universes, in which the characters act and interact according to feelings and personalities defined by algorithms and neural networks. The narrative junctions are therefore unpredictable, generating worlds no less real than the one in which we live. Thanks to video game production software, Avramović and Twidale give life to scripts that unfold like theatrical improvisation, always different and unique. This is the case of Sunshowers, a work produced in 2019 for the Barbican Centre and proposed again in Belgrade, within an installation space redesigned for the occasion. The animation, which regenerates constantly, is inspired by the initial chapter of Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams and follows a boy in his exploration of a forest. Together with him, animals, spirits, plants and rocks become the characters of a techno-animistic vision of a world in which the borders between human and extra-human realms cancel each other out; an entire oneiric universe that reveals the parallelism, dear to the two artists, between spirituality and Artificial Intelligence.