Opening on Saturday, 14.05, 18:00-00:00
Sunday, 15.05, 15:00-20:00
Foksal Gallery
Curator: Martyna Stołpiec
Collaboration: Milena Stryjewska
Trans – line is a program that measures the likelihood of swapping lives with another person. It distinguishes 21 areas most significant for human life, such as place of residence, associated identity, or relationship with parents. It makes possible to think of ourselves in an ideal way, without the things that bother us or that we don’t like about ourselves.
The weekend action at the Foksal Gallery will be merely an introduction. It will consist mainly in enabling the user to interact with the Trans – line program, solve the test and the program will collect as much data about the user as possible.
Solving the test will be crowned each time with “transformation” of the user into his/her digital equivalent and storage of data about him/her. The purpose of this experiment is to draw attention to the relationship between humans and databases. On a daily basis, the user encounters only the front end world, i.e. some kind of a facade, and has no access to databases or this access is difficult. There is a belief, partially correct, that entering the world of databases requires specialized knowledge. In this particular experiment, the program’s databases will be accessible, allowing us to think about the relationship between humans and their digital counterpart – code.
The Trans – line project is a thought experiment that draws on the assumptions of pataphysics which was an alternative form of science that did not seek to achieve tangible results and relied mainly on doing science in a formal way, publicizing through conventional methods like symposia and publishing articles. It also paid attention to the logic of the scientific community and how scientific truths are formulated. Pataphysics deals with what is in between. It takes for granted that everything that can be thought of is possible, and has the same value as sorted data and definitions that have been accepted by science and tested empirically. When a physicist performs an experiment and gets a particular result, he does not consider all the other possible conclusions that could exist. He simply records the result of the measurement he made. And pataphysics says that all the answers to that experiment are equivalent and so exist in the world. Only looking between zero and one, for what is in between, is valuable according to pataphysics.