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Autocalypse

Gallery project, paintings

August - September 2021
Civil Defence Cover, Bratislava, SK

Artists:

Dominik Hlinka

The car in this thesis represents a common symbolic attribute of the cycle of constant mutual influences and impacts (acceleration) of technology in our lives. In fact, author find the car to be an apt metaphor for pointing to our relationship with technology - it is a familiar object in which we can naturally discern what has been promised to us by technology, but at the same time left unfulfilled. What we see in these machines is how technology actually behaves.

The final series of paintings concluding his studies is composed of four, distinct positions, mostly depicting car crashes. Two of them can be considered manipulated or simulated - they are crashes in progress taking place in Need for Speed computer games. These crashes carry one fascinating element of a planned crash - that of anticipated disaster. Author was intrigued by both their aggressiveness and their atmosphere - the beauty of the scene and the ephemerality of the whole scene. The next position consists of a large-scale painting (diptych) depicting a real crash of a car from the Tesla concern.

He used his old paintings to make it, intending to connect his own lived (planned or, more importantly, already realized) past with the expected but dark future. Consequently, within this set he work with vehicles that are mainly known from popular films of the 80s and 90s. These include the futuristic sci-fi vehicle DeLorean from Back to the Future, KITT featured in the Knight Rider series, as well as the Ecto-1 van belonging to the Ghostbusters.

Author is interested in the fate of these cars off-screen television and working with their real-world implications. Finally, he select his childhood drawings of cars that were created in the software Sketcher, still on the Windovs 98 operating system. He leave these drawings to his painting machine to realise them 18 years after their creation in their current form, but one that is influenced by the software that exports the original bitmap data into the vectors needed for the machine to work.

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