Attention: Light! 2.0 by Józef Robakowski in collaboration with Wiesław Michalak and Paweł Janicki - audiovisual installation for Disklavier & multiscreen projecton

Attention: Light! 2.0 exhibition, Warsaw Autumn Festival, 2010

Attention: Light! was inspired by a film that the famous American artist and experimenter Paul Sharits made in 1981 in Robakowski’s apartment in Łódź under the influence of a potent dose of Chopin’s mazurkas. Sharits’s negative was lost, but a few years later he sent Robakowski a sketch that served as a production plan when – after Sharits’s death – Robakowski made a video version of the lost work in collaboration with Wiesław Michalak.

Attention: Light! 2.0 fits in with Sharits’s other works, in which he explored additive color synthesis as a structural element of film images; it also fits in with Robakowski’s interest in the energy of light, and with Paweł Janicki’s work structuralizing relations between sound and image by using communications protocols and original programming. This completely digitalized work draws on the classic traditions of structural cinema, powerfully demonstrating the energy of abstraction: the nearly biological – but at the same time totally digital – energy of forms generated by an algorithmic code.


Where is Chopin?, London, 2010