Damjanski
Damjanski is an artist living in a browser. Concerned with themes of power, poetry and participation, he explores the concept of apps as artworks. The app Bye Bye Camera is the camera for the post-human era. Every picture people take automatically removes any person. The app Computer Goggles let’s people capture the world like a machine sees it and the LongARcat app creates long cats in AR.
In 2018, he co-founded MoMAR, an Augmented Reality gallery app aimed at democratizing physical exhibition spaces, art institutions and curatorial processes within New York’s Museum of Modern Art. WIRED covered the launch with the headline "Augmented Reality Is Transforming Museums".
He created an online space that only programs can access. This software performance ,called Humans not invited, first hit Reddit’s front page before it was shown at the König Galerie in Berlin.
In March 2022, he published his first decentralized app (DApp) Unhuman Compositions. It’s a collection of 777 participatory generative photography NFTs – each generated when a person takes a photo with the camera of their smartphone. The work invites people to explore the abstraction of our physical world through a generative algorithm.
His work has appeared internationally, including exhibitions at NRW-Forum, König Galerie, Roehrs & Boetsch, Pioneer Works, Tropez, Import Projects. Currently Damjanski resides in New York.
Last update on 10-03-2023
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Featured Artworks
In [Nude study 29], Damjanski explores possible futures in a world deprived of people yet bearing the weight of a past civilisation. Using his Bye Bye Camera application as an artistic tool, he observes his surroundings while erasing people's presence. But beyond appearances, people are neither here nor gone. The artist's presence is tangible as he acts for capturing these augmented photographs. Likewise, the AI tool detects body shapes but fails to assess shadows. The result is a digitally-enhanced reality where humans stand at the verge of presence and absence, somewhere between the physical and the immaterial.
Nude study 29
2019
Still
In [Nude study 17], Damjanski explores possible futures in a world deprived of people yet bearing the weight of a past civilisation. Using his Bye Bye Camera application as an artistic tool, he observes his surroundings while erasing people's presence. But beyond appearances, people are neither here nor gone. The artist's presence is tangible as he acts for capturing these augmented photographs. Likewise, the AI tool detects body shapes but fails to assess shadows. The result is a digitally-enhanced reality where humans stand at the verge of presence and absence, somewhere between the physical and the immaterial.
Nude study 17
2019
Still
In [Nude study 54], Damjanski explores possible futures in a world deprived of people yet bearing the weight of a past civilisation. Using his Bye Bye Camera application as an artistic tool, he observes his surroundings while erasing people's presence. But beyond appearances, people are neither here nor gone. The artist's presence is tangible as he acts for capturing these augmented photographs. Likewise, the AI tool detects body shapes but fails to assess shadows. The result is a digitally-enhanced reality where humans stand at the verge of presence and absence, somewhere between the physical and the immaterial.
Nude study 54
2020
Animated gif
Ten rectangles of different colours, shapes and sizes inhabit the black canvas of Computer Goggles, Untitled Composition 2. Shapes either overlap or not. All seem to shrink down as they retrieve in the form of a perspective, driving the eye to a focal point. But what governs this geometry and is it the result of the aesthetic quest of the artist? The computeresque colour codes seem to indicate otherwise. Computer Goggles is, in fact, a photo app that captures the world as algorithms see it. It translates images of identified objects into a flat, multi-coloured structure. It is the skeleton of a picture based on a machine’s object identification database and a way to explore non-human compositions.
Computer Goggles, Untitled Composition 2
2020
Still
Three rectangles - cyan, magenta and yellow - inhabit the black canvas of Computer Goggles, Untitled Composition 1. Shapes overlap or fit within another. But what governs this geometry and is it the result of the aesthetic quest of the artist? The computeresque colour codes seem to indicate otherwise. Computer Goggles is, in fact, a photo app that captures the world as algorithms see it. It translates images of identified objects into a flat, multi-coloured structure. It is the skeleton of a picture based on a machine’s object identification database and a way to explore non-human compositions.
Computer Goggles, Untitled Composition 1
2020
Still
The Foundry
Events
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Digital Bodies is an online group show curated by Stina Gustafsson, Chloe Diamond, Serena Tabacchi and Marie Chatel featuring works by Cao Fei, Damjanksi, Frenetik Void, Hackatao, Hu Weiyi, Joanne Hastie, Lin Tianmiao, Maurice Benayoun, Miao Xiaochun, Skygolpe, The Fabricant, Travis LeRoy Southworth, and Twistedsister.
“Within the digital realm, the body becomes something we can no longer touch or feel. Often, it stands detached from our actions, forcing us into new ways of associating, observing, and thinking about the body and its relationship to space.
The human body has dominated artistic visions for centuries. With the emergence of new digital instruments comes new ways of exploring what role the body plays in both physical and virtual environments. Fluid boundaries where we alternate between our real and virtual lives imply that our understanding of the body is detached and outdated.
In this exhibition, MoCDA presents artworks that challenge existing notions of the body by exploring the ways in which they are represented across media and how the representation has evolved within a digital sphere. In the first collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art and the DSL Collection, presented for CADAF Online 2020, MoCDA seeks to examine the bodily structures that are increasingly challenged and questioned as our daily life is transported, shaped, and augmented by digital technologies.”
(The curators)