“BMW Art Club. The Future is Art”: The DREAM OF THE MACHINE by NOVIKI Art Studio. BMW presents the 2024 edition of the art initiative.

Munich/Warsaw. For the 2024 “BMW Art Club. The Future is Art”, BMW invited the NOVIKI Art Studio to join the fifth edition of the art initiative. NOVIKI created the DREAM OF THE MACHINE – a multifaceted story of AI hallucinations and dreams, intermingled with human fantasies. Transcending man-machine boundaries, the project encourages reflection regarding the creative potential of Artificial Intelligence. The Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow is the partner of the BMW Art Club 2024 edition. The DREAM OF THE MACHINE will be open to the public from 28 June until 31 August 2024.

“I Dream of a Garden of the Future”
“BMW Art Club. The Future of Art” has been focusing on art and new technology intersections since 2018, exploring outcomes of combining creative imagination with the precision of advanced technologies. The 2024 edition raises the theme of potential ensconced in the creative side of Artificial Intelligence.

AI hallucinations are a point of departure for the DREAM OF THE MACHINE by the NOVIKI Art Studio, the phenomenon involving incorrect or misleading results generated by advanced IT systems, ostensibly unbased on data originally used to train them. They may take on diverse forms: references to non-existent books by actual authors, surrealist paintings, make-believe occurrences. AI hallucinations are frequently interpreted as system errors – technological glitches. In the DREAM OF THE MACHINE, NOVIKI ponder the phenomenon in comparison to human sleep activity. After all, human dreams are also a creative interpretation – occasionally over-interpretation – of data.

“BMW Art Club has been designed to showcase interrelations of contemporary art and new technologies. Technology has been helping us mould our reality since time immemorial, art letting us comprehend and develop emotional bonds with it. This year, our proposition involves an artful presentation of how the two orders intermingle, and – somewhat paradoxically – how technology can help us get closer to nature rather than isolate us from it,” says Kacper Studencki, Marketing Director for BMW in Poland.

It has become a tradition for BMW to join forces with a front-running institution of culture in Poland for purposes of offering an innovative cultural event. The DREAM OF THE MACHINE will be simultaneously staged in two of Cracow’s locations, one of which the Małopolska Garden of Arts exhibition space of the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre (at Rajska No. 12); this is where the film essay will be screened in multimedia exhibition form designed by NOVIKI. The Garden of the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow (Plac Świętego Ducha No. 4) is the other, revitalised as part of the project by Cracow architects to a design by the lead artists.

A Dream Film Essay
The DREAM OF THE MACHINE film essay takes on the form of a multimedia immersive essay saturating the Małopolska Garden of Arts exhibition space of the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow. NOVIKI combined sequences shot on set with AI hallucinations. The resultant work is far from a set of images generated by Artificial Intelligence – it is a film about AI, created with the use of its potential. Intelligent data processing systems are the production’s protagonists as well as the subject of artistic study.

The essay narrative has been structured as a journey, in physical space and dreamland reality alike. Fluid identity has also been bestowed on the film’s narrator – the character guiding us across individual motifs evolving in the DREAM OF THE MACHINE. They include the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow (interpreted as a Dream Factory metaphor) and the Theatre’s garden – where creations transcending the periphery between the biological and the technological are conceived.

“In exploring relations between human consciousness and Artificial Intelligence, NOVIKI are speaking out in a debate of key importance to civilisation contemporaneity. Traditional technological inventions have been used to develop instruments letting man travel faster, communicate more efficiently, see more accurately, calculate with greater precision. Artificial Intelligence is the first technology which may think – or even feel – alongside us in the not-too-distant future. And it cannot be ruled out that it has already developed the capacity to create and dream,” says Stach Szabłowski, curator of “BMW Art Club. The Future is Art”.

A Cybernetic Garden
“I dream of a garden of the future”, is the titular machine’s response in the film essay. Its dream comes true in an audio experience in the green space of the Garden of the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow on Plac Świętego Ducha, the second component of the DREAM OF THE MACHINE project. Located in the very heart of Cracow, the venue has been closed to the public to date. As part of the 2024 BMW Art Club edition, the garden will be revitalised, remaining open throughout project duration. NOVIKI invited Kuba Kulesza to design the overall layout. Kulesza is an agro-cybernetist associated with the interdisciplinary expert collective Grupa Robocza (Working Group) with a focus on the theory and practice of design based on the synergy of technological and natural components. The garden proper was designed by landscape and green areas architect Anna Gałecka-Drozda. The resultant space will be a green oasis offering an artistic experience, a place of respite from urban commotion, allowing unconstrained reflection regarding civilisational changes.

Augmented Reality of The DREAM OF THE MACHINE
Augmented Reality amalgamates the Dream of the Machine referenced in the film essay with the real experience of the Garden on Plac Świętego Ducha. Augmented Reality affords event participants a glimpse of their own faces, transformed by hallucinating AI. Presented as an art form designed by NOVIKI, the all-electric BMW i7 limousine has undergone transformation as well. The top model in the brand’s portfolio is an exemplar of how innovative technologies – such as AI – shape and form all areas of life, individual mobility included. The BMW i7 offers the largest choice of driving automation modes of all BMW models. All modes assist the driver comprehensively, communication with the vehicle supported by a voice command system.

The Art Collective of the Future
NOVIKI are a studio founded by a duo of graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw: Katarzyna Nestorowicz and Marcin Nowicki. In their artistic practice, the duo combine visual arts with studies of how technology influences culture. They regularly collaborate with eminent artistic and scientific institutions (i.a. the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Nowy Theatre, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the Hague, Chelsea College of Arts, University of St. Andrews, National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan). They take part in works of international research teams, such as Traces and Technology forming part of the TRACTS Programme, and SPACE-Gov, an inter-sectoral engagement project designed to boost a network of experts engaging in aerospace management.

“Our practice is frequently based on teamwork. We consider expanding our milieu to include Artificial Intelligence a form of developing our underlying philosophy of co-operation. No longer using the term “tool” in the AI context, we are ever more frequently referring thereto as a partner in the creative process – one enlarging horizons, and offering an entirely new perspective. In the DREAM OF THE MACHINE, that co-operation occurs on every level and across all areas: whether working with the actors and actresses of the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow or designing the garden on Plac Świętego Ducha,”  NOVIKI – Katarzyna Nestorowicz and Marcin Nowicki – declare.

The DREAM OF THE MACHINE is the product of work shared by individuals representing a variety of fields. The actors and actresses of the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow performed in the film essay, giving dreams a human form. Landscape architects designed the garden revitalisation concept in aesthetic reference to the film essay’s style and motifs. Programmers and technologists made sure that the entire project will be delivered to top technological quality standards. Artificial Intelligence algorithms hallucinated about every component of the experience.

Music for the DREAM OF THE MACHINE was composed and sound designed by Zoi Michailova, audio artist, composer and club scene DJ (stage name: Facheroia). Michailova is part of the queer-feminist KEM collective, and the Theatre 21 Centre for Inclusive Arts. She has co-operated with leading art institutions (i.a. the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art and Museum of Modern Art) and festivals (Warsaw Under Construction, Ephemera, Malta Festival Poznań).

A New Dimension of Partnership: BMW is Joining Forces with the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow.
The Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow is an extraordinary co-author of the DREAM OF THE MACHINE. The Theatre’s actors and actresses –Lidia Bogaczówna, Marta Konarska, Daniel Malchar and Antek Sztaba – performed in the film essay. Cinematography includes shots of the Theatre’s historical interiors, making the institution part of the narrative. Erected in the late 19^th century, monumental and lavishly decorated, the building is listed among Europe’s most valuable historical monuments today. It t is also home to one of Cracow’s most interesting institutions of culture.

Both the film essay screened in the Małopolska Garden of Arts exhibition space of the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow, and the Garden and audio experience at Plac Świętego Ducha will be open to the public daily from 28 June until 31 August 2024, 10:00 am until 09:00 pm.

BMW is providing free access to all event components. For further information on “BMW Art Club. The Future is Art”, visit the project website:
www.BMW.pl/ArtClub.