2023 Two-channel video, full HD, 08:40 min / 12:00 min. Pigment print (50 x 40 cm), vinyl wallpaper (60 x 90 cm).

In the postmodern, the body and its image become malleable. Its position as a natural object is rightly examined and questioned in relation to cultural, scientific, political or economic factors. Therefore, contemporary body images must accordingly be understood as sociotechnically constructed images. New tools, such as artificial intelligence and three-dimensional simulations, are an addition to the media landscape and at the same time a challenge for the medium of photography. Real-time game applications such as "metahuman" already show simple ways to create human bodies and identities. These approaches are mostly based on statistical variations to describe and give meaning to the appearance of the human body. However, artificially created bodies are not a unique feature of today's computer games. They can be found in socio-technical networks, films, music videos or magazines. In the process, they are highlighted as bodies of art or are completely integrated into other conventional forms of representation. Precisely these phenomena and the new imaging techniques are taken up in the work. At the same time, these circumstances and developments are subverted by dispensing with normative-organic organisation and common representation of the human body.

2022 Two-channel video (40:00 min, 65"), Image series (40 x 30 cm), 3D print bust (PLA, 35 x 30 x 20 cm), acrylic glass plate (40 x 40 x 1 cm).

»Body Options II« (2022) is the latest installation by Mateusz Dworczyk, which was on display at Kiel's art association »Kunstraum B«. In his transmedial practice, the media artist explores the interplay between technology, the human body, and its pictorial representation. The focus lies particularly on photo-based digital imaging techniques such as machine learning and 3D technology. The work is built on the subset of results of an artificial neural network (trained on a self-created data set of ballet dancers) which contains outcomes that are usually defined as errors in the image-generating process. Those »errors« are then translated into three-dimensional space by using 3D-Software.
The images of these sculpted bodies appear in competition with normative body representations and the subjective body images of the visitors themselves. They infest the exhibition space, materialise, and affect the viewer. They show the power and impact of immaterial transclassical machines like artificial neural networks and remind us that technical instruments, apparatuses, and systems have always had anthropological relevance and a considerable influence on the idea of the human body, its function, form, and image.
»Body Options II« opens up a space of imagination that oscillates between present possibilities and future scenarios. However, neither angstlust-rhetoric (the pleasure of fright) nor fear of technology is the subject of the work. But rather the question of the omnipresent relationship between technology, the human body, and the ever-changing image of the body. Dworczyk aims to question the functional logic of technology which is transferred to the body. His work tries to visually oppose the inherent tendencies of standardisation, optimisation, and utilitarianism, as well as the organisation of the body into an organism through the artistic examination of a body without organs.

2021 Single-channel video projection (2 x 1,5 m, 05:35 min), dancers: SueKi Yee, Christopher Carduck, sound assistance: Christian Werner Sierra.

2020. A series of screenshot-compositions (digital print on PVC banner 1,7 x 6,4 m and 1,7 x 3,2 m folded as objects).

Fleckstein/Dworczyk contrasts anonymity with prominence and self-presentation in social networks. By including one's own self-image (selfie), as well as using the aesthetics of social software interfaces, the romanticised image of the uniformed individual is to be negated.

2020 Installation NAK: two-channel video/sound loops (03:40, 04:14 min) on two screens (55"), mattresses innerspring, mirrored revolving stage, Pfizer pills, glass and mirror smartphones (5.8") and various personal objects. Installation Futur3: two-channel video/sound loops (03:40, 03:00 min) on two screens (55"), white carpet (140 x 140cm), glass and mirror smartphones (5,8"), MA1 jacket, cable drum as well as various personal objects.

»Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites.« (Read; 2018) — Through a dialogic approaches, our related subjects are united in this two channel video installation. The idiosyncratic narrative tries to describe everyday turnarounds that usually go unnoticed. The interplay with these boundaries (and their reversal) is adopted in the spatial arrangement. In addition to commonalities in content, formal aspects of digital cultural techniques are addressed through the manipulation of digital surfaces.

2021 Video/sound loop (02:40 min), screen (75"), white bricks.

2021 Self-organised group show with Malin Dorn and Ramona Kortyka. Exhibition view: Atelier Umraum, Alte Mu Kiel (2021).

Digitality can no longer be regarded as a parallel structure or a mere extension of our world. The digitality that surrounds us is an integral, interwoven and influential part of all areas of life. For this reason, it is a mistake to believe that it is possible to escape the digital environment or to simply turn it off like a program. In this joint exhibition the multimedia artists address precisely these circumstances by focusing on code-based technologies, socio-technical networks and phenomena of a culture of the digital.

2019 — ongoing. A series of screenshot-compositions.

Focusing on phenomena of the presentation of self in everyday life and the question what part the real-time frame-medium »Internet« plays in this context, this work is dedicated to a special form of digital staging. This includes live webcams and especially sex webcams. The Focus lies on the arising elusive situation. The viewer is confronted with an overwhelming array of stagings and windows from all over the world. They allow a glance into supposedly private housing-situation. The screen recording has been used to capture a brief moment in which no person was in the picture. The fluid real-time image has become a photographic snapshot. The Internet has become a place of self- and external representation with elusive, ambiguous boundaries between private and public spaces.

2019 Installation: Various screens, revolving stage, high lift truck, cable drum. Video/sound loops (7:05, 05:49 and 04:33 min).

»[...] Artistic metaphors of reflection and self-representation appear often in his work. There is an echoing of parallel worlds, of superimpositions, doubled, reversed and negative images, whose quick movement recalls the rhythm of pop media landscapes, glistening with mirrored sculptural surfaces. Yet it is the weight of the human body which is at the center of [this] work, as a dancer, as a ghost, a lover, an object of war or a simulation of identity culled from the internet. The body as mediated image pulsating with themes of violence and sensuality becomes a site for the negotiation and construction of individual identity and the nature of representation itself. It is in his most recent work, »Deus Ex Machina« that Hannes Fleckstein effectively refines his ideas in a complex installation involving an industrial loading cart, a power cable reel and digital display screens in varying sizes playing sound and film loops in differing states of polymorphic manipulation. An autobiographic face, alternatively appearing with a mask or in negative, on a retro cell phone, looping through transformations and permutations at multiple angles and perspectives. The industrial metallic cart functions as both container and prop, supporting the displays and delineating the surrounding space. The installation is at the same time threatening and strangely familiar: these are the tools of self-optimization and digital narrative. It is a work which draws one inside while remaining at a critical distance.« Extract from the text by Arnold Dreyblatt for the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition. ISBN 978-3927979-94-9

2019 Installation: Two screens (55"), white curtain, black ventilator. Video/sound loops (04:00 and 05:50 min).

This work is committed to various questions of identity: How do we define and present ourselves, how do we communicate these identities in digital spheres? Fake lifestyle in social media is becoming the norm, the pressure of self-optimisation is turning into an overkill and the simulated perfection is transforming individuals into performative identities. Once everyone can display, shape and change their own faces, everyone becomes a star in their own reality show. Have those identities now reached a new peak or are there other goals they will reach with their digital performance? Starting from these questions, we think about our own digital narrative. The excess of perfect postings evokes a desire for trash, naivety and ugliness.

2019 — ongoing. Collaborative projec. Detailed information under memeclassworldwi.de and on Instagram memeclassworldwid and mcww.club

memeclassworldwide is an autonomous class initiated by Ramona Kortyka, Mateusz Dworczyk and Juan Blanco within the art academy. The starting point for this project was Dworczyks bachelor thesis (»Memes, the digital instigator: The social quality of the comic based on an internet phenomenon.«) in 2019.
Since then the artists organize research retreats, exhibitions, courses and workshops. Based on the Internet as a reference space, the class investigates post digital phenomena across their aesthetic, social and political dimensions, and integrating these investigations into practices of teaching and exhibiting. memeclassworldwide also collaborates with Bernhard Garnicnig, a PhD researcher involved in the project »Institutions as a Way of Life« (Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at Academy of Art and and Design in Basel).
In picture: Videostills from »memeclassworldwide video tutorial dokumentation«, contribution to the exhibition »escaleras futuras« in Galeria Santa Fe, Bogotá

2019 Installation: photogrammetric texture, 3D printed carnation, mirror base and found footage video collage (01:10 min).

Proceeding from Dianthus I (2018), this work expands the investigation on the sign towards a general question of the referentiality. The carnation is used as a sign in very different contexts and social classes for centuries. In „Dianthus II“ the flower is presented as a 3D object. It is stripped of its nature, digitised and medially doubled. By being placed on the mirror base, the relationship between the technical copy and its reflection is addressed. The found footage was subjected to a similar treatment: It was cropped and reassembled, so that the origin and the context of the image remain hidden. With this formal and medial interplay, the work tries to point towards a lack of reference systems since modernity.

2016 — ongoing. Texts and collages: paper, pencil, fine liner, felt pen, photographs, typewriter.

»es gibt die dinge, von denen ich weiß, dass ich sie weiß. es gibt die dinge, von denen ich weiß, dass ich sie nicht weiß. es gibt die dinge, von denen ich nicht weiß, dass ich sie weiß. es gibt die dinge, von denen ich nicht weiß, dass ich sie nicht weiß.«

2018. Installation: fresh flowers, urine, cellophane bags, tape, dipping wax. Picture: Digital colour photography »Selfportrait With Carnation« and video loops (32").

Throughout history, the floral symbol of the carnation has undergone more than one about-turn: from the peasant symbol of honour and love, via a resistance symbol of the nobility during the French Revolution, to the sign of the labour movement. The work attempts to detach the sign from its connotations and to renew the flower's description. In the course of this the emphasis is put on the special relationship beetween the portrait oft the flower and the artist's self-portrait. The carnation becomes the catalyst for a dialogue between two artists with different nationalities from working class families.

2017 — 2018. Digital Video-Sound-Collage using found footage, own film material and self-composed sound (5:47 min).

Photographs and videos from social networks, news, online portals and feature films that show the everyday media world and subtly try to undermine reality. Through alienation and editing, the images are ripped from their predetermined form and mixed with their own footage.

2017. Video Performance: water, used slip (video/sound loop 00:34 min).

It is what it is. A wet dream. It is what it is...

2015. In collaboration with Anne Sensel. Sound Installation: 3 cardboard boxes, speakers, Players and sound tracks. Exhibition view: Offspace Schlecker, Kiel-Gaarden.

Boxes isolate and dissect conversations with people in Kiel Gaarden who have experienced exclusion from society, for example through family misfortunes or drug consumption. The presentation in individual boxes is an attempt to reflect the vacuum in which these people are situated. In each box, different soundtracks can be heard. In these, Fragments of words are condensed through repetition and overlapping in order to reveal the reasons for their misfortunes.