Elusive Sense: On the Fluid Boundaries of Perception

In an era saturated by the digital, where the boundary between the human and the technological becomes increasingly blurred, what becomes of our senses? The exhibition Elusive Sense, a key event in the UK/Poland Season 2025, delves into this critical question. It brings together five Polish new media artists who explore how technology is not just a tool, but an active agent reshaping our bodies, our perception of reality, and our understanding of self. The exhibition confronts a fundamental tension of our time: are we augmenting our senses through technology, or are we outsourcing our own bodily functions, becoming increasingly dependent on the systems we have created? This tension is clearly felt in the dialogue between the works of Iga Węglińska and Agnieszka Mastalerz. Węglińska’s practice is rooted in transhumanism and the anthropology of the body, questioning the limits of human communication. Her work explores sensory augmentation, treating clothing and external objects as potential prostheses that can extend, suppress, or enhance our sensory experiences. She creates a vision where the skin is a reactive membrane and the frontier between the body and technology dissolves. This exploration of co-existence is countered by Mastalerz’s focus on the mechanisms of control inherent in our relationship with technology. Her work, often video-based and incorporating scientific imaging, uses poetic language to analyze how restrictive processes influence and exploit the individual, whether in intimate relationships or our interaction with the environment. Together, they present a complex picture of our symbiosis with non-human agents, a relationship defined by both empowerment and subordination. The nature of the digital image—its creation, consumption, and lifespan—is another central theme. The art collective panGenerator tackles the paradox of digital permanence. Their installation Hash to ash poignantly illustrates the fragility of our digital memories by transforming a user's selfie into a pile of physical ash, revealing that the digital manifestation of an image can be even more ephemeral than a physical artifact. This work, along with their explorations of the "infinite scroll," critiques the hypnotic, exhaustive, and ultimately disappointing search for visual stimulation in social media, a ritual that sacrifices our attention to corporate entities. In a powerful counterpoint, Kamil Czapiga (aka Cosmodernism) reminds us of the profound visual wealth of the natural world. His works, which appear to be computer-generated videos, are in fact ecosystems of living organisms observed under a microscope. Czapiga creates "science fiction but without the fiction," challenging an audience accustomed to CGI to recognize the surreal beauty of the authentic, a beauty we are at risk of forgetting amidst the overproduction of digital content. This re-evaluation of the "real" extends to our cultural memory. Janek Simon’s Meta Folklore series directly confronts the influence of artificial intelligence on our concepts of heritage, tradition, and identity. Using a neural network trained on thousands of images of ethnographic sculptures, Simon generates and 3D-prints new, mutated forms. These objects are at once futuristic and strangely familiar, a speculative vision of a universal folklore generated through algorithmic alchemy. Simon’s work poses a crucial question for our future: will AI enable a new, rich, and syncretic global culture, or will it flatten history and identity into a superficial stream of fleeting, decontextualized associations? Elusive Sense offers no simple answers. Instead, it invites the viewer into a space of active reflection on our cyborg present. The artists presented here act as both observers and experimenters, charting the elusive territory of a new sensory landscape where the lines between the human and the machine, the physical and the virtual, the authentic and the generated, are constantly being redrawn.