The Soft Machines exhibition is a space where material is not a passive carrier, but an active, sensitive, and responsive entity. The artworks create a connection between human and non-human factors that have been forcibly distorted by the Anthropocene through sensitivity and nostalgia linked to the material world. The creators do not start from the aesthetics of mass-produced objects, but from the special phenomenon when mass-produced objects lose their anonymity and gain character and individuality through their differences, flaws, and distortions.
The exhibition can also be read as a reflection on the logic of mass production, but it does not appear as an anti-activist gesture. The works treat the objects and materials that surround us with respect and are born at the intersection of manufacturing tools and natural structures. In this sense, they not only express a critique of industrial production, but also question the reproducibility and disposability of humans and nature themselves.
The works appear in a post-pastoral environment, where forms created by industrialization take on idyllic, natural structures. Technology becomes fallible and is interpreted not on the basis of its usefulness or performance, but rather through its mere impact. The destabilization of standardized forms, the disruption of machine precision, and the errors that appear in digital systems create moments in which parts of our familiar world step out of their functional roles.
At several points in the exhibition, natural structures take shape not in organic materials, but through industrial and synthetic media. These mimetic gestures do not seek to idealize nature, but rather to capture its fragile transience. They become visible in Plexiglas and 3D-printed materials, carriers whose time scale differs radically from that of the forms they represent. This material tension makes the works both mimetic and mementos, imprints of a transient, changing, living system in a material that is considered almost eternal and slowly decomposing.
In this context, nature appears not as a refuge, but as an archived imprint. It bears witness to the paradox that the very substance that preserves the forms of nature also contributes to its disappearance. In this medium, the body does not appear as an autonomous subject, but as part of a hybrid system connected to objects, technologies, and ecological processes. The creators connect intuitively to algorithms and do not work from a conventional transhumanist perspective, but seek their place as humans in a post-human world.
Valentina Várhelyi
Exhibitors: Nóri KISS, Fanni PETŐ, Janky ELOD, Virág BENKOVICS, Domonkos RÉFFY, Ágoston Balázs KISS