Biennale Warszawa: The Seeing Stones and Spaces Beyond the Valley

Can you store your pre-war memories in the DNA of a plant? Could national borders be the boundaries of your internet? What if algorithms fed with our data know more about us than we do ourselves? How much does the Cloud weigh and how hot is it?

The exhibition and the public programme include fifty people and groups of artists and researchers. The artists will present twenty-five works, nine of which were commissioned by Biennale Warszawa, that refer closely to the current socio-political context by touching upon the subjects of reactionary ideology hidden behind technologies, surveillance of citizens through spyware, the technology of border protection, or the infrastructure’s role in establishing new power structures – also concerning the war in Ukraine. Invited to the public programme are media theoreticians, philosophers, and new technology researchers, who will analyse and review the foregoing technological models but also speak of ideas and solutions serving as an alternative to them.

The title of the exhibition refers to the theme of palantírs, or seer stones, from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Palantír is also the name of a technology company, founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel, a conservative lawyer and investor, which provides advanced data analytics, mainly on behalf of the US government. The second part of the title refers to Ramesh Srinivasan's book Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World Are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow. Its author presents alternatives, objects and prototypes that can counterbalance the current technological model, created and managed by private, monopolistic corporations in collaboration with political centres around the world. The fantasy world has more in common with the world of digital technology than we think.