Ján Šicko

concept & realization

"This piece, like the film, draws upon the city as a multilayer structure of relationships, connections, meanings and as a collage of incentives, strategies, goals and personal stories. The installation creates a mosaic of acoustic-visual impulses through various objects. The sounds, purely acoustic, are created by specially designed “musical instruments” and come from all sides, creating an uncommon score. Pictures are created through the objects themselves, which in turn ideologically emerge from architecture or urbanism. Their simplistic construction determines the inner and outer space. This space is then extrapolated into its surroundings, thanks to the play of lights and shadow, creating a structure of elongated shadows, lines and borders."

Jan Šicko is an artist and designer with an original approach towards his craft, which glides along the edges of various forms and genres. Multimedia works are a characteristic genre form of his. He creates interactive installations and objects, live visuals and light design for various performances. A special layer of Šicko’s work is the development of auteur software and hardware. His projects often emerge in collaboration with other creators, such as the audiovisual performance Glass Burlas in St. Martin’s Cathedral in Bratislava for the festival Konvergencie, the interactive projection for the performance Ornamenty (SĽUK), the interactive book LookBook for the Slovak Fashion Council and the project titled Hľadanie krásy/Looking for Beauty in collaboration with Ové Pictures for the Slovak Center for Design. He is head of the Department of Visual Communications at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava.

Jonatán Pastirčák

concept & sound composition

"‘The Lines’ installation, just as the film, is inspired by the city, by its pulse, tempo, melody and definitely not in the least by its geometry. It pulls you into its micro city which has its own rules and its own music. Thanks to shadow play and the placement of acoustic objects, this city comes to life and you can very easily lose yourself in it."

In the past, I collaborated with Jan Šicko on a number of projects and each one left me with a sense of fascination about the way he thinks and the way he is able to turn his ideas into reality. In this case, we drew inspiration from a different work which has its own specific language and storytelling and we let ourselves be inspired by this language.

Music composer and sound designer Jonatán Pastirčák studied music production and sound engineering at SAE Institute in London. He currently performs under the pseudonym Isama Zing, through which he explores the borders of club and dance music. Under the pseudonym Pjoni, he creates improvised and electroacoustic music. He received a Radio Head Award as part of the duo Midget & Pjoni. He has collaborated on a number of audiovisual installations and performances such as Plain, which was exhibited in the New York gallery Pioneer Works. During the last few years, he has been active in music production and has supervised the production of a number of albums including: Září (Zvíře jmeńem podzim), Jiskřící (Zrní) and Antigona (Katarzia).
Jonatán is the musical composer for a number of film projects including: V síti (directed by Barbora Chalupová, Vít Klusák), Špina (directed Tereza Nvotová) and Mečiar (directed by Tereza Nvotová).

Soňa Kúdelová

performance

"Collaborating on the creation of this multimedia installation, ‘The Lines’, has been a long-term experiment for me; creatively for my mind and literally in time and space. It is a standstill of action and the succession of quick and slow reactions towards random and varied impulses. Sound is connected to objects and objects to light. Bodies are present among them and the movement goes on and on and on."

Soňa has been working in the modern dance scene in Slovakia as a choreographer, dancer, performer and teacher. She explores new approaches in performative art and its projection. She observes the flow of art and its rhizomatic placement in everyday life, glances at its history and openly approaches its current form. Drawing from everyday performance, she gains the experience and recognition to grasp herself in today’s crowded society, as well as the significant motivation and creative spontaneity the creative process entails. These themes are represented in her auteur solo trilogy – three dance performances – Autopilot, Autocorrect and Autonomy. She creates collective collaborations with visual, musical and intermedial artists with whom she tests the limits of artistic expression at one time and in one space. Presently, she is working on an open participative project titled Zvuky ticha/SOUND OF SILENCE, which is part of long-term research for her scholarship. She is the co-founder of the educational project Telohra and a council member of PlaST – Platform for Current Dance and the coordinator of the residential space Telocvičňa in Nová Cvernovka.