Cybernetic Existentialism

With this work Michael Kutsche, an LA-based German artist known for his potent animation characters made for various film productions, pays tribute to the emergence of virtual communities that are affecting change in, as many call it, the current Renaissance period for digital art. New Renaissance is a portrait in which Kutsche attempts to capture the feeling of a rising era: the childish inquisitiveness, the vivid colors of excitement, and eye-widening wonders.

Mexican artist Luis Ponce’s psychedelic landscapes lure the viewer into worlds of intersecting looped systems, acid colors permeated with growing flora, bodies and bodily fragments (undead or otherwise), creating a serial image for a so-called “cybernetic existentialism.” In Primitive agents of change, a more careful examination reveals an omnipresent feature: a four-eyed face, eye-shaped striped balls that sometimes seem to levitate aimlessly, at other times jumping in a nervous and impatient manner, apparently examining what is around them and creating a nascent sense of anxiety. At the same time, systems loop and seem to work smoothly with, or perhaps despite, the psychedelic prospects.

The childish inquisitiveness and joyous anticipation for wonders in the earlier work in this selection by Michael Kutsche, gives way to a sense of disillusionment populated by some dark power that keeps one suspended at the threshold between childhood and adulthood. The shiny shapes floating around the teddy bear with the body of a boy, are reminiscent of pharmaceutical pills, enhancing in the viewer the feeling of a luring illness.

Often the world of ideas and the human world need a mediator, an extremely sensitive being who is able to spot the spirit of an idea that has penetrated the human world (they might see it even in the light of a street lamp or the passing headlights of a car). Children are normally considered natural mediators, able to navigate freely between Neverland and the reality of adults. What shape have these mediators taken in the new digital era? A writer and a storyteller as well as an artist, XoniaGar psychic explorations are often populated by such otherworldly migrations.