Weronika Lewandowska

A spoken-word poet, performer and researcher dealing with new media and immersive experience (PhD in humanities), she has been an active initiator of VJ events in Poland and an organizer of grassroots initiatives and new media exhibitions (“Share Warsaw”, “Share Poland”, “BYOB Warszawa”, “polishVJing”). She cooperates with musicians, visual artists and dancers, among others. In both her research and artistic work, she combines the methods of artistic research with academic research. She has been researching immersion culture and immersion experiences since 2010. A director and screenwriter (“VR Noccc”) as well as an executive producer (vnLab/Film School in Łódź, 2019), she was also a researcher in the “+-brain. A cognitive image of dance” project – transdisciplinary research on the perception of dance in virtual reality (SWPS University grant) – carried out between 2014 and 2016. She completed her doctorate on “Immersive Experience in Performative Art Practices”. Recently, as part of an artistic residency in Prague, she has worked on the artistic use of 360° technology for a poetic performance (International Visegrad Fund, Bazaar Festival/Cross Attic).
The “VR Noccc” experience is based on her spoken-word poem, which has been translated into 13 languages, presented in over 20 countries, and on 3 continents. It was also heard at the “The Liberated Voice – Sound Poetry” exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2019), presenting the most important phenomena and works of sound poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries.
She deals with digital storytelling in the context of performance art and social media. She is interested in socially engaged VR, immersive journalism, the use and development of VR/AR/XR in live performance art (including dance and poetry), and other real-time activities.

Prompt

Multimedia action, spoken-word poetry (work-in-progress)

“Hey Siri, do you have a body?” – this question weaves through Veronika Lewandowska’s spoken-word poem, which became the starting point for the multimedia performance “Prompt.” In her performance, the artist forecasts the “weather of the future” by creating multimodal prompts, seeking a creative and critical dialogue with artificial intelligence, while wondering if it will help make better decisions crucial for humanity. Can it help us avoid wars and advance cooperation? Will artificial intelligence – without a body – develop a substitute for “embodied remembering”?

Lewandowska has been exploring XR (Expanded Reality) art for several years, designing spatial metaphors for immersion. The new performance – a form of prototype performance/expanded environment – features various objects whose source is not entirely obvious. They overlap with body gestures, space, words, things. Sometimes it’s an augmented reality or optical illusion, and sometimes it’s an artificial intelligence hallucination. The performance Prompt is an experiment, a live creative writing workshop and a test for today.