Let the Heavy Things Float... So That Words May Precipitate Harmoniously
(A text about the exhibition "Let the Heavy Things Float" by Alsino Skowronnek)

Santiago Morilla, July 2025

Is a brush technology? Behind this simple question lies a deeply critical and self-reflective artistic impulse. Put another way, it underlies the most genuine and properly human essence: questioning ourselves about the creativity that transforms the world and, with it, transforms itself in return. Indeed, a brush is technology, even if it's lo-fi. Without doubt, it is the result of applying knowledge, skills, systems or methods to solve problems and satisfy needs and concerns, including symbolic and plastic ones. Because every artist creates worlds with the materials of the world itself, mediating and being technologically mediated in order to speak hidden languages and bring to surface the meanings that reside in the representational depths. But the role of technology, understood this way, goes beyond its mere instrumentality in Alsino Skowronnek's work, because what he offers us is a rich semantic field with which to embrace uncertainty and the questioning of the techno-artistic construction of our own memory and identity. That is, Skowronnek invites us to think about the effects—on us and on other materialities, logics and more-than-human existences—of the construction of a language (understood as another form of technology) always shared and historically negotiated between material contingencies, existential needs and informational flows. Here, the initial verb that modifies worlds is found in a blurred uchronic past that emerges as a renewed and stylized informalism. A verb that makes itself known, beyond the surface of the work, challenging the formal coexistences of post-vandalistic character that—even without offering an easy and direct interpretation—connect with the technological roots of possible ancestral futures.

But let us continue with the questions, those that hide inside black boxes or that are concealed behind the painting, there where meanings are encrypted. Is technology merely a physical and prosthetic extension of ourselves (in the line of thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and André Leroi-Gourhan)? Or perhaps, can it also be considered as an extension of our memory that constructs identities and cultures (as Bernard Stiegler maintains)? I believe we can agree that technology is both things, simultaneously. Certainly, the question of technique, as Martin Heidegger points out, goes far beyond circuits, codifications and screens—that is, it is not just a question about machines or instruments, but about their reverse, in a word: their essence. But it turns out that, for the German philosopher, the essence of technology is not something that can be uniquely understood as a neutral means to achieve an end but, rather, a mode of "unconcealment" (in Greek, aletheia). Let us remember that, beyond the meaning associated with "manufacturing" or "making," the etymological root techné also means "to reveal" or "to make present" the truth of something (poiesis). And it is there where, at present, its trap resides and, also, its true potency, because, in that act of unveiling, the world is placed at the disposal of the human being as a material and discursive resource, as a constant "standing reserve" (in German, Bestand), positioning reality and ordering it massively, at a planetary level, for greater production and efficient control of capital flows (economic, cultural and symbolic).

Let us now return to the brush that Skowronnek handles, unconcealing and ordering resources, but in his case, with a clear intentionality of subjectification and critical emancipation. He employs for this a hybrid methodology, certainly particular. On one hand, his solid academic training in economics, programming, design and data visualization, together with his trajectory of more than two decades in graffiti culture, allows him to move comfortably between systems and surfaces, where he creates friction between the formal analysis of symbolic systems and a fluid handling of contemporary algorithmic tools. Not in vain, since 2019 he has developed different strategies to integrate AI into his work, exploring the possibilities that machine learning has when training image generation models (which can learn from the inherent characteristics of a database such as, for example, a set of tags) to produce formally similar and semantically coherent results, but never identical (for example, ghost tags from letters of the Latin alphabet). In this "digital excavation," as the artist himself suggests, his attention is focused on the surprise offered by the machine's drift—still recognizable—for the subsequent plastic hacking of its apparent bias of infallibility and neutrality. It is here where the artist takes advantage to "curate" the machine response and introduce a warm visual noise. Noise that, in turn, would connect us all with certain coding bases that would be present in the brain structures specific to language that, as Noam Chomsky maintains in his theory of linguistic nativism, humans would share with all cultures. Thus, the plastic results obtained by Skowronnek tend to deviate from his own self-imposed norm (inscribed in his ConScript, or constructed script) with the objective of, precisely, perturbing the machine in its learning process. It is about humanizing the machine, so that it fails and stutters in a complicit and consenting drift that accompanies the search for a space of introspection and apperception in both the artist and the spectator. But, for this, it is necessary that both throw into the sea the key to their respective codifications and visual interpretation guides. Only thus can the beautifully chaotic or unexpectedly poetic data float, those that remind us of the contingent value of chance at the margin of the unprogrammed. With all this—which is not little—what the artist offers us here is, in a certain way, a path of access to the recognition of a corpus with a universal grammar that humans, non-humans and more-than-humans share.

On the other hand, there is a key issue that must be mentioned, due to the profound personal change it represented for Skowronnek and which, moreover, drove his research project alongside the professionalization of his work. Chance willed that the recent birth of his daughter coincided in time with the discovery of the existence of a Nigerian grandfather whom the artist never knew. This activated an auto-ethnographic turn focused on connecting new branches and roots of the family tree that, crossing worlds and geographies, now presented itself as a new identity dimension that tensioned the always complex relationship between the inherited being and the chosen, self-defined being. What connection would exist between his grandfather's cultural legacy and the vital journey initiated with his daughter? Here the artist mentions the idea of working on "a message for her," but also speaks of the "search for one's own language from the biographical," which leads him to investigate ancient writings like Nsibidi, used by the secret society Ekpe (also known as Egbo or Leopard Society) in southeastern Nigeria.

Nsibidi is composed of hundreds of symbols that can represent concepts, ideas, actions or objects, and their meaning often depends on the context in which it is used, being able to be accompanied by gestures, dances or masquerades, often connected with spirituality and divination. The truth is that a significant part of its linguistic system, especially that related to war and the sacred, was and still is kept secret, accessible only to the initiates of societies like Ekpe. But why is there such a manifest interest in encryption—so characteristic of graffiti—and in programming languages—constructed scripts and personalized AI models—in Skowronnek? Doesn't a clear connection exist here with the stratified feelings of his personal history? Doesn't the exploration of meaning itself, present throughout his work, connect with the ritual capacity that Nsibidi has to explain teachings and life lessons?

Evidently, we are not masters of technology or language. In reality, we are also being shaped by their logic. At most, we can say that we are always initiates, eternal practitioners and apprentices. This is why Heidegger maintains that the very essence of technology is enframing (Gestell), understood as an unconcealment that challenges and demands that nature—and all being—become reserve, ready to be processed, ordered and endlessly exploited. Other thinkers, like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, will also point out the danger that technological omnipresence becomes an end in itself, molding society and human values according to the logic of hyperproductivity and efficiency in service of a "megamachine" (coercive organizational and technological systems) with cryptic and dehumanizing tendencies. But not all technology is bad in itself, it is not always colonizing or predatory, nor is it always indebted to the superior right of the "Idea" against nature. This is one of the main objections of Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui to Heidegger (and much of Western philosophy of technology) when he criticizes its implicit universalism, which tends to present technology as an inevitable and global destiny that subsumes all other historical non-Western forms and variations. For Hui, technology is not a neutral and universal phenomenon, but is always embedded in a particular cosmology (a system of beliefs about the universe, nature, humans and their place in the world) and in a moral order. That is, there is no single technological path dominated by Western Gestell, but multiple technological paths rooted in different worldviews that invite us to re-appropriate technology, without denying it, but developing it in dialogue with other cosmological traditions that are more harmonious and less extractive. This is urgent, especially in a context where a total challenge, like Gestell (the unlimited exploitation of resources), has become unsustainable.

An intuitive example centered on the need to cultivate the plurality of unconcealments through technodiversity we have here, when Skowronnek confronts the binary language of the machine with the scraping of pigments impregnated in a bundle of filaments from the end of a stick (brush). With this, he is not seeking the faithful representation of any concrete calligraphy or a beautiful landscape recognizable by human eyes. He is seeking a ritual "key" (not the one that would open the technological black box) that harmonizes with his cosmotechnical ancestors, as a conscious strategy to be able to send a non-dystopian message to the future. In this regard, Hui tells us that, in Chinese calligraphy, for example, the brush is not just an instrument for tracing letters and mountains, but its use is impregnated with a flow that seeks harmony (the Dao), as the expression of the balance of vital energy (qi). The brush, in this context, is not "enframing" the canvas or pigment as a resource, but participates in an act of harmonic revelation.

The beautiful paradox of Skowronnek's work is that to "reveal" or "bring to light" the immanence of our hyper-technified time, with so many accelerated processes delegated to artificial agencies, his strategy is to stop, put the computer to rest, leaf through family albums, breathe and give space to the slow time of painting. It is painting that is in charge of "unconcealing" the rapid hi-fi technological mediation process, refuting its immediacy by seeking probabilistic patterns that dilute cultural and autobiographical nuances, those that are vital for the richness of a mature artistic language. Painting, without doubt, is a kind space for breaking the generic style that AI imposes on us, "unveiling" with it the radical creativity that hides in every beautiful imperfection.