For both artists, working on the project was a novelty. Mariusz Waras, an artist who has so far found artistic expression in two-dimensional murals, now constructs a huge, three-dimensional object; Krzysztof Topolski, aka Arszyn, supplies it with a special interface for interactive involvement of the viewer, offering each and everyone the possibility of creating an individual soundtrack.
The vast, engine-driven Factory is accommodated in an institution dedicated to contemporary art, like an ironic comment on the mechanisms of the production of artefacts and cultural policy. The m-city factory produces nothing, it serves no useful purpose, but it stirs the senses nevertheless, and its huge dimensions emphasize the transformations that contemporary culture is undergoing. This factory needs no workers. The engines that keep it going require little attention. The ghostly nature of the installation evokes a vague sense of danger and forecasts the end of physical work.
The installation highlights the notion which is common nowadays that physical work is disappearing. However, the end of work foretold by Jeremy Rifkin has not happened –its means has merely been shifted. A traditional Ford factory has indeed disappeared as the machines have been sent off to China. Workforce has been reduced and re-educated, and their work is now performed elsewhere. The factory is thus an image of the industrialization myth and its revolutionary connotations which, in Europe, have become history.
Yet, is a contemporary museum not similar to a traditional production plant in a number of ways? Perhaps the factory and its mechanisms have been imposed on the entirety of societies, and leaving the factory is no longer possible. Escape from productivity is the only way to oppose neo-liberalist order.
Curator of the sound installation is Daniel Muzyczuk.
Mariusz Waras (b. 1978, Gdynia) is a freelance graphic artist, outdoor painter, traveller, amateur architect. Ha has graduated from the Department of Graphic Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk where he is currently assistant lecturer in Prof. Jerzy Ostrogórski’s painting studio. He is the author of the m-city project, which includes several hundred murals.
His work focuses on urban space. His murals may be seen in the streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk, Berlin, Paris, Budapest, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bolzano, London and Prague, as well as in art galleries, including individual exhibitions at the Arsenal in Poznań (2005) and the CSW Łaźnia in Gdańsk (2006). He is also a curator of the 238x504 cm hoarding gallery in Gdynia as well as an archivist/collector of Polish street art. graphic artist.
Krzysztof Topolski, aka Arszyn (b. 1973) is a percussionist, electronic musician, improviser and creator of sound installations. He records as a solo artist as well as in collaboration with Emiter. In 1998, he was a cofounder of the workshop Pracownia Ludzie Gdańsk. He was also a member of the group Ludzie and was involved with the group Kobiety, the project RogulusXSzwelas as well as with the group Dzieci Kapitana Klossa.
He is the initiator of the cycle of lectures Contemporary Music for Housewives, organizer of a number of educational projects as well as sound workshops of listening and acoustic ecology. Topolski performed at a number of festivals, including Stimul, Plain, Turning Sounds, Unsound and Alt+F4. He received a grant from Museums Quartier in Vienna. He is also organizer of the project Audio Tourism Kaliningrad-Gdańsk. He composed the music for Stanisław Wyspiański’s drama The Curse directed by Łukasz Kos. In 2007, he received a grant from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage for his project Arszyn_Emigrant.