For decades, artists working with computers, networks, simulations and interactive systems have used technology not simply as a tool, but as a way of asking what it means to live alongside machines. Capital Dream, presented during Ars Electronica Festival 2026 at the University of Arts Linz, brings together five projects by six Polish artists who have been exploring these questions.
Curated by Dominika Kluszczyk and Klio Krajewska of the WRO Art Center team, the exhibition draws on twelve editions of the Best Media Art Graduation Projects Competition, organised by WRO Art Center and the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, featuring bachelor’s and master’s projects in new media art from Poland’s public art academies.
Seen together, the works form an accidental timeline of technological anxieties and ambitions: a plant learns to survive alongside a neural network; a synthetic landscape is generated by an early language model; an armillary sphere becomes an interface for hearing the Solar System; an artificial body waits for its human creator; and an avatar moves through a world where more communication produces less clarity. What connects them is a fascination with what happens when technology moves beyond representation and begins to participate in the world — as collaborator, author, environment or instrument of control.
Made between 2014 and 2025, the works offer an interesting perspective on how quickly the future can become ordinary. Many of the technologies they once approached as experimental are now part of everyday life, making these earlier questions feel surprisingly close to home.
Natalia Balska: Between the Real and the Virtual
Natalia Balska arrived at Kraków’s Intermedia department after studying Graphic and Media Design at the University of the Arts in London, where her interest in the relationship between technology and the physical world took an unusually organic turn. Her 2014 master’s project, B-612, connected a plant to a neural network, creating a system in which neither could exist independently of the other. Sensors monitor the plant’s surroundings (light, humidity and temperature) and feed this information to the network, which controls a limited supply of water. The machine makes its own decisions about how to divide that water between itself and the plant, with a reward system shaping its choices according to the changing environment.
What emerges is a fragile relationship: the survival and development of the plant and the network become mutually dependent. B-612 is ultimately an experiment in interaction between the real and the virtual, but also a surprisingly tender question about dependence and control.
Xtreme Girl: Paradoxes of Communication
Lena Peplińska and Laura Radzewicz founded Xtreme Girl in 2022, making the duo itself part of the work’s fiction. Xtreme Girl is both their artistic avatar and the protagonist of Hands turned into fingertips, fingertips spiraled into the chaos (2024), an installation and two-channel video essay produced at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań. The project was created together with Kasia Piątkowska, a producer, DJ, and sound artist who is a long-standing collaborator of the Polish artistic-research collective Xtreme Girl, contributing a distinct sonic perspective to the work. Through this persona, the artists explore a world where identity, information and technology are caught in an increasingly difficult cybernetic loop. Their starting point is a paradox: the more communication becomes automated, simplified and accelerated, the more unstable and difficult reality becomes to read.
Drawing on Bogna Konior, Bifo Berardi and the ‘Dark Forest’ theory from Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, they frame communication as both a condition of survival and a potential source of conflict. Xtreme Girl borrows the language and aesthetics of technology-driven environments to question their dominance and control. What makes the work unsettling is how little of this feels futuristic: technology promises clarity while producing confusion, instability and fertile ground for radical beliefs. Rather than imagining a distant dystopia, the work locates these tensions within the networks we already inhabit.
Piotr Madej: Listening to the Solar System
For Piotr Madej, an intermedia artist, composer and sound engineer working across music, animation, physical simulation, AR and programming, the Solar System becomes something to listen to rather than simply look at. At the Intermedia Department of the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, with its focus on sound and ‘audiospheres’, Madej developed an interest in bringing scientific phenomena and technology into sensory experience.
His 2017 installation, Perception of Spheres, begins with an ancient armillary sphere, once used to track the movements of celestial bodies. Madej transforms it into an object-controller — a virtual instrument that allows the viewer to navigate a 360° simulation of the Solar System. As the planets move, their physical parameters are translated into sound, while meteor activity and data from LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) are also sonified. The result is a space that can be explored through sound and movement, with the physical armillary sphere acting as an interface between the body and a virtual cosmos. Rather than simply representing space, Perception of Spheres invites us to hear, navigate and interact with it.
Jagoda Golińska: To Control What We Create
A graduate of the University of Opole and Wrocław’s Academy of Fine Arts, Jagoda Golińska explores the point where bodies, technology and the natural world begin to overlap. Her work often gives mechanical systems an organic appearance, drawing on the unsettling imagery of science fiction and body horror to play with the boundaries between human, animal and machine — which becomes a question of creation itself in In Your Skin (2025).
The work imagines humanity’s desire to produce artificial life — and the ‘God complex’ embedded in the idea that to create something is also to have authority over it. An organic, membrane-like body houses a responsive technological core, giving the object the appearance of something alive. Yet its apparent autonomy has limits: it activates only when a human enters its presence. What looks like a newly created form of life is ultimately subordinate to its creator, exposing the uneasy relationship between the desire to bring something into existence and the desire to control it.
Golińska turns the familiar science-fiction fantasy of artificial life into a more unsettling question: if we create another form of existence, do we ever allow it to exist on its own terms?
Krystian Grzywacz: Artificial Realities
A multimedia artist working across video, animation, VR and sculpture, Krystian Grzywacz is interested in what happens when reality is reconstructed through machines. His 2016 graduation project, Vacant Spaces, made at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, is built around errors produced by a 3D-scanning system. The animation turns the imperfections of machine perception into a story about a person becoming increasingly entangled with technology.
A few years later, after graduating from the Academy of Arts and Design in Wrocław, Grzywacz returned with Still Life (2019), pushing this fascination with artificial realities further. Here, even nature is synthetic: plants and figures were constructed entirely in digital space, creating a landscape that looks lifeless because it has never been alive. Grzywacz describes the work as a snapshot of technological evolution in its ‘meantime’. Its text, generated with an early version of GPT-2, adds another layer of artificial authorship, with glitches and strange combinations becoming part of the film’s poetry. Inspired by Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, Still Life leaves us somewhere between the real and its imitation.
Negotiating With the Machines
Read together, the five projects in Capital Dream reveal different ways of negotiating our relationship with machines: through dependence, simulation, artificial life, communication and new forms of perception. What feels most striking now is how little distance there is between the futures these artists imagined and the world we inhabit today. As machines become increasingly capable of sensing, generating, deciding and communicating, the question is no longer simply what technology can do, but what we are willing to let it become — and what kind of world we are building alongside it.
