IN: HUMAN 2024

"Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born." Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, 1913.

The famous manifesto of the Italian Futurist painter initiated a trend of combining music with visual arts, technology, and culture. Its continuation can be observed in the works of the Dadaists, the Fluxus movement, and artists like Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, whose sound-based works blurred the boundaries between music, performance, and visual arts. In the 1960s, American percussionist Max Neuhaus was the first to use sound to create site-specific installations. The subsequent development of electronic and digital media expanded the possibilities of sound art. Artists such as Bill Fontana and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer began using synthesizers, computers, and software to build complex sound environments.

Contemporary sound art often intersects with visual arts, performance, and media art. It continually pushes the boundaries of how we experience and understand sound in the context of art. The combination of these two forms of expression allows for the creation of unique, multidimensional experiences for audiences. This year's Venice Biennale was largely dominated by sound exhibitions, such as John Akomfrah's exhibition representing Great Britain, Julien Creuzet's project in the French pavilion, and the exhibition Sailing Through Fire by Tod Machover and Lee Bae. These presentations demonstrate how music and sound can influence the perception of visual artworks, creating a new quality of reception.

In his exhibition in:human, Mariusz Szypura presents an installation where music plays the main role, and each piece is complemented by a visualization inspired by the specific composition. Entering the exhibition space, we are transported not only into two parallel musical worlds but also into the corresponding moving graphics. The first element of the composition consists of instrumental music by Silver Rocket and the visuals created for it, which offer a postmodernist view of human beings. In response, the artist prepared the second part, which looks at the same graphic material from the perspective of a machine.

Szypura takes on a new role, which is a consequence of his long-term involvement in visual creation. As a versatile artist, Szypura uses his musical and graphic skills to create multidimensional, interpenetrating works. The integration of music and visual art in the presented installation reflects a dynamic dialogue between tradition and modernity. The in:human exhibition juxtaposes what is human and analogous with what is digital and technological. The music installation is a kind of exercise in preference or a psychological test, to which each visitor is subjected. The choice of one of the two sides of the exhibition reveals the visitor's level of habituation to new technologies.

Will artificial intelligence dominate music? Does it have a chance to prevail over visual arts? Can sounds generated by AI become more popular than those created by analog artists? These are the questions Szypura poses in his music installation, provoking viewers to reflect on the future of art and technology.

Mariusz Szypura is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, music producer, graphic designer, and visual artist present for almost three decades.

He began in the Polish alternative scene in the early 1990s with the band Happy Pills, an icon of the independent rock scene. The band released several albums, and their US career was interrupted by the attack on the World Trade Center towers, the band was on its way to New York City when it happened. He was also involved in the group Blimp, whose album Pressure: Pleasure remains a hidden treasure of European experimental post-rock, with reviews in The Wire and De:Bug.

From 2010 to 2015 he held the visual identity of the OFF Festival in Katowice and signed artwork for more than 80 albums by Polish artists. Between 2014 and 2017 he designed and developed 4 award-winning games, recognised at IMGA Global in San Francisco, White Nights in Helsinki, Casual Connect in Belgrade, and Appaward in Warsaw.

His main original music project is Silver Rocket, with which he released 5 albums, including Unhappy Songs and Tesla, a longplay inspired by the extraordinary life of Nikola Tesla, nominated for the Fryderyk Awards and recognised for Best Graphic Design. The latest album, Infinity Fidelity, is the first one ever recorded as a Simultaneous Experience: two discs meant to be played at the same time, mixed in Dolby Atmos. Each of its 16 tracks is paired with original visualizations created by Mariusz, and it was awarded Gold for Music / Film Cover at the European Design Awards 2025.

In July 2024 his installation in:human opened at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, an interactive A/V environment exploring the relationship between humans and technology, often described as the threshold between his design practice and the immersive audiovisual work that followed.

In November 2024, during Unsound Festival NYC at Lincoln Center in New York, he presented êkhos, a stereoscopic anaglyph A/V installation made with the )))echo~echo((( collective.

From 2025 onwards his work has been organised around Chopin Residue, a multidisciplinary project that reimagines the music of Fryderyk Chopin through systematic deconstruction, collaborative reinterpretation, and material transformation. The cycle began with the Lathe-Cut Session I performance at Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków and the Nonaptych. Prelude Op. 28 No. 20 installation at Pałac Wilanów in spring 2025.

It then took the form of a nine-channel sound field and large-scale video projections at BALC Gallery in Osaka, performed live with Sugar Yoshinaga and Masayoshi Fujita during Unsound Osaka 2025. In November 2025 the album was released at Fridman Gallery in New York, with live performances by Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), John Stanier (Helmet · Battles · Tomahawk) and Zoh Amba.

In January 2026 the project travelled west for a Dolby Atmos 11.1.6 pre-release at Fab Factory Studios in Los Angeles, then arrived at the Polish Pavilion at Malta Biennale 2026, where the sound installation Redefining. Polish-Ghanaian Textile Narratives was awarded the Maltese Falcon for Best Pavilion. Chopin Residue remains the active core of the studio's practice and continues to expand.