ARTIST STATEMENT

I do simulations.

Main core of my work is devoted to examination of simulations and worldbuilding. Therefore I often use PC game engines to make computer games, 3D rendering software or hand drawings, to make a glittering copies of the world yet to be built.

I play the game of imitation. Its rule is simple – if it kicks back, it is real. There are no virtues guaranteed. I usually play as an artist, sometimes disguised as an architect or recently as an informatics researcher. The goal of the game is to give the purposeless universe we live in a … goal. As an artist, the main attribute to my persona are imitation skills. I use tools of so called virtual reality in its renaissance meaning to become something in effect, but without an actual presence. Like that time when I was fist fighting my best friend in yellow hazards suits in front of a nuclear power station. As nothing happened, so I went to the visitor centre to borrow uranium, successfully, really. The fight was also real. I had bruises. The kicking back was forbidden. The use of anything virtual is often looked upon as something artificial, with no stakes in the game. Virtual reality are however not just a computers and new technology buzzword, it appears to be a fundamental phenomenon of nature, or even better as a tool of how to understand and explain the world we live in. That is quite a challenge to do, but the least I can do is to try, fail, and try again.

I read, watch and play.

I enjoy playing of game designers Lucas Pope and Jonathan Blow, since they take games as a tools to explore the world we live in, or to offer an open world scenarios where the goal of the game is not the most important thing. For me their games are important source of world building techniques and I share their struggles in development of interactive experiences. Nowadays there are a lot of complications in the world of computer gaming. The one problem which I see is that some of the big titles, mainly in massive multiplayer genre (World of Warcraft, League of Legends etc) can give lot of people a false sense of goal, where accumulating virtual objects and being the best of the best is the only meaning of our virtual existence. Game like the Witness or Papers Please might at first glance offer such a simple solution too - you are in a way locked in a strange world of puzzles, where solving things seems to make you go further. But as one progresses, the excitement from hoarding of achievements fades and players with longer attention spans are rewarded by different “ending”. The game suddenly becomes a sort of epiphany simulator, where the joy from understanding the environment, exploration and discovery reveals to the player, who suddenly realizes that one is no longer trying to achieve artificial goals, but to stand out, understand surroundings and bravely pursuit things as a free soul.

Techniques.

I often express my thoughts by using game engines, 3D rendering software, but also by writing novels, gamebooks or simple hand drawings and physical installations. The situations which I create are lacking a clear goal, PC games and gamebooks cannot be won and novels and gamebooks are lacking the end and the beginning. They are meant to be part of the world, with open end and unclear beginning. I like to dive into strange situations which are hard to describe with reason and logic. I offer a complementary reading of the events and situations, which are hard to grasp, all based on limited and personal experience. I tried to collaborate with Nollywood CGI industry, I failed, so I ended up helping to produce a 3D animated movie for an unknown email scammer, who emailed me, saying that he is stranded on Russian extraterrestrial vessel since 1979. I designed several architecture projects on very lucrative spots in Prague, which are taken for centuries, with no ambition for realisation. The proposed buildings were for example house for poor and unsuccessful architects, a house for worshipers of the atom, or a house designed to bury an existing graveyard and subsequently the building would bury itself too. I slept in self-reconstructed modernist torture cell, having a bad dream about an infinite number of dirty toilets ordered in a very modernist grid. Or I made several Styrofoam copies of old furniture, facades, rusty handrails and chairs and described that in a short book and small PC game where two geodesics are trying to measure the world they are in. Some visitors sat on the chairs and destroyed them, even though they were white and completely unrealistic. So as one might or might not see, those things have a few things in common. It is a notion of distance, since it is hard to get inside a nuclear power station, move to Nollywood or demolish five centuries old churches. I use various types of simulation, new technology or old tools to get to these unreachable places to discover the world by the means of art.

Connections, mutual awareness and long shots.

How does this all come together? Imagine you have just finished a book, game or saw a movie. One is possibly still partly in a fictional world, which was bordered by the time you have spent in. But in fact, parts of the fiction have already started to leak in the world you have. They merge and the real becomes different. This infusion of the real with fiction is for me a fundamental way of how art can shape things. In my fictional worlds, I have always tried to offer visitors to look for hidden agendas like nuclear energy, new technology, long distance asymmetric collaboration, architecture and designed environments, loneliness, naivety, modernist arrogance, social asymmetry and planetary issues. These topics are however not shining like diamond - shaped spectacle, but waiting to be discovered. There is no easy way of how to sell these topics, especially within art, and that is why I try to tackle them with care. In art, I am afraid of simple solutions and shortcuts, since I believe art is not a competition, but a fractal shaped adventure where mistakes are the gems one focuses on. I have failed in almost every project I did, and often the failure was the most interesting part, where the naivety of my initial assumptions just came to be seen. I often also aim to offer the visitors/players/readers to become something else, where the new technology allows people to step out from their human perspective and see things from a view of someone who can only see two metres ahead, is a pine cone, or a computer. This mutual awareness is something what I like to see on people who are interested in my work.

BIOGRAPHY

Vojtěch Rada works in the fields of fine art, architecture, computer graphics and game design. He often calls his practice as the creating of the worlds, simply known as worldbuilding.