In the urban landscape where human ingenuity meets the raw edges of industrial neglect, street artists like Mariusz Waras excel in transforming overlooked spaces, animating them. Waras (AKA M-City), is known for his expansive murals and street art that appears across over forty countries, is one example of how the artist’s vision can reframe and rejuvenate neglected urban environments. Similarly, the digital realm has seen artists and technologists in the Demoscene meticulously re-engineering code to craft immersive experiences that challenge and redefine virtual spaces. These digital pioneers have turned lines of code into poetry, movement, and sound, projecting their creations onto walls to alter perceptions and environments.

The exhibition LOOP at CSW Łaźnia in Gdańsk, Poland, is a testament to this transformative power of art, bridging the worlds of physical street art and digital innovation. Curated by Anna Szynwelska, whose practice often explores the intersection of traditional and new media, LOOP embodies this fusion with its groundbreaking approach. Szynwelska’s previous projects, such as Bigger than Life and The Art of the Internet, reveal her dedication to examining how technology reshapes art and audience experience.

“The starting point of the exhibition and its core material are my works (mainly paintings) and their language,” says Waras. “Like I do when working on a painting, I reached to a digital library of elements, created consistently since the outset of the M-city project, namely to the graphic equivalents of various urban objects. Using AI tools, 3D visuals, and sonification, together with the team, I created an exhibition that fully relies on new technologies.”

LOOP integrates Waras’s graphic language with cutting-edge technology, featuring a dynamic 360-degree projection and interactive installations created with artificial intelligence. This immersive environment responds to visitor movement, making it unique and engaging. The exhibition merges traditional artistic practices with contemporary digital tools, reflecting Waras’s deep engagement with pixel aesthetics, graffiti, and electronic music. The interactive elements of LOOP not only blur the lines between creator and viewer but also integrate their presence into the evolving narrative of the installation.

LOOP’s innovative technical and creative dimensions are the product of a skilled collaborative team. Radosław Deruba, an artist and motion designer, has crafted the immersive virtual world that forms the exhibition’s core. Patryk Chyliński, with his expertise in artificial intelligence, trained the AI using a rich collection of Mariusz Waras’s digitized artworks, enabling a generation of continuously evolving visuals. Gosha Savage, an electronic music producer, designed the soundscape, enhancing the interactive experience with his auditory compositions.

Curator Anna Szynwelska integrated these elements into the exhibition, a dynamic environment that reflects LOOP’s technological and artistic innovations. As celebrated by the situationists in the urban environment, here, there is a continuously shifting dialogue between art and audience, each affecting the visual vocabulary. By combining his established visual style with new media innovations, Waras is experimenting with an intersection of street art and digital art, possibly transforming and redefining both.

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