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NIKLAS WALLENBORG

( Interdisciplinary artist, with an interest in socialism, sci-fi, digital culture, space and the apocalypse )

I am a visual artist who employs methods of transformation, copying and sampling to collect my artistic material. My work alludes inter-culturally to common frames of reference within film, music, literature, and proceeds from already existing material within popular cultural science and science fiction. This is the starting point for my creation of and examination into alternative realities, applying various approaches around dramaturgy, information transformation, and social critique. During the last ten years, my practice has centred around an investigation into how science fiction can be applied within contemporary art.

I see sci-fi as realm of history that runs in coexistence with our actual history and reality and which speak of an alternative, a change and perception of the unexpected. Sci-fi is narratives about us and about how we relate to each other through time and space.

What have we done? What to do now? What to do in the future? In Sci-fi literature our need to understand and interpret the world around is addressed from a string of angles; from a human outlook, morally, politically, technically etc.

Sci-fi is an expression of our ideas and thouhgts about the times we live in and about the evolution of these times into future scenarios. To make use of this artistic base and gives endless possibilites to scrutinize and criticize contemporary society from alternative ends. I use sci-fi as an act of resistance not as escapism, but rather as the offer of an alternative world and possibility to change the face of present realities. Fictive worlds I believe can help shaping reality.

My new ongoing work is not about technology per se, nor is it about the problems we face in a digital society and a virtual world. It’s not about AI and robots. Rather, it is an attempt to work with and in the gap between the human emotions and the virtual. From the mythology and the utopian ideas in internets first step, early hacker culture and the digital d.i.y movement, through digital bodies, virtual realities to cyber shamanism, magic coding and cyberpunk.