he rigged CRASHTEST exhibition expands on Olbram Pavlíček’s long-standing deep dive into the intricate, formal dynamics between the individual and the technological infrastructure of power. At the center of his artistic exploration, we find the often overlooked yet painful contradiction between individual needs and the unifying frameworks with(in) which we must negotiate constantly. Pavlíček’s sculptural work is therefore commonly inspired by the shapes of everyday objects — the heels of shoes, household or street furniture, medical equipment, and all kinds of prostheses, devices, or gadgets — that we do not give any thought to with ordinary use, but that quietly cut right into our bodily comportment and mental processes.

In Pavlíček’s rendition, the seemingly welcoming morphology of industrialized products thus takes on menacing proportions, as the uncompromising optimization of physical, affective, and emotional capacities shows its teeth from beneath the soft cushioning. We all face its pressure, at least from the moment a “pacifier” is first placed in our mouths, and today optimization advances rapidly in areas such as hormone therapy, psychopharmacology, plastic surgery, or biohacking, but also in the pervasive whispering of algorithmic recommendations. For Pavlíček, however, the mutual malleability of organism and technology does not present a target for simple criticism. It is, to an extent, an evolutionarily indispensable quality, despite — or perhaps exactly because of — its capacity for manipulation or abuse. As the exhibition title suggests, we are dealing with such manipulation here and it is possible that nothing is what it seems.

Likewise, there is a certain ambiguity inherent to the principle of ergonomics that Pavlíček examines in his sculptures. Like most technology, ergonomics is remarkable for its partial transparency: as long as it works “smoothly”, we usually do not pay attention to it. Its contours become conspicuous only when the functionality breaks down or the default configuration is misaligned. The objects in the exhibition play out this ambivalence — they are both pleasant and frightening, soft and spiny, familiar and foreign. The unsettling impression is further enhanced by the fact that instead of a robotic assembly line, they are paradoxically born out of a tedious, artisanal process in the studio. Pavlíček’s sculptures assume with their distinctiveness the frictionless shapes of design products and digital interfaces that lure us into their embrace, while at the same time subversively underlining or amplifying some of their aspects, rendering thus visible the hidden manipulation under the surface of late neurocapitalist infrastructure.

In its essay Fuck Off, Google, the French radical-left group The Invisible Committee argues that networked reality has produced a new, “transparent” kind of humanity — a humanity defined, rather than through the will of an individual subject, by flows of electrified information disseminated across a technologized “environment” from which an individual can no longer separate themselves. In their view, we are thus dealing with a “system-being”, an entity that defies traditional frameworks of Western thought. The rigged CRASHTEST exhibition introduces us to such a system-being. Here more than ever, Pavlíček’s interest in the relationship between the tool and the user exceeds the realm of personal interaction and spreads deep into the networked environment through complex installation and cryptic scenes drawn in pencil. This networked environment is made up not only of bodies, but equally of automated agricultural and industrial systems, computer-generated images, and scrapings from dark corners of the (post)post-internet culture — a mess of words and signs whose supposed meaning is now becoming increasingly difficult to agree upon.

Merging with the system-being, the visitor cannot claim any distance. As Pavlíček’s treatment of the motif of exposed tissue suggests, we are transparent in yet another sense — never hidden, but always both obverse and reverse, outside and inside at once. The very distinction between natural and artificial thus becomes difficult to maintain. Human and non-human animals alike have evolved in the tangle of technological devices to the point of no return. Everything is maintained through the network of reciprocal decisions, perhaps most accurately represented by the object hanging from the ceiling of the room. Its shape is based on the anti-suckling brace — the spiked nose ring fitted to young cattle. The early separation of calves from their mothers leads to anxious behavior, and young cows try to compensate for their unsatisfied need to suckle by latching onto other members of the herd, which the spiky ring prevents by immediately stabbing the udder if the muzzle comes too close. To draw a direct parallel with the pacifier would be a bit of a stretch, but the uncomfortable tension between need and discipline leaves us with a similar aftertaste.

This chain of interdependent processes of enforcement, subjugation, and adaptation runs through the entire exhibition. Cows are now domesticated to the point where their existence can hardly be separated from ours, and we would similarly search in vain for a mythical moment before the “technologization” of humankind. Our physical and mental form has always been shaped along with technology, whether by fire, the fist wedge, the wheel, the steam engine, or generative algorithms. But today’s multiplied dysfunction is an unprecedentedly potent reminder that we are indeed part of a system-being — a sometimes pleasant but increasingly goading tool that often hits places we hadn’t anticipated. It is a situation that calls for nothing less than a rethinking of previous forms of “humanity” — on more than only one level.