Goshka Macuga: when programs work too properly energy takes over

“Growing up with nothing trained me to build everything” – Goshka Macuga on reminiscence, archives, AI, and why programs develop into harmful when effectivity begins to override human reality 

Political Propaganda: Systems, engineering, and the danger of emotional erasure

HS There’s a perceived coldness to the determine of the engineer or mechanic—a distance from what’s being dealt with. When you’re working with huge, interconnected programs of knowledge, do you ever really feel the logic of the construction threatening to overhaul the human reality of the supplies?

Goshka Macuga It’s political propaganda. It is a type of data engineered to perform effectively, however that effectivity comes at the price of human finest curiosity. Propaganda is constructed to govern and management, to not perceive or be sympathetic. It reduces people to targets and feelings to instruments, disregarding their emotional and lived wants, and the truths hooked up to their existence.

I discovered about this as a toddler rising up in Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the specter of such management had gone away for good. This doesn’t appear to be the case immediately, as we’re as soon as once more dealing with excessive ranges of censorship and legal guidelines that restrict freedom of speech throughout the globe.

I see the function of engineers as usually tied to political or institutional illustration, establishing constructions and mechanisms of management. This occurs outdoors of myself, and my function as an artist turns into centered on discovering methods of working inside such restraints. I reply to this by constructing programs of expression fairly than programs of counter-control.

In the previous couple of months, my focus has been on new analysis round computing and the way this may alter our excited about the way forward for synthetic intelligence. I’ve been growing a proposal related to this discipline, and it has occupied a few of my time, although not sufficient to really feel completed at this stage.

Where play enters the work: Goshka Macuga on brainstorming and making

HS Meccano is a toy designed to show correct engineering, however kids usually use it to construct issues that don’t make sense. In your individual observe, the place do you’re feeling a way of play?

Goshka Macuga In the brainstorming part, when the technology of concepts and the conceptual exploration happen. This stage permits me to think about potentialities with out constraints. The making itself will also be playful, once I work with methods which can be new to me or collaborate with one other individual. I’m drawn to new experiences and to the method of studying itself, so each undertaking turns into a type of playful exploration of the unknown.

Growing up with out toys: Cold War Warsaw in Goshka Macuga’s observe

HS The toys and video games you keep in mind taking part in with as a toddler. Do you recognise any continuity in that early type of play?

Goshka Macuga I spent my childhood in Warsaw, Poland, throughout the Cold War, a time when toys, clothes, and even meals had been tough to search out. What we had was usually dictated by seasonal coupons and restricted choices. Toys had been a luxurious and principally self-made from no matter supplies had been out there: paper, wooden, clay. I keep in mind amassing chestnuts, acorns, and sticks to create toys and preparations, and I usually made my very own garments.

Learning by doing – how ability and curiosity formed Goshka Macuga

HS There’s a thirst for information in your work, but additionally for ability—the truth that you are taking issues into your individual fingers and be taught by doing.

Goshka Macuga From the age of fifteen, I attended a secondary artwork college named after Wojciech Gerson, the place every little thing revolved round being artistic. We not solely centered on creating pictures and objects, but additionally on developing one’s personal identification from little or no. Looking again, I really feel that being an artist in Poland throughout the ’70s and ’80s was a approach to assert company and creativity in such a constrained atmosphere. My resourcefulness and inventiveness in childhood in all probability mirror how I strategy tasks immediately.

Beyond gaining educational information and sensible expertise, I used to be acutely aware of what was true and what was false throughout the context of my very own historical past. Growing up beneath a state managed by the USSR, I discovered that official narratives had been usually propaganda; discovering information for myself, by way of phrase of mouth or analysis. This early expertise of navigating restricted data shaped a deep curiosity and a DIY strategy.

Memory as construction: analysis, choice, and narrative in Macuga’s tasks

HS Your tasks contain absorbing enormous quantities of knowledge, histories, and voices. How a lot do you consciously maintain onto, and the way a lot do you let fall away as soon as a undertaking is completed?

Goshka Macuga I accumulate data that pursuits me in lots of codecs, usually following a subjective, intuitive path fairly than a strictly educational technique. From this assortment, I choose components to kind the skeleton of a undertaking, round which a story begins to emerge. Only after this level do I resolve on the medium of the ultimate paintings. Often, my tasks embody texts or works by different folks, as something can contribute to the development of which means. Not every little thing I encounter leads to the ultimate work. 

Forgetting on function: know-how, distraction, and instinct in Goshka Macuga’s course of

HS Do you might have any methods for organising or jogging your reminiscence, or is forgetting part of how you progress ahead?

Goshka Macuga I would like help to boost my reminiscence. It want a psychological house, a state during which magical but additionally meticulous connections can spark. I’m not positive whether or not immediately’s know-how is useful for my mind, or whether or not it makes it lazy to some extent—an undisciplined thoughts that may simply develop into hyperactive and distracted. My cellphone, social media, and the web are sources of knowledge, however a lot of that data feels ineffective or unreliable. As a outcome, I need to self-discipline myself to stay centered and structured. At the identical time, many issues nonetheless come to me intuitively, or by likelihood, fairly than by way of strictly organised programs.

When a construction fails: instinct, danger, and reconfiguration in Macuga’s work

HS When one thing in a undertaking isn’t functioning, do you have a tendency to exchange a single element, or does it set off a extra radical reconfiguration?

Goshka Macuga After a few years of working with a technique, I’ve discovered to belief my instincts and take dangers. Not all tasks really feel equally profitable looking back. Most artists have just a few works that really stand out, a minimum of from a subjective perspective. I have to take good tasks to the subsequent step. Along the way in which, there are ranges of experimentation and refinement.

When nothing strikes alone: collaboration inside Goshka Macuga’s observe

HS Meccano teaches that nothing strikes alone—every bit will depend on one other. 

Goshka Macuga Collaboration has been on the core of my working technique, even when the ultimate final result may seem idiosyncratic. From my early tasks developed for artist-run areas corresponding to Cubitt and Sali Gia in London, the place I included the work of different artists, to more moderen, deeply layered tasks, collaboration has been a necessity fairly than a complement.

My ongoing collaboration with theatre director Fabio Cherstich on Tales and Tellers, created for Miu Miu calls for a mode of working that’s dynamic and multifaceted. While I develop the conceptual framework independently, the conclusion of efficiency works requires belief in others’ experience, in relation to casting, rehearsals, timing, and the bodily route of individuals in house. Authorship turns into shared.

From humanoid robots to AI: how Goshka Macuga rethinks synthetic intelligence

HS 2026 will mark ten years since To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll at Fondazione Prada, whose protagonist was a humanoid robotic consumed well-known speeches, film scripts, and guide passages. 

Goshka Macuga My curiosity in synthetic intelligence was inseparable from an extended historic inquiry into synthetic reminiscence. Rather than approaching AI as a futuristic substitute for human cognition, the undertaking traced humanity’s enduring want to increase its mnemonic capacities—a want that may be noticed as early as historical Greece and turns into specific throughout the Renaissance. I used to be thinking about pre-technological programs of thought, and I referenced airtight philosophers corresponding to Ramon Llull and Giordano Bruno, who devised complicated programs and symbolic machines to broaden the human means to memorise and generate information. These programs weren’t exterior instruments designed to exchange the thoughts, however cognitive architectures meant to coach and intensify internal capacities.

In that sense, the robotic within the work functioned much less as an impartial intelligence and extra as a mirror to humankind. From this angle, the undertaking was not a lot in regards to the improvement of such know-how because it was about the way it has impacted us as a species. This stays an open query immediately.

Research beneath strain: how Goshka Macuga defines a rigorous observe immediately

HS There’s a way that the artwork of analysis itself is beneath risk: underfunded archives, misplaced histories, on-line assets proving much less everlasting than as soon as assumed, and the outsourcing of thought to LLMs used as analysis assistants. To you, what are the staples of a very good analysis observe?

Goshka Macuga Research can’t disappear. As lengthy as humanity stays alive, the impulse to go looking, to attach, and to recollect will persist.

What is beneath strain immediately isn’t analysis itself, however the circumstances that help its observe. The fragility of our planet —ecological, political, and financial—can have an effect on the preservation of information. Archives are underfunded, supplies might deteriorate or disappear, and institutional reminiscence turns into more and more weak. The query, then, isn’t solely how we analysis, however how information is safeguarded, transmitted, and maintained over time.

At the identical time, analysis has develop into diffuse and fixed. We all analysis day by day, usually unconsciously: scrolling by way of huge quantities of knowledge, amassing fragments, pictures, quotations, and references as we transfer by way of digital house. This mode of analysis lacks the rigour and slowness of working in a bodily archive, but it surely reveals the modern situation. It produces a type of information—associative and provisional—that exists in distinction to the structured authority of archival analysis. It strikes between analogue and digital, between deep, sustained consideration and incidental discovery. It requires time, repetition, and bodily engagement, but additionally an consciousness of how data circulates and mutates. What issues most isn’t the instrument itself—whether or not an archive, a database, or an algorithm—however the duty of the researcher.

How Goshka Macuga resists “just existing”

HS You’ve spoken earlier than about discovering the concept of “just existing” scary. 

Goshka Macuga Many elements of my life are inseparable from my work, not as a result of I intentionally blur boundaries, however as a result of making is the way in which I orient myself on the planet. My observe is extremely social; it entails interplay with many individuals throughout totally different disciplines.

In distinction, my personal life is pushed by the necessity for solitude. I search it as a necessity in an effort to recharge. I journey, however a lot of the locations I go to are tied to work fairly than leisure, which implies that motion itself turns into a part of a working rhythm fairly than an escape from it. I’ve a second dwelling the place I spend roughly three months every year, in a setting the place the looks of one other individual on the horizon is unlikely. There, I’m extra usually accompanied by birds, bugs, and bats than by human presence.

Wherever I discover myself, I are likely to create duties—usually self-imposed tasks that stay artistic even on a small scale. This has at all times been the case for me, so long as I can keep in mind. Activity, considering, and making, fairly than merely present with out route or a plan. I discover a state genuinely scary. I’m conscious of the bodily and psychological limitations that point can impose, and this consciousness shapes each how intentionally I work. Making turns into a manner of staying alert—intellectually, bodily.

When historical past resists construction: constructing with fragments in Goshka Macuga’s work

HS The Meccano set is satisfying as a result of the items match completely, however archives are sometimes jagged, incomplete, or damaged. When you’re incorporating historic fragments into a brand new construction, the place does the system are likely to jam? Can you recall an “uncooperative” piece of historical past you’ve tried to construct with?

Goshka Macuga The system tends to jam when historical past continues to be charged with unresolved nervousness—when materials carries too ethical ambiguity, or proximity to trauma. I’m concerned in precisely this type of train: working with historic materials that is still unresolved, or continues to be within the making, marked by layered trauma and manifestations of human cruelty that repeat themselves throughout time. These should not remoted occasions however patterns, and that makes them tougher to deal with as discrete or archival findings.

Certain locations appear to paralyse fairly than inform. They carry an environment, a unfavourable cost that resists any sense of play or artistic distancing. In these instances, the Meccano logic of fresh joints and practical connections breaks down.

Goshka Macuga – a brief biography

For Polish artist Goshka Macuga, rising up in Cold War-era Warsaw meant making do. “Toys were a luxury,” she remembers, and childhood video games had been workouts in improvisation. What existed was rationed by way of seasonal coupons, and what didn’t exist needed to be made. She constructed her personal toys from no matter was at hand: chestnuts, acorns, sticks, scraps of paper and wooden; sewed her personal garments; and discovered early that creativity meant working with constraints. From these small, self-fashioned worlds, a behavior of invention took maintain—a logic of development that also drives her observe immediately. 

From her early interventions to the 2008 Turner Prize-nominated Objects in Relation—which interwove works by early-modernist group Unit One, tree trunks from English forests and letters from artwork world lovers—Macuga is much less thinking about arriving at solutions than in staying with questions, particularly people who refuse to resolve shortly. “Curiosity allows me to approach historical material without a fixed agenda, to follow unexpected paths, and to remain open to things that resist immediate understanding.”

Relocating to London within the early ’90s after the autumn of communism, Goshka Macuga established a observe formed by institutional critique, collaboration, and a sustained engagement with historical past as a contested terrain. Trained at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, her work has questioned the place authorship ends and curation begins, and the way which means shifts as objects, pictures, and narratives transfer throughout contexts.

From early tasks developed inside artist-run areas to large-scale institutional exhibitions, Macuga has labored with borrowed supplies, different artists’ works and traditionally charged artefacts. In Picture Room (2003), she reactivated Sir John Soane’s dense hanging technique by putting modern works alongside William Hogarth. In The Nature of the Beast (2009) at Whitechapel Gallery, she exhibited a woven reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica—the identical tapestry lengthy used as a backdrop for diplomatic occasions on the United Nations, and famously hid throughout Colin Powell’s 2003 speech forward of the invasion of Iraq. By relocating the thing, Macuga uncovered how pictures purchase energy by way of use, concealment, and repetition.

More just lately, her collaboration with theatre director Fabio Cherstich on Tales and Tellers, commissioned by Miu Miu, has prolonged her observe into efficiency and rehearsal, the place authorship turns into distributed and provisional. Across totally different media and codecs, Macuga’s work returns to a persistent set of issues: how histories are constructed, how programs of information function, and the way constructions designed to organise which means may also develop into instruments of management. In this dialog, she displays on analysis, reminiscence, collaboration, and the purpose at which programs start to work too properly.

Harriet Shepherd