Arturas Bukauskas is a Doctor of Arts and an Associate Professor at the Department of Photography, Animation, and Media Arts, Vilnius Academy of Arts. His background is in documentary film directing. His artistic interests include the intersections of living and non-living entities within societal constructs, along with their corresponding concepts and transformations. He works with experimental forms of the moving image and explores the interactions between text and image. He investigates the aesthetic and conceptual expressiveness of technology-based art, with a particular research focus on the phenomenon of animation.
THE LAST SUNDAY OF AUGUST documentary/animated. Israel. Animation editing direction, 2017
PRACTICAL TRAINING ON HUMAN SUBJECT live action, 3D animation, 11 min, 2007
ESTETOMOTTO live action, 3D animation, 16 min, 2005
EROTOMOTTO live action, 3D animation, 9 min, 2005,
A DAY OF BIRDS animation, 2 min, 2d multimedia, international project "Optimus Mundis", 1998
PLAY fiction 40 min, 35 mm, 1995
A LULLABY FOR THE CITY animation, 3 min, 2d multimedia, 1995
A TELEPHONE LINE animation, 5 min, 35 mm, 1991
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY
More than 30 video adds and short films. Film director, audiovisual post-production supervisor.
TEXTS
Bukauskas, A. (2023). Mirksi žymeklis. Pavadinimo vietoje – ne iki galo surinktas tekstas. „Jie atgijo”... Apie rekursinę animaciją.” Dailė, (90), ISSN 0130-6626
Bukauskas, A. (2022). Menama nukritusio lėktuvo ir lakūno kūnų sueitis (materijos reginiai). Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis, (106), 302–321. https://doi.org/10.37522/aaav.106.2022.128
Bukauskas, A. (2021). Virtualios realybė kaukė. Technologijos ir menas.Tyrimai ir aktualijos, (12), 94–98.
Bukauskas, A. (2011). Ritualinis laiko aukojimas. Kultūra ir menas (temų konspektai). Vilnius: Lodvila.
EDUCATION
Vilnius Academy of Arts
Phd of Art
VGIK, Russian Academy of Cinema (Всероссийский Государственный Институт Кинематографии)
M.A., Department of film directing, documentary film directing
V. Kobrin’s class
Vilnius University
M.A., Faculty of Physics, Radiophysics
WORK EXPERIENCE
"ALTERNATIVE SCREEN" film studio
Screenwriter, film director
Animation department, Lithuanian Film Studio
Film director, screenwriter, animator
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Vilniaus Academy of Art
Department of Photography and Media Arts
Associate Professor
Lithuanian Academy Of Music And Theatre
Faculty of theatre and film
Lecturer⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Imagine that an as yet unknown technology enables us to resurrect anything: any being, any age, any state of the world. Knowledge of the fundamental physical and metaphysical laws as well as comprehensive data on the evolution of the universe until this point should allow a precise reconstruction of any process of emergence or disappearance that constituted it. Animating unlived time and decomposed space, at least as a projection or simulation, has become a shared fantasy, a readily recognisable register of moving and still images. The ultimate expression of our representational curiosity; what beguiles us most is not what mechanical image recording devices can or could capture, but what took place before their invention (in other words, not in our habitual reality). Bringing that back to life requires an algorithm – a text in the broadest sense, a prompt describing what we desire to see. Hence, image becomes arbitrary and abstract, no matter what its particular content is. The essential thing is that such an image is possible in principle, even if no consciousness presently alive has ever seen it with its own eyes, and its source or prototype is unidentifiable. Just like sound, image can be acousmatic, emanating from an invisible source – from a sinkhole, a cavity, from beneath the surface, among the debris of what once was. What we see and hear is inevitably ghostlike. The image is finally unbound, unwrapped from the shroud of spacetime, empowered to rise from the catacomb and go in any direction. It has ceased to refer to anything conventionally perceived as real, but it is alive in an as yet unfamiliar sense, because someone recognised it as such. Yet no resurrection happens without entropy and danger to its witness. What comes back is not exactly the same as what was intended to be reanimated, if not its absolute opposite – an otherworldly entity that refuses to return to the ground and threatens the integrity of the viewer’s self-consciousness. Even with this risk in mind, though, the power to unbind (image, sound, gaze, time) and let go is too tempting. That is when they come to life and begin to rush to the surface – or inside. The viewer can only let themselves be devoured and see where it leads.
Text: Jurij Dobriakov
Architecture: Mindaugas Reklaitis
Sound: Benas Buivydas
SPARE PARTS FOR THESEUS PLANE
Arturas Bukauskas
2023
In 1933, aviators Darius and Girėnas flew from New York to Kaunas. They flew a modified experimental aircraft named Lituanica. They wanted to make Lithuania famous with this flight. The plane crashed in Germany, just a short distance from its destination. The bodies of the aviators were embalmed and kept in a mausoleum. When the war started, they were hidden in the wall of the Kaunas Medical Institute. After the war, nothing was known about their hiding place. Thirty years after the air crash, the grown-up daughter of one of the aviators, now a doctor, used her percussion method to search for cavities in the walls. That's how she found her father.
This exhibition is the third and final of a composition of three exhibitions. The series of exhibitions based on the principle of Theseus's ship (plane) deals with the question of the continuity of the body and memory.
In the third exhibition, the same parts, understood both as spare parts and as wrecks, are described and multiplied by means of prompt engineering (human language for machines). One could say that the works remain "behind and after" all three exhibitions because, according to Theseus' paradox, they find and pass into each other, animate, and become unnameable as they come to life. They are neither the fragments of a plane, nor the parts, nor the bodies of pilots. The catastrophe has not happened, it has only been approached, only the rough connections between the still falling parts and the human body that has reached the limit of time are observed.
Ersatzteile für das Schiff des Theseus?
Arturas Bukauskas
2022
Zu sehen ist außerdem die Arbeit Ersatzteile für das Schiff von Theseus (2022) von Arturas Bukauskas. In seiner 3D-Hologramm- und Videoinstallation denkt der Künstler darüber nach, wie Körperbewegungen und Handlungen durch neue Technologien beeinflusst werden.
Auf mehreren Monitoren sind abstrakte Oberflächen in Bewegung zu sehen, die sich scheinbar im Widerstreit befinden. Dazu zeigen drei 3D-Hologramme Worte, die von einer künstlichen Intelligenz generiert wurden. Es handelt sich um Wortneuschöpfungen für menschliche Tätigen, die es noch nicht gibt und die vielleicht erst in Zukunft durch neue Erfindungen möglich sein werden.
Die Installation fragt, ob wir durch zukünftige Werkzeuge bald Tätigkeiten verrichten können, die uns heute noch unmöglich, gar paradox erscheinen.
Bukauskas:
The ship and plane of Theseus. The Theseus ship paradox raises raises the question whether a ship which has had all of its parts gradually replaced remains the same ship. The plane of Theseus is an object whose parts have been replaced on the ground, then in the air, during the fall, then on the ground again, with numerous rearrangements of the crash site and stuffed dummies of the pilots. The question is whether we are a part of this plane, and perhaps an already replaced one. How are the functions of memory redistributed in a body that expires? How does memory reorganise those functions in movements? Can a shared reminiscence be triggered by an external action? An accident is constantly materialised by motion, while every moved object is a projection of an accident.
The exhibition features bodies (like computer storage media undergoing defragmentation) that have ceased resisting both the external gaze and the attempts to provide care to them. Bodies as the totality of replaceable parts. Bodies which, when moved, remind of the possibility of unfinished actions. The question of truth is irrelevant, because the real is no longer confined to the bodily senses. The position of a contemporary artist that is reconsidered in the exhibition is also no longer any bodily position – the artist has come to the store and forgot the shopping list. The intention was to copy the actions of buying, to pretend to act against them, in a politically and socially active way – and instead the artist froze. The viewer is invited to be a witness to that and to date (as in dating, i. e. making obsolete over time) together. A few actions remain relevant.
‘Can you really use a spoon though?’
Šarapovas:
Every sound is a small earthquake. Or not so small. The aural environment – the vehicle of tactile memory – is experienced as a very real and tangible yet also somewhat spectral manifestation of the past reality. The listener perceives sound as their present; sound testifies: these are incidents of temporal reality, I reproduce them in your surfaces. The world also experiences your presence in the sea of air as sound.
It says: I am Sisyphus, a swarm of small Sisyphi; and immediately pretends to be null, an invariable repetition, a loop. Helmholtz takes a knife and divides a circle into two equal parts. That is how the sine wave, the mother of all sounds, is born.
Mare Memoria, the sea of memory, is the movement of molecules in liquids, gases and solid bodies, waves constantly rolling on the shore of the listener’s ear, rubbing stories of ever new catastrophes into their cochlea.
A second-long sound cycle – one ascent and one descent of the sine wave – travels 343 metres in air at 20°C and moderate humidity at sea level.
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