Essay by Silvia Benedetti
Images no longer circulate in isolation. They arrive filtered through
machine vision, state power, and the immediate experience of viewing.
Understanding how memory and truth take shape today requires looking
directly at the tools governing what gets recorded—and what gets
erased.
Bogdan Perzyński operates at the intersection of technology and human
perception. Through performance, drawing, and conceptual interventions,
he destabilizes the authority of official news and state history.
In his solo exhibition, Crazy shit. Everything is cool., Perzyński
examines how contemporary art confronts machine optics and systemic
control. The show pairs a video animation of the same title with more
than fifty drawings depicting drones, rockets, and satellites from
ongoing wars in Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East.
Rooted in Polish post-conceptualism, Perzyński moves beyond raw data to
ground his work in lived experience. Alongside artists like Trevor
Paglen, who exposes covert state geography, or Walid Raad, who
constructs fictional histories of trauma, Perzyński creates a striking
tension between automated systems and intimate physical gestures.
Against high-speed surveillance, rendering precision hardware—such as
reconnaissance satellites, FPV combat drones, and surface-to-air
missile systems—becomes an act of friction. The deliberate, hand-marked
line works directly against the cold efficiency of the drone lens.
Rendering these instruments of destruction through slow mark-making
across his extensive Darkly series allows Perzyński to channel the
historical impotence of our moment onto paper.
This impulse—filtering public trauma through a personal medium—recalls
Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977. Like Richter painting the
Baader-Meinhof group, Perzyński avoids generalized depictions of
conflict, choosing instead to isolate specific mechanical vectors of
violence. Where Richter questioned whether painting could capture
contemporary history, Perzyński confronts the current crisis by
translating digital surveillance imagery into hand-marked drawings.
Perzyński sharpens this contrast between visual weight and anti-
monumental play through Fluxus tactics, most notably in his essay-
performance The Future’s Ecology. Rather than presenting a bound text,
he breaks the work into eighty-seven double-sided cards. Each bears a
brief line on the front and a private passage on the back.
Visitors activate the work by selecting a card, which Perzyński hand-
stamps with the word "Fluxus" and the motto "Concerned With
Insignificances."
Extending this action through telephonic transmissions between Dallas
and Johannesburg, Perzyński bridges voice, silence, and distance.
Stamping his Fluxus motto across performance cards and drone imagery
alike, he punctures the totalizing claims of machine optics through a
radical commitment to the minor and the everyday.
This tension between media-driven chaos and quiet ritual carries
directly into his performance work. Even through a phone speaker or a
live stream, the action retains an uncanny intensity. Built on
repeating rhythms, the performance responds to the relentless news
cycle feeding our screens. As the numbers are called and answered by a
voice or by silence, the piece reaches for an unpredictable, Cagean
awakening.
Perzyński’s work does more than critique technology or modern media.
By combining live digital feedback and animation with slow drawing,
interactive Fluxus tactics, and live performance, Crazy shit.
Everything is cool. transforms the gallery into a space where
authority is questioned, historical trauma is processed, and new
possibilities for shared human experience can emerge.
Interview with Bogdan P. K. Perzyński from Silvia Benedetti
SB: In an era where state power and machine vision dictate what we get
recorded and erased, how does your identity as a Polish and Jewish
artist living in the US influence your understanding of historical
truth, trauma, and the minor rituals of resistance in your work?
BP: My identity is Polish and American, and I’ll answer as openly as I can.
I grew up where differences between people were quietly kept out of
sight, and I learned early to look for ways across: a train to West
Berlin, later a passport, and now a life between two countries. There
are points of origin: Slavic, German, Jewish, Sardinian. But our
identity asks for passage.
As for minor rituals of resistance, the phrase is almost too shy for
these times, and I prefer humor, mischief, and play. Risk is acceptable
and necessary: it is how things get made and found. Times are tough
again, but I trust we are going to make it. I have great respect for the
younger generation, who have the backbone to speak up. So I speak from
passage, and from who holds the passport.
SB: In Crazy shit. Everything is cool., you contrast cold, systematic
surveillance with Cagean randomness and live human participation. Do you
consider the exhibition itself an archive of our contemporary moment,
and how do you navigate the balance between indexing history and
embracing the unpredictable?
BP: I am not concerned with balance as two things on a scale. In art, I’m
less interested in psychology than in the logic of human expression,
which lands where human risk is taken. I set conditions: numbered cards
called in order, a drawing that takes as long as it takes. That is not
the same as calculating probability. Then comes an “if… then,” and I
can’t predict the “then.” For the viewer, it is an active, empirical
experience. I wouldn’t call the show an archive of our moment. Stamped
on every drawing: Concerned With Insignificances.
SB: In tracking ongoing conflicts for your drawings and video work, what
specific news sources or media do you follow? How deeply do you research
the military hardware you depict, and how do you manage the noise and
filters of modern war coverage?
BP: I read across borders and across sides: The Guardian, Le Figaro, The New
York Times, Wyborcza, Al Jazeera, the Israeli press, scholarly articles,
and the military sites where weapons are explained. The voices I trust
most are Ukrainian soldiers and observers who speak online about what
they live, and friends who stay careful about every state’s propaganda,
whichever state it is. I ask who is speaking, and why. I’m no expert,
and it’s too complicated to become one. I want to see better what will
happen to people in the conflict zones. I’ve flown drones for many
years, so I felt the dark side of their potential long before this
project. Today’s drone warfare is a test ground for what is coming, and
that frightens me.
SB: How does your work founding and teaching the Transmedia curriculum shape
the way you approach interactive systems, time-based media, and
performance today?
BP: Bill Lundberg and I started Transmedia together, and many others
contributed to it over the years. We never wanted to over-explain, only
to imagine and construct. Speaking for myself, that is how I approach
interdisciplinary and time-based work, including performance: I set up
conditions and let bodies and time do their part, as in my installations
where visitors re-composed my video just by moving through the room.
