More than human?
A Technoromantic view of the “Buenavista” exhibition

The concept of Technoromanticism moves between these two poles. Artist Stéphan Barron coined it in the 1990s in order to describe the linkage of technological innovation and ecological sensitivity. At the same time, media theorist Richard Coyne analyzed just how strongly digital visions of the future are informed by Romantic ideas, such as the wish for wholeness, attachment, or transcendental experience.

Troika’s works lock into this ambivalence, not naively, but in a reflected manner. Their pieces are precisely staged experiments in which technology, nature, and perception meet in a new way. In the “Buenavista” exhibition a poetic ecosystem arises in which the individual installations are interwoven at the aural, visual, and atmospheric levels.

The layout of the space itself shows what is involved: The “Buenavista” video installation readily reveals what it looks like from behind, as we see all the cables, connections, steel struts. Technology is not concealed, but visible and effective in the hall. Human, machines, plants, and data share this one atmosphere.

Out front, digital landscapes flow past: Icebergs, sand dunes, forests in the fog, tropical beaches. A furry figure, mounted on a robot arm, moves through this flood of images. Nature does not appear as a place, but as an algorithmic memory of collective desire. But who is choreographing whom?

This issue is also pursued in “Anima Atman”: knee-high thistles that move in slow motion as if they breathed. Their movements are the result of an electromechanical system and yet they seem alive. Here, a different kind of empathy comes into view, through openness to things alien to us. Troika’s works open our eyes to other forms of intelligence outside the human being: in plants, in machines, in systems. This highlights a central theme in Technoromanticism: Technology appears not just as a tool, but as an interfacing agency between forms of perception, realities, and ways of living that while not identical are definitely interconnected.

Troika does not serve up a finished image of the future, but a referential space in which humans, technology, plants, and the immaterial are all interwoven. The exhibition does not revolve around a center, but a principle of interlinkage. It is not just humans that have the power to act, as this is shared: between systems, sensors, atmospheres, and what we have for a long time considered “inanimate”.

The focus here is on no longer construing humans as the sole agents with sentience, an ability to act, and significance, but also on recognizing these qualities in non-human actors – in networks that are not shaped by but definitely with humans.

Troika’s art enables us to experience that coexistence is not a utopia but a reality that we are only just learning to see. Here, technology is not understood to be cold rationality but a poetic tool: Troika makes the invisible tangible, the inaudible audible, the improbable conceivable.