SHACK15 Artist Spotlight: Agnieszka Pilat

Agnieszka Pilat is SHACK15’s current Artist-in-Residence. She spoke to us about her art and inspiration, ahead of her conversation Renaissance 2.0, taking place at the Shack on September 15, 2021.

Born in Poland, Pilat is best known for her series of heroic portraits of technology and machines. She’s been an Artist-in-Residence at Waymo (Google’s self-driving car project), Autodesk, the USS Hornet Museum, Wrightspeed (the electric vehicle startup founded by Tesla co-founder Ian Wright), and is a guest Artist-in-Residence at Boston Dynamics.

She is a part of the Silver Arts Program Cohort at The World Trade Center in New York City and as a self-proclaimed machine chaser who commutes between the east and west coasts in pursuit of emergent technologies.

In her practice, Pilat is taking not just painting, but the genre of portraiture as a starting point: in art history, portraits reflect the power balance in society and she believes that today technology holds that power. The machines in her works are preemptively posing for their place in museums of the future, provoking us to consider the trajectory they embody. “To understand the future, we must understand the machine”, she says.

Pilat has been a featured artist at exhibitions at Google, the de Young Museum, Rochester Museum of Fine Arts Biennial, and Art Week Miami, FL. She is also a frequent guest on panel discussions revolving around art and technology, including Women of X at Google and most recently at Immersive Art Alliance.

SHACK15: Tell us about your journey as an artist. Where do you come from and how does your background influence your art?

PILAT: My journey to becoming an artist in America has been an awesome and challenging adventure. I was born in Poland and I grew up in a communist society behind the Iron Curtain. When I arrived in the U.S., I was immediately struck by the vast scale of everything American. Especially the industry: big factories, huge shipyards, giant machines. And the daily promise of even more great new technologies, both in robotics and in the digital realm.

Living in San Francisco, near Silicon Valley, I witnessed something new happening: a small cluster of tech elite coming to great power and influence. Even though I spend more and more time in New York now, the experience of living in Silicon Valley had a lasting impact on my understanding of disruption. What kind of future are we heading for? And who is leading this revolution now, the human elite or the machines that get smarter by the day? I have been pondering this future and it is the story behind all my paintings.

SHACK15: You’ve described your work by saying, “I paint heroic portraits of technology.” Can you tell us what that means to you?

PILAT: Sure. In my practice, I take not just any painting, but the genre of portraiture as a starting point. Why? Oil painting is notable for the fact that the genre has focused attention on the central figures of every era, from the aristocracy to the merchant class to celebrities. In other words - in art history, portraiture is always a site for the discussion of power and today the power is increasingly centered around technology.

Now, the aspect of heroism: I believe that machines are a manifestation of man’s need for heroism. The Kitty Hawk Flyer to the Wright Brothers or the Lunar Lander to Neil Armstrong, machines are often the extensions of human heroes. One of the key concepts in my works is man’s urge to heroism as the central problem of human life. Think of human civilization as a sophisticated cultural hero system, a system built to satisfy man’s need for a higher meaning in the face of mortality. All of mankind, each one of us (admitting it or not) creates our own ‘immortality project’ to give a meaning to life by providing an opportunity for a heroic transcendence. As technology is increasingly taking a center stage in this hero system, machines might as well be humanity’s ultimate immortality projects.

SHACK15: What inspires and influences your work?

PILAT: Technology and questions it poses for the future of the human race. The friction between man and machine has been made by man, and man himself. Machines and robots are man made, we spawned them. While they have been some of humanity’s greatest achievements elevating us above all other animals and allowing us to land on the moon and control the atom, machines have also threatened us with ultimate destruction for over seventy years. My work revolves around that conversation, the impact of technology on humanity.

SHACK15: Your newest series of painting, ‘Automata: Secret Lives of Machines,’ combines art, augmented reality and storytelling. What was your motivation behind incorporating AR and other forms of digital media in your pieces?

PILAT: In 2019, in my journey of exploring humanity’s relationship with technology, I approached Boston Dynamics, a manufacturer of the most advanced robots in the world. When I was introduced to Spot, I was astonished by the robotic dog’s ability to climb a staircase with lifelike agility. I was reminded of one of the 20th century’s most innovative paintings, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), by Marcel Duchamp. In his 1912 canvas, Duchamp depicted the movement of a nude woman as a series of superimposed frames, much as a machine might perceive and analyze human motion. As an Artist-in-Residence at Boston Dynamics, I was inspired to portray the innovative bio-inspired machine as Duchamp might have done. But that was only the beginning, as my paintings created there were moved into the conceptual realm through a literal amalgamation of oil paint with the latest digital imaging techniques. By holding a smartphone up to the painting, viewers can see the robots that inspired them, and can watch the robots in motion. Evocative of Duchamp’s use of transparency in his Large Glass, this augmented-reality layer reconnects the paintings with his conceptual aspirations to advance human perception by carrying Cubism into the fourth dimension.

SHACK15: How did you get introduced to Spot and Boston Dynamics?

PILAT: Unlike most artists, I go to places where no artists have been before. Boston Dynamics is one of them: there’s no Artist-in-Residence program there, which is understandable for a company very protective of its intellectual property. The relationships I have built with tech companies are a result of direct personal introductions from engineers and executives who are champions of my work. I have a largely optimistic view of technology and I have been romanticising it in my work for years, so with their help, some of the most protected doors swing open. I’m extremely grateful for these introductions and to the companies trusting my vision. I see my presence there as a service to a community of the most talented, curious and hard-working teams. It’s a mission to give them a voice, for they are an awesome force for good.

SHACK15: How did you get involved with SHACK15?

PILAT: I first came to visit SHACK15 and met Jorn a couple of years ago, before the world shut down. Then, in 2020 I moved my studio to New York where I had a very focused year, preparing for a show at Modernism Gallery. Because my New York studio was huge, I started painting much bigger and many paintings for the show ended up six feet or larger. I was running out of time and had to come back to San Francisco to finish up the work for the show. It was a daunting task to try to finish these large canvases in my modest, old studio in the Mission. And then magic happened: by reaching out to the San Francisco community upon my return, Jorn and I reconnected and he offered to host me in a vast 5,000 square feet space, a part of SHACK15.

I’m inspired and grateful to be working here. When I am not in New York, SHACK15 feels like my home away from home. The studio has magnificent light and having a space where I can finish the work and have my Bay Area patrons visit is a wonderful gift. It’s a beautiful space, with a thoughtful team and I made many friends in a community of entrepreneurs for whom SHACK15 is a place to work and connect too.

Follow Agnieszka Pilat on Instagram and visit her website to stay in the loop about her current and upcoming projects.