For more than twenty years, Alsino Skowronnek has been exploring the synergies between plastic formalization and linguistics, while questioning the role of technological mediation in creative processes that both transform the world and, in turn, transform themselves. Yet, in the midst of this density, some questions float to the surface of representation. Is a paintbrush a technology? And what is its mediating role?

Behind these—seemingly light—questions lies a profoundly critical and self-reflective artistic impulse. Indeed, a paintbrush is a technology, even if lo-fi. It is the result of applying knowledge, skills, and methods to solve problems and satisfy needs and concerns (including symbolic and aesthetic ones). Every artist creates worlds using the materials of the world, mediating and being mediated technologically to express hidden languages and reveal deep meanings that reside within the representational field. However, in Skowronnek’s work, technology transcends the role of mere tool. It offers a rich semantic field through which to address uncertainty and to question the techno-artistic construction of our own memory and identity.

His questions move beyond codes, machines, or instruments to address essences. Here, technology cannot be understood simply as a neutral means to an end, but rather as a mode of “unconcealment” (aletheia in Greek). Let us recall that beyond its meaning associated with “making” or “fabricating,” the etymological root techné also signifies “revealing” or “bringing forth” truth (poiesis). The brush that Skowronnek wields follows a hybrid methodology, moving fluidly between systems and surfaces, where the formal analysis of symbolic systems rubs against a supple handling of contemporary algorithmic tools. It is a kind of “digital excavation,” as the artist himself suggests, where the focus lies on the surprise offered by the machine’s (still recognizable) deviation—later plastically hacked to undermine its apparent infallibility and neutrality. It is here that the artist seizes the opportunity to “curate” the machinic response and to introduce a warm visual noise.

Let the heavy things float seeks to humanize the machine, to make it falter and stutter in a complicit drift that accompanies a search for a space of introspection and apperception in both artist and viewer. But for this to occur, both must accept the challenge: to strip themselves of their respective codes and visual interpretation guides. Only then can beautifully chaotic or unexpectedly poetic data emerge—those that remind us of the contingent value of chance, outside the realm of the programmed. With all of this—and it is no small thing—the artist offers us an entryway into recognizing a corpus with a universal grammar that we might question whether, perhaps… is shared by humans and more-than-humans alike?

The pictorial and sculptural works of Let the heavy things float combine forms generated by artificial intelligence with traces of Nsibidi, an ancient Nigerian writing system known only to initiates. Nsibidi consists of hundreds of symbols that may represent concepts, ideas, actions, or objects, with encoded meanings that often depend on the spiritual context in which they are used, including divinatory rituals. One might wonder why such a clear interest in encryption—comparable to graffiti—and in programming languages (constructed scripts and customized AI models) appears in Skowronnek’s work. Is there not an evident connection here to the stratified feelings of his personal history? Does not his lifelong exploration of meaning resonate with Nsibidi’s ritual capacity to convey teachings and life lessons? It is worth recalling that chance had it that the recent birth of his daughter coincided with the discovery of a Nigerian grandfather he had never met. This sparked an auto-ethnographic turn, aimed at connecting new branches and roots of his family tree which, crossing worlds and geographies, now unfolds as a new dimension of identity that tensions the always complex relationship between heritage and self-definition.

Indeed, there is no single Western technological path, but rather multiple technological paths rooted in diverse worldviews, inviting us to reclaim technology—not by denying it, but by developing it in dialogue with other cosmological traditions that are more harmonious and less extractive. In fact, an intuitive example centered on cultivating plurality in unconcealments through technodiversity can be found here, when Skowronnek confronts the binary language of the machine with the scraping of pigments spread across a bundle of filaments at the end of a stick (a brush). In doing so, he is not seeking faithful representation of any specific calligraphy nor a picturesque landscape recognizable to human eyes. He is searching for a ritual “key” (not the one that would open the technological black box), one that harmonizes with his cosmo-technical ancestors—a conscious strategy to send a non-dystopian message into the future.

The beautiful paradox at the core of Skowronnek’s practice lies in the fact that, in order to “reveal” or “bring to light” the immanence of our hyper-technified age—characterized by acceleration and the delegation of processes to artificial agents—his strategy is to pause: to shut down the computer, leaf through family albums, breathe, and grant space to the slow time of painting. Painting is the medium that “unconceals” the rapid process of hi-fi technological mediation, countering its immediacy by seeking probabilistic patterns that dilute the cultural and autobiographical nuances essential to a mature artistic language. Painting is, without a doubt, a fertile ground for breaking with the generic style imposed by AI, thereby “disclosing” the radical creativity hidden within every beautiful imperfection.

(Text by Santiago Morilla)