Inflammation Theory
Video lecture by Natalia Sielewicz and Eternal Engine

  • (colored, abstract graphic with the wording fuzzy: inflammation)

When I am asking how do you use your heat, I am asking after Audre Lorde “How do you use your rage?” How will you use your right not to remain silent, particularly when your language is being used against you?

Starting with the metaphor of inflammation, which has occurred as a long-haul symptom in many patients recovering from SARS-CoV-2, the visual essay is a short tale of heat and energy – of affects, neural plexuses and algorithms. In brief, it’s a story about the metabolism of the revolution which occurs in the body, on the street and in the data cloud.

A scientific narrative intertwines here with fake news, memes, data visualizations and VR environments. Thus, the Inflammation Theory is a speculation rather than a theory in the strictest sense. It flows freely in a stream of information, images and confessional oversharing.

What kind of heat emanates from a transmission of communal feeling? What the thermodynamics of riots has to do with peak performance, covid apps, infrared sauna blankets, astrology, algorithms and biohacking? In what ways language of heat and care permeates marketing campaigns? Have you already installed Virus Assist, Corona-Care and Relief Central on your smartphone?

This videolecture will be available in English with Polish subtitles. The event is part of the festival Warsaw under Construction. Something in Common

Natalia Sielewicz

is an art historian, author of texts and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In her practice she focuses on the affects theory, feminism and technology, for example in various exhibitions such as ‘Paint, also known as blood. Women, affect, and desire in contemporary painting’ (2019), ‘Ministry of Internal affairs. Intimacy as text’ (2017) or ‘Private Settings. Art after the Internet' (2014). Most recently she co-curated exhibition and festival ‘Warsaw under Construction. Something in Common’ (2020).

Eternal Engine

art duo Jagoda Wójtowicz & Marta Nawrot. Digital witches, cyber-fairies of technoculture, post-Internet art and new media, smoothly moving in the xeno / glitch / cyberfeminist discourse. Designers and programmers of virtual worlds, creators of multiplayer and musltisensory experiences in virtual reality and 3D animation, fighters of Open Source and Free Learning. They are inspired by life forms such as eukaryotes: insects, fungi and bacteria, and their digitized counterparts (varieties of bots and nanobots and their imaginary evolutions) which in their works express the ideas of a
completely automated space of freedom in where, beyond gender categories, entities
combine in the form of enriched with cybernetic organs of hybrids with a fluid identity -
A fully bioautomated queer future. Active on the real platform as cyberfeminists, they organize meetings and workshops on creating one's own virtual spaces, thus spreading access to the fruits of technoculture. Founders of the newly budding Eternal Engine duo and the Pussymantra collective.