AMPLIFICATION: Daniel Vlček & Antonín Gazda, Jiří Suchánek & Pavla Beranová, Lukáš Likavčan & Selmeci Kocka Jusko

Galerie NoD
Amplification
Daniel Vlček & Antonín Gazda, Jiří Suchánek & Pavla Beranová, Lukáš Likavčan & Tomás Kocka Jusko
Cooperation: Giovanni Cecconi, Johana Rotterová
Curated by: Pavel Kubesa
Opening: 27. 1. 2026, 6pm
28. 1. - 27. 2. 2026

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From the Architecture of Disintegration to Ecological Sensitivity

In the novella Death in Venice (1912), as well as in Visconti’s film adaptation Death in Venice (Morte a Venezia, 1971), Thomas Mann unfolds an “architecture of disintegration” and the collapse of an old order arising from the direct confrontation of bourgeois formality—embodied in the figure of the writer (or, in Visconti’s version, a genius composer) Gustav von Aschenbach—with the destructive vector of beauty incarnated by the young Polish boy Tadzio as a symbol of the “new”. Set against the seasonal micro-world of a cosmopolitan elite at the Hotel des Bains and in Venice itself, afflicted by a concealed cholera epidemic, the narrative also tracks—in one of its thematic lines—the strategies of power through which political, social, cultural, and above all economic status quo is maintained. By concealment, by denial of an obvious catastrophe, by the management of the economy of desire, by the endless reproduction of illusions of décor, hygiene, and a stable society, the “system” keeps the machinery of its financial ecosystem running—even at the price of the imminent total collapse of both order and the individual within it.

It is precisely this image of an “administratively neutralised crisis”—a politics of denial and an institutionalised repression of awareness of an inevitable apocalypse—that can be recognised in today’s environmental and ecological reality as well. Out of fear of more radical weakening of performance indicators of national or global economies and the ensuing threat of collapse of worldwide financial structures—or perhaps out of purely kleptocratic motives—representatives of global political power and commerce systematically delegitimise the institution and authority of scientific discourse and, through surrogate topics that generate “noise”, offer “alternative narratives” that camouflage the ongoing “final squeezing” of the system’s remnants: whether social, cultural, or environmental.

As a long-term cause of the destabilisation of planetary ecology (climate, biodiversity, nutrient cycles, soil quality, the state of the oceans, and more), human activity linked to the development of the fossil economy suggests itself at first glance—an activity further amplified by the contemporary digital-algorithmic infrastructure of silicon technologies. If the Industrial Revolution opened geological carbon reserves and transformed them into the engine of modernity, then silicon infrastructure formed its nervous system: as such, it executes and governs an accelerated extractivist machinery of mining, logistics, and consumption. Human activity tied to the fossil-energy industry and to the logistical-data apparatus thus generates ecological pressure not only on individual organisms and animal species, but also transforms the conditions of life themselves: it undermines climatic stability, disrupts the natural functions of ecosystems, and destroys the regenerative capacities of the biosphere.

In For a General Theory of Agency, Lukáš Likavčan engages with the book by the philosopher of biology D. M. Walsh, Organisms, Agency, and Evolution (2015), in which Walsh revises the neo-Darwinian “modern evolutionary synthesis”—a theory that conceives evolution fundamentally as a phenomenon at the sub-organismic level of molecules (i.e., genes). Within the proposed theory of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Walsh offers an organism-oriented conception of evolution, pointing to the capacity of organisms not only to “assimilate, integrate, and orchestrate the causal contributions of genes, epigenetic structures, tissues, organs, behaviour, and physical, ecological, and cultural embeddedness” into their development, but also to “construct niches” (“niche construction”). Yet a “niche” does not mean merely a specific place or biotope; it also figures as a selective environment, i.e., a set of biotic and abiotic conditions (temperature, humidity, chemical composition, resources, predation, symbioses, competition) that determine what is adaptive in a given environment and what is not. “Niche construction” thus names the process by which organisms alter these conditions in such a way that, across generations, they simultaneously redirect “selection pressures”—both for themselves and for “others”.

D. M. Walsh thereby marked a crucial turn for evolutionary biology, which had until then been dominated by a model describing the circulation of genes (at the cost of reducing the organism to a mere “vehicle” of heredity): a “theory of the agent”. In this view, organisms do not appear in evolution as passive intersections of environmental pressures and molecular programmes, but as goal-oriented systems—“agents” capable of performing evolution. Alongside the question of how something happens, the question why also enters: to what end (maintenance, survival, reproduction, stability) does a given process serve?

Likavčan proposes to develop this added teleological moment into a broader philosophical project that would think through the possibilities of a theory of agency across both living and non-living systems. Likavčan writes:

“Perhaps the metaphysically (and normatively) burdened question ‘Is it alive?’ could then be replaced by the more cautious, yet more inclusive question: ‘Is it an agent?’ [This then…] offers a pragmatic criterion: does the system display goal-orientation, a certain adaptive repertoire? And finally: it also makes it possible to include technological systems in the category of agents without collapsing the difference between them and biological organisms. They differ in substrate, generational embedding, and lineage of emergence, but not necessarily in kind.”

The proposed framework then allows us to reformulate ecology itself as a science: with the fundamental concept of agency.

“…is a kind of atomic unit for interpreting a specific mode of existence shared by many entities in the world, including terrestrial life-forms. If this framework is to be taken seriously, ecology cannot remain bound to its biological origins. It must become the study of agent–environment relations regardless of whether agents are made of carbon or silicon, whether they emerged through biological evolution or were constructed in a laboratory…”

From this perspective, it becomes possible to reformat our perception of the conflict between the fossil industry, silicon infrastructure, and the (supposedly) “natural” pre-industrial state of nature: carbon industry and information technologies (as the “incoming new”) are no longer “agents of destruction” of the “old order”. The climate crisis and collapsing ecosystems can thus be understood as one of the successive states of a multi-agent ecosystem in which organisms and technologies rearrange their niches, rewrite mutual selection pressures, and move toward a certain goal-oriented resolution. The crucial question remains: the instrument of what politics will this state become? Does the environmental crisis serve only the further—accelerated—distribution of social and economic inequality, or is it nevertheless an opportunity—mediated also through modern technologies—for a broader emancipatory, considerate, and sustainable effort?

The current geopolitical situation suggests rather the first possibility: neo-patrimonial tendencies—stretching from Vladimir Putin’s Russia to a Trumpist administration—through “state capture” facilitated by algorithmic technologies of digital platforms and social networks deform the rules of the game and reproduce existing power relations and economic asymmetries in favour of a narrowly, clientelist-defined “elite”. The environmental crisis is denied, silenced, and covered over by the noise of right-wing populist nationalist rhetoric and the revived racial/ethnic ideologies of nativism. The model becomes the capacity to impose one’s agenda ruthlessly, however predatory it may be and however anti-ecological—in the broadest sense of the word. It is as if ruling regimes were consciously accelerating planetary collapse in the hope of occupying empty niches left behind by those groups and species that lacked sufficient economic capital to survive it.

The project Zesílení (Amplification) proposes the opposite strategy: it neither relativises ecological reality nor scientific knowledge and emancipatory logic; on the contrary, through modern technologies it attempts to gain a closer understanding of concealed biological processes that form our living conditions. The exhibition, as a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and multimedia field, oscillates between a site-specific installation and a laboratory situation in which individual artistic interventions develop the exhibition’s central concept: amplification. In synergy with technological and theoretical apparatuses, the artists focus on various possibilities of “amplifying” (such as sonification, visualisation, biofeedback, data analysis, and more) biological and physical processes that shape the changing environmental conditions of life in the Anthropocene—processes that elude traditional anthropocentric perspectives and attention. The encounter of the “old” (human, biological) with the “new” (technology) does not take the form of a destructive conflict, but rather that of a multi-agent collaboration striving for a positive evolutionary dynamic.

Pavel Kubesa