The work of Janek Simon grows from the experiences of traveling between different cultures, economies and visions of the future, which the artist combines using innovative digital tools and DIY practice. The Meta Folklore series of sculptures, which has been ongoing for two years, is an artistic, technological and political fantasy—a vision of a new, universalist art created with the help of artificial intelligence, fed by a collection of thousands of non-academic sculptures from around the world. The heart of this project is a GAN neural network trained by the artist, which generates images that are a distillation of the essence of the dataset entered into the network. Based on these images, Simon develops 3D models, which he then prints in his studio, which he has furnished and equipped himself. The multicoloured and originally-shaped figures are a seductive materialization of the concept of a creative, transcultural, anti-colonial community based on free, democratized technology.
Sixteenth World is also a unique corrective to the modernist idea of progress, measured today by the growing computing power of processors and larger and larger capacity of virtual memory, expressed in multiples of 2 and 4. While using modern technology and new materials, Simon returns to archaic forms of figures and totems. In this way, he weaves threads of humanism, spirituality and anarchy into the fluid world of the future.