Ondřej Konrád
All Critters
5. 9. – 28. 9. 2025
opening: 4. 9. 2025 from 6PM
guided tour: 25. 9. 2025 at 6PM
curator: Martin Netočný
When I was little, I used to listen to a cassette tape with sounds from the South American jungle as I fell asleep. Thanks to this, I formed a perfect image of the dense rainforest near the Amazon, even though it was unattainable for me in reality. During one of my evening sessions, just as my waking mind lost control over the rest of my body, the cassette player skipped a track and the sounds of parrots, monkeys, and tigers began to play twice as fast. This immediately activated me. Before my motor functions returned, however, I felt something unusual for a moment. The receding sleep paralysis trapped me in a situation that showed signs of a familiar ritual, yet was completely different from the previous ones and forced me to reevaluate my relationship with the recording.
During the months and perhaps even years that I waited to fall asleep accompanied by the imitation of jungle sounds, a bond formed that is explained in cognitive science by the principle of parity. The essence of this relationship is based on the identification of internal symbolic patterns with objects existing in the external world, thereby extending mental processes beyond biological dispositions. After hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, brain activity has essentially expanded beyond the boundaries of the skull. Thanks to this, today a driver can use GPS navigation to get to Mělník, for example, without having to know the entire route by heart. Similarly, one could say that while listening to the aforementioned cassette, I moved into an imaginative model of the Amazon rainforest and waited there for this image to turn into a dream.
Whether we are talking about a journey to a specific city or an abstract idea, the principle of cognitive parity always works in the same way – based on identification, which can take place in two directions. The way in which it is achieved influences the overall distribution of agency in a given situational framework. In the case of driving with GPS, its imaginary center of gravity is on the side of the human actor, who, by identifying their own position with the digital cursor, successfully moves to their destination. Listening to recorded animal cries, on the other hand, lends agency to the cassette player or tape recorder, which evokes images of a jungle never visited in the human mind. Regardless of whether the imaginary vector points from technology to humans or vice versa, it is conditioned by a belief in its repetitive and flawless functioning, which also results in gadgets gradually disappearing from the view of their users.
The more we rely on navigation systems when driving, the more we take them for granted as a natural part of driving. This naturally leads to a gradual blurring of the boundary between the real world and the virtual object that the GPS system mediates for us, and thus to an unconscious blurring of the boundary between its scope and the organic functions of the brain. Returning for a moment to the incident that occurred while listening to a cassette player one evening long ago, it was precisely its unexpected acceleration that disrupted the long-established cognitive parity. In retrospect, it seems absurd to me that an idea based on abstract animal sounds imploded under the influence of their distorted, but no more concrete, version. At the same time, however, I suspect that it was precisely this unexpected shift in the conditions of the established ritual that destabilized it. In other words, if the device had decided, without my knowledge, to play slightly altered subversions of the original track every evening, it probably would not have affected my internal model of the Amazon. The pattern of cognitive identification was disrupted only by the presence of the mediating effect of technology, which in this case occurred due to a random error.
Ondřej Konrád's game installation revives this experience in me, but completely changes its temporal aspects. While in the bedroom of my childhood the feeling of inadequacy lasted only a moment—all I had to do was overcome sleep paralysis, sit up, turn on the lamp, and with a few movements get the player to obey—in the Jelení Gallery I am exposed to this discord throughout my entire visit. Moreover, the gamepad, speakers, and computer are working as expected. My current situation is thus significantly different from my distant memory in this respect. Although the sounds I hear as I move through the terrain, even without the presence of a technical error, resemble a twice-accelerated recording of the jungle, I cannot control their playback in any way. So I stubbornly continue through the environment and inadvertently remember the meeting where Ondřej showed me a rendered design of the entire game field. I long to see it again and get my bearings, but I immediately realize that the game is designed for me to wander around in it.
Unlike using GPS navigation, this is not about exploring the field from an analytical perspective. It is not possible to understand anything, get anywhere, or accomplish anything. There is only a series of familiar yet unfamiliar situations created by a jumble of natural and synthetic sounds. I am sure that I have been to all the places featured in the game at least once, yet their representation in the gallery differs from my inner representation. The more I fail in my attempts at identification, the clearer it becomes to me that I will not succeed even if I replace sensory perceptions with other, more familiar content. While Bertolt Brecht describes in his famous essay the effects of semantic alienation on European audiences watching Chinese theater, Ondřej simply aims elsewhere. He does not intend to exploit the misunderstanding between two symbolic systems. He seeks to initiate the release of potential that is bound in our consciousness by the framework of cognitive identification.
Logically, this draws our attention directly to the essence of mediating the surrounding reality. Just as a momentary technical lapse in my childhood prompted me to imagine other variants of the virtual object of a jungle and think about ways to use my own imagination, so does the game installation presented here today. Unlike my distant memory, however, the disconnection of cognitive links also brings with it a reflection on the possibilities of their capitalization. Under the guise of marketing exoticism, the aforementioned sounds of parrots, monkeys, and tigers brought into my life the prerequisites for forming ideas about animals that logically did not come from autopsy, but corresponded to the colorful cassette cover, cartoons, and television commercials. I am sure that each of us has similar cognitive parities in our minds. Ondřej's game provides a good opportunity to reevaluate these and shows that neural pathways can take us to different places, not just where technology shaped by market mechanisms has been navigating us since childhood.
Martin Netočný
The program of the Jeleni Gallery is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7,
GESTOR – The Union for the Protection of Authorship
Thanks: Joinmusic
Media partners: ArtMap, artalk.cz, jlbjlt.net, Radio 1
