Echo Chamber

The current awareness crisis, combined with the socio-political impact of the pandemic, has led to a growing sense of alienation among people. This can lead to a destructive path of self-misunderstanding and non-acceptance. The regulated system of algorithms that determines the visual formats we consume on the Internet, social platforms, and sharing networks is our “most reliable” friend in such conditions of rapid and unpredictable change. However, it can also lead to an echo chamber, a virtual space where content is placed based on the monitoring of digitized activities. This environment amplifies the noise inside, preventing the entrance of outside tones and leading to a distortion of reality. People become trapped in their desired comfort zones, losing touch with different communities and alternative viewpoints, and stepping into a mindset of a mirror-like configuration.

Anja Tončić’s art addresses this issue by constructing almost holographic spaces that challenge painting techniques and introduce us to the echo chamber of the possibility of knowledge. Each work contains a phantasmic sound and vibration, and the component of the monumental and eternal is present in the skillful performance and atmosphere of each exposed resonance room on the canvas. With her latest series of works, Anja Tončić synthesizes the reality of the society separation with the concept twist of an echo chamber, opening a distinctive chapter of her own art practice that relies on scientific models.

The consequences of the current awareness crisis are just setting into motion, while we are rooted in the time and place of multiplying the socio-political impact that the recent global pandemic has left (and kickoffed). The process of individual adaptation develops in many directions. While many hope that the world will return to the occurrences it was in before “all of this”, people are facing a growing sense of alienation. The beginning of an almost destructive path of such a state can be detected in the misunderstanding or non-acceptance of oneself in the spectrum of new quivers of confusion and anxiety that we are not immune to be so radically faced with as a collective, nor ideologically accustomed to sensuously experience the scenario of an almost dystopian narrative.

In conditions that change rapidly and unpredictably, man’s “most reliable” friend will guide towards quiet harmony. It is the regulated system of algorithms that determine the visual formats we consume while spending time on the Internet, social platforms, sharing networks and beyond.

An echo chamber is a virtual space within which content is placed based on the monitoring of digitized activities, so that there are different sets of information that are implemented to individuals based on the media they pay attention to, seemingly without supervision. In a figurative sense, it is an environment in which the noise inside is amplified to the point of exhaustion to prevent the entrance of outside tones, although due to enclosure, interference and mutually equal sounds there is a necessary distortion. The echo chamber of conspiracy theorists confirms their personal beliefs, while simultaneously projecting new, more attractive and convincing ones. Such a set of reverse auto-reflection of data sabotages a person’s critical apparatus and brings them into a kind of “mental quarantine”, a bubble of their own reflection, to which none of us is completely immune. The personal viewpoint feeds on self-affirming posts and pleasant experiences, invisibly personalizing our inspection, making it more likely that we will notice only what we want to see. The negative effect is that people become trapped in their desired comfort zones, losing touch with different communities and alternative viewpoints, stepping into a mindset of a mirror-like configuration.

Anja Tončić constructs such, almost holographic, spaces in advancing towards new methods of works. It derives painting from the technology of two-dimensionality and introduces it into an epistemological framework. It challenges the painting technique, uses it as an instrument for the expression of rhythm, hierarchy, dispersion and networks of connections and introduces us to the echo chamber of the possibility of knowledge whose fragment is cyclical to infinitude. It shows a particle of a mental shelter that diffracts the architecture of digital metabolisms, in which there is the fullness of an unfathomable empty scenery. The continuation of the author’s play with dynamics, movement and principles of generativity is clear.  In addition to the exhibited canvases, objects are also presented that, by their form and purpose, can be characterized as the materialization of experiments in the examination of systems in the physics of subatomic phenomena, which is a constant topic of the artist’s analytical research.

Along with tactility, each work contains a phantasmic sound and vibration, which the (hyper)sensitive can hear and feel. The component of the monumental and the eternal is present both in the skilful performance and in the atmosphere of each exposed resonance room on the canvas. With her latest series of works, Anja Tončić opens a distinctive chapter of her own art practice that relies on scientific models while synthesizing the reality of the society separation with the concept twist of an echo chamber.