AWOO: “The Choice Is Yours”

The BCAA collective started appearing on the Czech scene gradually some years ago, but their impact has been increasingly intense. It was never about a demonstrative performance by students or fresh graduates from an art school studio, as was so often the case in the past. Rather, BCAA emerged from the environment of the global network, echoing a rediscovered acceleration with all the paradoxes this trend represented – from the dystopian scenery of cyberpunk to the hopes of its solar offshoot, from the inertia of urban culture to an escapism found in overgrown hillocks, from critical theory to the new horizons of utopia. The collective became a local version of cyberculture 2.0, characterized by new modes of representing artworks, their fluidity, and their spillover into other media where the digital and the AFK cannot be distinguished (or at least don’t need to be). In the Czech context, this was also a time when the boundary between design and fine art was coming undone, retromania was definitively over, and music was excreting deconstructed, abstract rhythms which could say more about their contemporary era than any old verses lamenting the sad state of the world. Club culture again showed its true, free form (both in terms of the space in which it was heard, as well as its frantic plasticity) and became part of the art world not as a soundtrack but as a source of inspiration, or even a topic of its own.

Although BCAA system works with a global language (and not only in the literal sense of using English), they show a local sensibility which is more Central European than explicitly Czech. Miloš Hroch put it well in his review of the collective’s groundbreaking video No-one is an Island (2019), where he notices the “neo-peasant smocks like from the dark ages of Přemysl the Ploughman, but with the experience of the digital revolution.” This film also wonderfully illustrates BCAA’s typical strategy, which consists of making it difficult to answer the question, “What is this?” The video was originally launched on the collective’s YouTube channel to serve as a visual accompaniment to the music compilation made available on Bandcamp, while at the same time being a stand-alone artwork which was later expanded into an installation of objects (the group exhibition 7 Reasons to Smile, which took place at the Holešovická šachta gallery in 2020, curated by Tina Poliačková and Lumír Nykl). The overlap between media, or rather the overlap between one artwork and another, their gradual expansion and contraction, and the avowed strategy of its various versions became basic identification markers of BCAA’s impact. The word ‘impact’ here is better than the restrictive ‘work’, as BCAA continues to have an impact in various spaces simultaneously, framed equally by theoretical texts as much as the dance floor. The obfuscation is also heightened by the collective’s diverse representations, from its members’ nicknames to their digital presence. And here begins another chapter of the collective’s story. Paradoxically, it begins in a well-established gallery…

Apart from the significant role of music in BCAA’s art, their works are also characterized by the mutation of materials and the use of tools and aesthetics connected with virtual gaming. The stand-alone romanticizing exhibition Heslo je zahrada (The Password Is Garden, Entrance Gallery, 2021) was a game played in physical space in the exteriors of the Břevnov monastery, largely based on the principle of a treasure hunt. But this time, it was with a smartphone in hand. The exhibition also provided instructions for another game: what to do outside of gallery spaces when the next pandemic wave hits. Dusk, a monastery, infection, searching through the bramble, 3D-scans of archaic objects, a dungeon, medieval aesthetics… and as my 10-year-old son commented: “…plus the people have some great costumes.” BCAA member Michal Plodek, still known as ‘bílej kluk’ at the time, talked to him about the difference between PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, comics, music, and the avatar he would soon become.

This transformation happened first in the basement spaces of The Stone Bell House of the Prague City Gallery as part of the group exhibition The Club as a Shelter (Light Underground III) in the fall of 2021. The large-format video was essentially a music video that used the visuality of computer games. The central protagonist falls into a fantastical world, appearing in the interiors of a castle, seeming confused and occasionally dancing. Perhaps they may never leave this place. A year later, the video premiered again, this time on BCAA’s YouTube channel and with the disclaimer that two more episodes would soon follow. This indeed happened, and the final credits of the last video told viewers: “album out soon.” Awoo is credited as the artist of the YouTube videos – that’s ‘bílej kluk,’ but as an avatar. Ultimately, we are seeing a triptych of BCAA system’s videos, which is at the same time a series of awoo’s music videos. Using the vocabulary of postmodernism, we can say that the high and the low are mixed, but today we just take it at face value.

It is interesting to see the number of views of the series/AWOO videos: the first video has the largest number of views (1673 by the end of July 2023), the other two are a few hundred views short. Considering the global nature of the web, their exclusive use of English, popular visual code, and the music’s international character, this can come as a bit of a surprise. And one can assume that in a standard gallery space, many more standard people would see it throughout the standard exhibition duration. By ‘standard people’ I mean visitors. But I understand that ‘standard’ in our country may not be the standard elsewhere… And what seems attractive in the gallery space may not necessarily work as well online. Online, we work with international standards, shed the local audience, and, most importantly, become part of a popular culture that works according to its own short-term rules. One of them is: there is so much of everything. And that’s a problem. On the internet, awoo becomes interchangeable with hundreds of other similar videos uploaded at the exact same minute. The format of video clip is a bit tricky: its length is limited, and these days, the shorter the clip, the more viral it may become. Awoo’s videos also show a problem with narration: what to narrate (when everything has been said), and how (what do we even call a music video nowadays)? Shorts, reels, and TikTok further influence the overall visual culture. And this does not merely apply to products of mass culture, gallery audiences also complain of long videos (who among us has really watched the entire thing?), and the audience is tired of long films, series have become mini-series. YouTube ads last only a few seconds, and it’s the first five that really matter.

And it seems that the creators of the awoo clips are very much aware of this. Nothing groundbreaking happens and the story of the three videos can be summed up in one sentence: the protagonist appears in an unknown location from where he escapes to a different world where they are being stalked by a strange creature on their way to a canyon and finally wake up in the third video where the creature talks to them. One would like to add, “to be continued…” It’s a bit more complicated, but let’s not spoil it.

All three videos were selected for the PAF Jiné vize competition in 2022 and were credited as “Šimon Levitner, Michal Plodek, Oliver Torr: AWOO.” The caption then invited people to conceive of this episodic epic as a compilation of video clips. But as Šimon Levitner noted in an interview for Radio Wave in the spring of 2023, “it didn’t work very well together.”

And now it’s high time for me to switch from the position of an objective reviewer (is that even possible when we all know each other?) and speak on a more personal note. Because I must admit that I have been avidly following BCAA system since the beginning, rooting for them, and any time I spoke, I would say without reserve that “the saviors of Czech art have arrived.” There ought to be emoticons here, so at least one trivial one for all: :-). They were simply something new, exciting, and mysterious. Furthermore, we indirectly worked together at various times. As a member of another art collective, I can perhaps shed light on the inner workings and paradoxes of art collectives (I spent a long time mulling over the difference between a group and a collective, and did not come up with anything satisfactory, so I will continue to use these labels interchangeably). Perhaps it will resolve some of the dilemmas I made clear in the previous sections of this text.

A definite, positive aspect of art collectives and groups is the mutual tension that manifests in both centrifugal and centripetal expressions, in terms of their strategies and the variegated nature of artistic outputs. A group does not need to reflect on the media that support their art; indeed, they don’t even need to care about art at all. It can be a byproduct of their relationship or relationships. It is hard to collaborate with groups, as they always seem to have a surplus of collaboration among themselves. And economically speaking, it is, at least in our region, not a very profitable template, as profits are divided by the number of members. But there are many other risks besides, the most obvious being the duration a group stays together. Relationships can’t merely be cared for, they must be cultivated, unless we choose to accept that every group is only temporary anyway. Temporality is in fact one of the theoretical concepts through which we can better understand contemporary art. Much like the outcomes of joint production, collectives are not tied down by the space of their presentation, and it is a question whether the digital sphere is not the primary, or perhaps the only, space for them. Much like a band, an art collective is easier to recognize than a single artist – logos, merchandizing… We say that Damon Albarn is the one from Blur…

In their collective works, BCAA tests not only media and strategies, but also the modes of such collaboration. Each one is drawn elsewhere; he and she are more into theory, and another has become more of a music producer. The dynamics of their collaboration shift, the tendencies are expansive, and we must ask what remains of the center and whether it can hold together. I think, in fact I hope, that it can’t. Quite the contrary – the courage to go into unknown territories gives new hope.

For me, the most important thing is the aesthetic code which connects the various works and products (music video = ad for playing the song on Spotify), expressed, for example, in the amorphous shapes which re-appear as 3D models, drawings, object materials, and in the overall set of various ornaments, decorations and textures. Another, more general identification marker is the DIY approach applied to new outcomes. None of the collective’s members have a degree in filmmaking or know the ins and outs of script writing, actor leading, shot composition, or their ideal tempo, yet they managed to shoot the short film No Blade of Grass (2021). Or they used motion capture to make awoo videos on an almost professional level. Or use game engines to enrich the definition of the concept of game design… And then there’s another line of connection in their work: the local variant of the new weird in the tradition of China Miéville or Jeff VanderMeer. Connecting the genres of sci-fi and fantasy with socially critical barbs (climate crisis, corporate capitalism), weird vegetation, weird buildings, and weird characters with their weird mutations (for example, the creature in the videos) creates an authentic, living world in itself, with BCAA as its architects and builders.

I am just a bit afraid that this world may crumble, that it may be left in ruins – an image which in fact figures extensively in their work. Too many things fall apart in the real, lived world… But where else to go without repeating oneself? The local is too small, and the global too immeasurable, generic, and unfortunately also generative. It is a similar dilemma that the avatar awoo is facing at the end of the “yabi” video when he finally finds out: “your dimension dies either way, whether u go back and die or stay here and live a life of joy. The choice is yours."

Photos: BCAA system