19 Mar 2026
Infrastructures of Absurdity: Robertas Narkus on Performed Identity and Economies of Coincidence
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
Robertas Narkus’ practice unfolds at the intersection of performance, installation, social choreography, and speculative entrepreneurship, operating less as a production of discrete artworks than as a continuous modulation of conditions. Describing his work as the “management of circumstance in an economy of coincidence,” Narkus positions himself not simply as an author of forms, but as an orchestrator of systems—economic, institutional, social, and symbolic—whose outcomes remain deliberately unstable. His projects frequently adopt the logic of start-ups, laboratories, cooperatives, or fictional enterprises, staging situations in which art, labor, belief, and absurdity collapse into one another.
Rather than treating technology as a visible interface or a fetishized tool, Narkus engages it as a cultural and organizational force. His work operates within what might be described as a post-digital condition: a space in which digital logic has fully permeated social structures, bureaucratic procedures, economies of attention, and modes of self-production, even when screens, code, or devices remain largely out of sight. Technology, in this sense, becomes infrastructural—embedded in protocols, workflows, and behavioral scripts—rather than spectacular.
This approach was articulated with particular clarity in Gut Feeling, the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022). Conceived as a large-scale social sculpture embedded in the urban fabric of Venice, the project functioned simultaneously as a laboratory, a factory, and a communal experiment. Centered around the speculative production of a “mystical” substance derived from algae, Gut Feeling brought together artists, scientists, local workers, and visitors within a hybrid ecosystem of research, belief, and quasi-industrial labor. Automation and programmability were present not as explicit digital media, but as conceptual frameworks shaping the rhythms of production, cooperation, and exchange. Here, technological rationality intersected with bodily intuition, ecological materiality, and collective myth-making, revealing how post-digital systems are often sustained by affect, trust, and narrative rather than efficiency alone.
Narkus’s more recent project, Shoft Plower, developed for Performa Biennial 2025 in New York as part of the Lithuanian Pavilion Without Walls, extends these concerns into the terrain of virtuality and performed identity. Structured as a performative laboratory and navigable environment, the work invites participants into a maze-like scenario reminiscent of video game logic and online navigation. Viewers move through a cognitive landscape where physical presence is continuously refracted through virtual metaphors, unstable roles, and fragmented selves. The project foregrounds the “performed self” as a condition shaped by social media, algorithmic visibility, and urban infrastructures, suggesting that identity today is less a fixed position than a series of adaptive gestures within overlapping systems.
Across these projects, Narkus’s engagement with digital culture remains indirect yet incisive. He does not reproduce technological aesthetics so much as he exposes their operational logic: the ways algorithms resemble bureaucracies, how automation mirrors social hierarchies, or how virtual environments rehearse real forms of governance and control. Humor and absurdity play a crucial role in this process, allowing his work to remain critical without becoming didactic. In Narkus’s universe, post-digital aesthetics are not defined by screens or code, but by the lived experience of navigating systems that are opaque, contingent, and perpetually under construction.
Alexander Burenkov: Your practice has been described as the “management of circumstance in an economy of coincidence.” How does this framework intersect with digital systems, algorithms, and networked media in your work?
Robertas Narkus: I’m a Libra. I’m joking. But seriously — it’s something I feel almost prescribed to do: to seek balance, equilibrium. Making choices. Navigating.
I came up with this description of my work as part of an attempt to redefine what it means to be an artist. Don’t judge me, please. In the early–mid 2010s, I was fully into technological optimism — not mimicking corporate aesthetics, but more like: fuck it, let’s join the dark side and make it work in our way. Let’s do startups as a living drama series. Let’s innovate, work hard, party hard.
I never meant to reject sensitivity or social justice, but I wanted to find my own way of being in this new world — not building communities in the sense of relational aesthetics, but building actual infrastructures. I don’t know — it’s not that I’m a Fluxus fan, but George Mačiūnas is in my DNA. Management and economy sounded so different from art; it was also a revolt against my own inherited romanticism and idealism.
Working with new media equaled conceptual thinking — something I thought I was essentially missing.
AB: In what ways do you consider digital technologies — not just as tools but as cultural forces — in shaping the conceptual foundations of your art?
RN: My work emerged from the backyards of nihilistic 1990s chaos — the suburban realities of Vilnius. Exactly from those spaces that the so-called Western eye often saw as exotic, honest, and brutal. After the declaration of independence, Lithuania experienced an explosive influx of capital and neoliberal logic, melting together the paranormal, The X-Files, monsters — self-destructive yet intelligent, to the extent of snobism, of course.
That’s when I started thinking of the corporate body — with its bureaucratic rituals, anagrams, the IBM logo — as some occult structure that I was both scared of and drawn to. I saw mass media channels as secret messages — you know, the 25th frame. Hardware — both obsolete and new machinery, CDs — I treated not exactly as magical, but as conspiratorial devices.
But that’s not so important; those are fantasies. The main driver for creative output was social injustice — the algorithms that were defining your situation in society. In this context, I intuitively saw art as a social elevator: a dangerous tool connected to access to power and technology, something that allowed engagement in production, in alchemy, that others could not wield.
AB: How does your use of technology differ from that of more traditional “new media” artists, and how would you situate your practice within what critics call “post-digital” aesthetic?
RN: Have I ever sought alignment with certain aesthetics, styles, subcultures, or particular technologies? I don’t know. Overall, I sometimes regret saying — or admitting — that I rejected the visual or formal part of art-making for a very long time. The aesthetic output came as a side effect, almost a rudimentary part of what I was involved with.
I come from a post-conceptual art scene — what Vilnius could have been described as ten years ago. My approach was territorial: new media meant new space, new dimensions to explore and to parasite. What does it look like? Whatever.
I was driven by the idea that an artist should be able to claim and direct the vectors of where we are heading with technology. Why are there so few alternatives to existing platforms? I sought to build gangs rather than communities — groups operating across fields as unruled agencies. I initially collaborated with hackers in the broadest sense, geeks from various fields, to create synapses with my own operational field, whether a gallery space or a city.
AB: Given your engagement with social media and virtual identities in Shoft Plower, commissioned by Performa in 2025, how do you see the role of algorithmic identity formation in contemporary culture?
RN: Constant self-reinvention is a notion — or myth — I love to work with. Yes, as Byung-Chul Han puts it, we are entrepreneurs of ourselves, seeking longevity, optimization, etc. I’m okay with being permanently not good enough — that’s the drama of our times. Narcissus is never happy with his reflection in the water.
While I used the theatre of social media as a stage for performance in the past — with projects like Prospect Revenge in 2018, just before Reels took over Instagram — I have to admit I get overwhelmed quickly by the dopamine rush and people’s reactions. So my performative episodes on social media are rather sporadic, not strategic.
For Shoft Plower, I was playing with new identities — but immediately got a call from my mum asking if I was okay. (laughs)
AB: Can you describe how you approach the boundary between virtual and physical spaces in your performances — especially in relation to audience agency and participation?
RN: In Shoft Plower, I’m streaming from a virtual job simulator. I’m just hanging out in the virtual office space — messing around, eating virtual donuts, talking to myself, throwing virtual paper planes, and reading résumés.
The headset and VR are off-putting because they are so disconnected from the surroundings. Yet in the performance, I make realities collide. I start wandering through the crowd wearing the headset — apparently blind to physical reality — helplessly bumping into audience members.
I drink virtual coffee in the game, but I’m thirsty. I ask for real water. It’s awkward. I beg for water until someone in the audience passes me their bottle for a sip.
AB: Shoft Plower invites audiences into a maze-like experience reminiscent of video game logic. How do you see game mechanics as a critical tool, aesthetic or metaphor in this performance?
RN: I love working with site specificity. I invited visitors into the backstage — the motherboard of Performa. I created a path where visitors could explore the space and encounter my look-alikes, non-playable characters. They wander through intimate spaces of performers — dressing rooms, offices.
I designed the sights and engineered the gaze to fall into traps or hints.
AB: You use humour and absurdity in technologically inflected contexts. How important is that tone in unpacking serious contemporary issues related to media, automation, and post-digital life?
RN: Humour has been a tool that allowed me to ventilate the hazardous environments and questions I’m coping with. I’ve never pursued humour as a goal; it’s more the tragicomic that I’m after. Some things are too painful to approach without an element of absurdity.
Humour is a core element of any free society. Memes are often the last frontier where certain things can still be said. I’m for serious art — and a humorous approach is an important element within post-truth, market logic, and brand-building cultures.
AB: Shoft Plower evokes the tensions between automation, bureaucracy and agency. Could you talk about how digital systems and automation resonate as both narrative and structure in this work?
RN: Shoft Plower is a pre-articulation project, thriving in mumbles, scaffolding, and states of unbuild. Bureaucracy is my sworn enemy — that I love.
I have a sadomasochistic relationship with bureaucracy as an institution — maybe it’s sexual. I’m scared of forms, of anything that involves following algorithmic order. At the same time, I sometimes go to office-building cafés to observe the normality of office life. Of course, I often dream of a normal life.
That is the premise of Shoft Plower: a fantasy of normality.
AB: Your Venice Biennale project Gut Feeling intertwined biological, automated, and social processes. How did that experience inform your engagement with digital systems or computational metaphors?
RN: Essentially, Gut Feeling is an investigation into cowardice, submission, and the prevalence of capitalist logic. I wanted to use the art world and the symbolic capital of the Venice Biennale to launch a mysterious superfood project — to inhabit people’s intestines with a specific family of bacteria that would hack their minds.
I wanted to use the mandate and agency of the artist-celebrity to transform a corner of Castello into a magic factory — to ferment positive impact for locals. It was set up as a kind of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The superfood failed. The main ingredient was infected with toxic waste. I was left with empty cans, promises, slogans, designs, and production lines — ready to produce ever-new products, ever-new problems.
AB: In Gut Feeling, automated processes appeared alongside organic collaborations. Could you reflect on how this hybridization informs your understanding of “post-digital” as a lived condition?
RN: The project attached — or infected — a particular street in Castello with the declared aim of empowering locals, showing that the Biennale is not something otherworldly. We engaged in intimate relationships: the pavilion took place in inhabited buildings. We made deals, transformed spaces, fixed places, brought clients.
What once was the pavilion has now become a gallery venue — the space was acquired by the patron Justas Janauskas. From my perspective, the legacy of Gut Feeling continues.
AB: How do you use internet culture, memes, or digital community behaviours as a material or conceptual force in your art?
RN: Since I’ve been operating while mimicking serial entrepreneur models — exploring different venues and prospects — I tended to employ teams or collaborate with people producing memes, merch, designs, parties.
I initiated Autarkia, which we called an artist daycare center. It was a meme machine where artists were the children and bohemia ruled the house. It was a bug in the system. I hesitated to call it an art project, yet it was one — maybe even without realizing it. It operated as a meme. We ran a restaurant that mocked existing rules.
AB: In an age where digital media often creates hyperreal narratives, how do you think artists should respond — critically, collaboratively, subversively — to these mediated worlds?
RN: Some artists are brave enough not to succumb to the rules of the game. It is our duty to support each other and take care of one another. That’s the only way.
AB: Looking forward, what technologies — whether AI, VR/AR, generative algorithms, or something else — do you anticipate integrating into your work, and how will they shape your exploration of post-digital aesthetics?
RN: No matter how much we talk about speed and disruption, not much has really changed. We’re still working with technologies from the 2000s — or even earlier. Baroque architecture is a proto-VR device.
Yes, things are faster; we have more computing power. But behind every technology are fundamental virtues: be brave — or go home. Any technology is just a tool to help us better understand what the fuck is happening.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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