This is the sixth edition of the inter-university art project Random Check, the product of creative collaboration of undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students as well as teachers from the Karol Lipiński Academy of Music and the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design, both in Wrocław. In 2020–23 the successive editions of Random Check were presented at contemporary music festivals: Sacrum Profanum, Audio Art, and Musica Polonica Nova. The fourth edition took the form of a multimedia installation titled Random Check – Second Nature, shown at the Four Domes Pavilion of Wrocław’s National Museum, while the fifth (Random Check – Overwriting) opened the WRO Media Art Biennale. Altogether, nearly 150 artists have taken part in the previous editions and the events that led to them. The majority of these were students representing both academies (from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the United States, Great Britain, South Korea, Turkey, Portugal and Italy), who have created around 50 individual projects. Some teams continue regular cooperation and now work on their own independent multimedia projects. The Random Check project was invented and has been coordinated by Marcin Rupociński, who could easily take as his motto the words spoken by Zbigniew Rybczyński during the ceremony of awarding him an honorary doctorate of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in 2023: “It is doubtful whether anything significant could be created individually [in today’s media art].” 

In Matching Components, the leitmotif is adjustment and accommodation. The project consists of several parts, presenting autonomous audiovisual pieces created by the individual artists from the Random Check Media Ensemble as well as collective works. The whole opens with a collective work titled Immersion, aiming to immerse the audience in audiovisual space alive with acoustic and visual colours. This is followed by Agata Zemla’s (music) and Aleksandra Trojanowska’s (video layer) work titled Apomorphic. The artists, strongly inspired by the natural environment, refer this time to apomorphy, that is, the concept of an advanced, novel evolutionary trait not found in the ancestors of a given evolutionary line. 

The next part of the project is the title piece, Matching Components, a joint multimedia undertaking by Cezary Duchnowski and Marcin Rupociński, with an interactive video layer by Laura Adel and Maja Wolińska. In both form and means (music, image, and movement), the work draws on the achievements of Morphai artistic group which these two composers founded 25 years ago. The musical and visual layers correspond to performative actions by Kaya Kołodziejczyk, supported by interactions with the environment. This reflects the leitmotif of this project edition, that of matching, relation building, and complementariness. 

The next audiovisual piece, strongly contrasted with the first one, is [[[~]]] by Maciej Michaluk and Bartosz Radzikowski. The enigmatic title consisting of graphic symbols introduces the contentless, intensely essential experience of generatively unfolding phonic and visual material.

The whole project ends with another of Random Check Media Ensemble’s collective compositions, titled Emersion, which melts away gradually, leaving the audience in an environment that pulsates with its own generative life form – that of a multimedia installation. 

For more information the Random Check project, visit: https://randomcheck.asp.wroc.pl.