The Magician is a photographic project that tells a fictional story of a magician struggling with creative challenges. Through overlapping documentary photographs by Mikołaj Tomczak, the story takes on a metaphorical character, serving as a reflection on the creative process and the complex relationship between the artist and the factors shaping their creativity.
The starting point of the work is an attempt to personify artificial intelligence, which in this story the artist treats as a creative entity. By blending it with his own artistic process, he creates the title character. Experimenting with documentary imagery fits into the long tradition of collage and experimental photography. At the same time, it functions as a simplified imitation of the way artificial intelligence operates, applied to the artist's personal archive. Mixing and overlaying documentary photographs of everyday life also serves as a reflection on perceiving the past and the relativism of the concept of „truth”.
The conceptual structure of the work draws inspiration from Donna Haraway's cyborgs, described in her essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" as "condensed images of both fiction and material reality." It also reflects on the contemporary condition of the artist within the triangle of human-nature-technology relations, as well as on the meaning and purpose of art in the age of artificial intelligence and the widespread commercialization of images.
The textual part of the project (a narrative) was created in collaboration with Chat GPT and subsequently edited by the artist. However, the images were neither generated nor post-processed by artificial intelligence.
Narrative:
In the heart of a peripheral city, where people lived in a labyrinth of closed streets and empty skyscrapers reaching the clouds, there lived a magician named Alan de Kooning. He was a man renowned for his almost divine abilities: with a single gesture, he could conjure images so perfect that anyone who saw them would forget reality.
His works emerged and dissolved like dreams, remaining only in the memories of those fortunate enough to witness them. He would swiftly create flawless landscapes, timeless portraits, and abstractions so profound that people would stare at them for hours, trying to uncover their secrets. Yet Alan hated his creative ease. The townsfolk often used his abilities to seek answers to complex existential questions, asking him to create an image of the meaning of existence, for instance. Alan willingly attempted to provide such answers, but despite their technical perfection, he felt his magic was limited by content he had yet to comprehend. Even though each gesture came to him naturally, he felt nothing but a growing sense that what he produced was mere noise, treated as a curiosity or a way to make easy money.
"My life is like a crystalline sheet of water," he would say to himself, gazing at the city through his apartment window. "It’s like a hollow shell painted with colorful dyes, displayed in the window of a toy store."
He longed to replace those dyes with tallow. In this way, he could become more intriguing, unique. He would no longer be a hollow novelty but an artist telling a story.
One winter evening, as sadness and frustration once again gripped his heart, he decided to make a change. He vowed to find something that would bring pain into his life—something that would shatter his equilibrium. He desperately wanted to feel like a physical being rather than an immaterial entity fulfilling others’ wishes.
Alan set out on a journey, visiting the strangest places he had heard of. He met artists who painted with their feet, poets composing verses on crumpled scraps of paper, and musicians drawing sounds from objects abandoned in landfills. Everywhere he went, he felt like a spectator in a theater of randomness. He was fascinated by the chaos, yet he remained cold. His mind still operated with perfect precision, as if every impulse was calculated according to some unknown algorithmic code.
One day, he reached a small village at the edge of misty mountains. There, he found an old, ruined inn where the innkeeper, a hunched old man named Gakutensoku, offered him lodging. As it turned out, the man was a traditionalist painter who remembered the invention of photography. He told Alan that he had ended up there because the speed of image creation with a camera had rendered his portrait studio obsolete. Alan listened attentively to his story, and with shame in his eyes, sat by the smoking fireplace to tell the man who he was.
Gakutensoku listened silently, then laughed deeply, though his laughter carried an undertone of fear. “If you’re searching for a flaw, you must go to Bostrom Pass. There you’ll find the answer. But beware—that place reveals the true face of anyone who ventures there.”
Alan set out at dawn. When he reached the pass, he understood why the old man had seemed so uneasy the previous evening. The rocks, covered in layers of ice and moisture, reflected light in geometric shapes. Every step Alan took created hundreds of his reflections—each disturbingly different. Some images were familiar, but others were distorted, alien.
At the center of the pass, Alan’s reflection disappeared. He heard only an intense sound, like a short circuit in an electric circuit, gradually circling him and condemning him to suffering. The magician covered his face in terror and crouched, hoping the sound would stop, but its volume only grew, causing the surrounding rocks to tremble. After a moment, he felt his body becoming disturbingly light, and his breathing grew faint.
Suddenly, his eyes began to see something different from the place he was in. He saw images he had created before, his favorite photographs, the pictures he had seen in Gakutensoku’s inn, works by famous artists, scenes from films he had watched, and advertisements hanging across from his apartment building. Alan, unable to calm himself, let out a scream, but his voice was lost in the deafening short circuit. He turned and ran as fast as he could. His body, still unnaturally light, made abrupt movements difficult, but the magician’s survival instinct proved stronger. His reflection reappeared in the rocks only just before he left the pass. Terrified, Alan did not look at it closely; he felt uneasy, as if he had done something he shouldn’t have in a place that, despite his fear, seemed strangely familiar.