Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
May 15, 2026, 6:00–7:30 PM, Auditorium
Language: English
Free admission

This presentation highlights recent work and looks at ongoing projects concerned with the materiality of abstraction. There is a particular focus on artificial neural networks and so-called latent spaces in AI. Latent spaces—high-dimensional representational manifolds learned during model training—encode properties that directly influence outputs and, by extension, shape what we experience as AI. We ask whether these abstract configuration spaces can be read not merely as mathematical systems, but as complex sites or interiors. This direction is explored in “Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans” (2026), developed as a close collaboration with Nina Beguš, Gašper Beguš, and Riccardo Petrini for the Antikythera journal. The piece draws parallels between generative adversarial networks (GANs) and James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. 

The event is supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands.

Metahaven’s work between filmmaking, design, installation, and writing has been focusing on the role of poetry in both its cinematic and visual, and also its literary and cognitive senses. Pairing research with experimental aesthetics, the collective, founded in 2007 by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden, uses poetry to form a potential bridge between art and science, like in the film work “Capture” (2022-), or as a way to question the mapping between language and feeling, like in “The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object)” (2024)—based on a poetry collection by Eugene Ostashevsky. Metahaven have presented solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; ICA London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Asakusa, Tokyo; Izolyatsia, Kyiv; e-flux, New York, and State of Concept Athens, among others. They have participated in group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; the Gwangju Biennale; the Sharjah Biennial; Ghost:2561, Bangkok, the Museum of Modern art in Warsaw, and many others. Their films have been screened at IFFR, Docs Against Gravity, CPH:DOX, the Museo Reina Sofía, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. Their work is in international public and private collections including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Sharjah Art Foundation, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Victoria & Albert Museum, M HKA, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Metahaven are artistic advisors at Rijksakademie and heads of department at the Geo-Design MA at DAE.