Ewa Wójtowicz
BETWEEN THE HYBRID AND THE “NEW NORMAL”

Il. Magdalena Lazar

Hybrid as a concept, increasingly widespread these days primarily because of the implementation of new technologies, especially those that combine solutions already accepted with radically new ones, has wider connotations. To be observed, parallelly and independently, is a long‑standing interest in hybridity reflected in artistic attitudes within the framework of the theoretical‑practical debate to which art actively contributes, as well as in those art institutions and cultural events that describe their profile as hybrid.¹ The reason for that is the popularity biotechnological experiments have been retaining in art and the humanities for years now, and the effect artificial intelligence has contemporarily had on artistic creation. This area of ​​interest is demarcated by the Technocene, a concept defined by Nadim Samman as a way of “thinking about the contemporary from the perspective of art, addressing […] the overwhelming prevalence of technology in all corners of life.”² This approach is consistent with the cognitive condition referred to by Benjamin Bratton as the “new normal.”³ Although more commonly associated with a state of chronic crisis,⁴ this term has been proposed in response to the trouble with naming the outcomes of civilisational changes conditioned by the impact new technologies exert on our reality as a whole, for the description of which there has been no appropriate terminology. When referencing the concept of hybridity, one could – following Piotr Zawojski, who has examined how the meaning of this concept has been transforming in media art and the humanities in the recent decades – notice that it appears in “a perspective which can be assumed to be ontological as it concerns a hybrid reality that formed as a result of the mixing of the material and physical with the immaterial and virtual.”⁵ It should be emphasised that the process of combining the two orders is not, initially at least, collision‑free or imperceptible. To put it as simply as it gets: if we can still recognise the incompatible components of which it is made, it is a hybrid we are dealing with. Once we stop noticing or identifying them as contradictory, the hybrid turns into normality, the so‑called “new normal.”

Capturing hybridity

When embarking upon the New Normal art/research project on hybridity he was to lead (2017–2019), Benjamin Bratton pointed out that sometimes names for completely unprecedented phenomena tend to reference familiar concepts, becoming terminological hybrids (a car is a “horseless carriage,” blockchain is “digital money”).⁶ Although apparently useful, they prove to be insufficient because, the theorist argues, hybrid terminology hampers the recognition of new things through the deceptive familiarisation of them and by reducing the getting‑to‑know to techno‑deterministic criteria, while blocking out what they actually mean. This observation about language which, while being rooted in the past, is trying to keep up with the fast approaching future provides the starting point for this discussion. It should be added, in view of the naming problems indicated by Bratton, that a side effect of the emergence of the “new normal” is that we are increasingly struggling to find the right words for the sphere of our experience that is not digital. The meaning of such terms as “real,” “physical,” “material,” or “analogue,” or antonyms that have cropped up in response to the condition of digitality (offline, on‑site), seems to be diluted by the overwhelming influence of online reality, while terminological suggestions such as “mixed‑reality” have failed to be widely adopted.

One of the methods of examining hybrid forms of cultural texts involves isolating layers and fragments that make visible the differences between what is digital and what is becoming really hard to define as the negative of digitality which, today, constitutes the dominant layer of the reality around us.⁷ Regardless of the nomenclatural problem, or perhaps because of it, the state “between” changes can be seen as hybrid due to art which is replete with examples of various approaches to the concept of hybrid. This article discussed a selection of them – in varying proportions.

The monster of the Technocene era

The state of “new (a)normality” could take Panorama Cat (2022), Eva and Franco Mattes’s hybrid sculpture inspired by digital glitch (so‑called panorama fail) and made from bodies of more than one cat, as its emblematic animal. This figure is a reference to the non‑human, being “an icon for digital distortion of both nature and culture, and the new life (undeath?) that this situation entails for everything living today.”⁸ A stuffed eight‑legged ginger cat with an unnaturally elongated body does not have an appearance as sinister as that of the medieval manticore, although Nadim Samman considers this Technocenic chimera to be a modern Sphinx in which “understanding and nonsense converge.”⁹ The recognition of a hybrid does not involve the grasping of its meaning – it remains an enigma, reflecting the moment of confusion when we come to realise the inadequacy of the vocabulary at our disposal and experience cognitive anxiety. But this tends to be a passing state, preceding the advent of the “new normal.” This vague “in‑between” state, detectable before the hybrid blends in with reality, can be difficult to capture in linguistic terms because that is also when concepts disappear (the concept of media convergence, mentioned by Benjamin Bratton, which fell into disuse when it actually occurred is an illustration of this).¹⁰ This contradiction is uncovered by the fact resulting directly from the example cited: as an artwork, Panorama Cat produces a comic effect consistent with its origin in memes and, at the same time, a sense of uncanniness. It is, too, a riddle like those posed by the mythical Sphinx, however, it seems pointless to solve this one. It could be interpreted within the context of anamorphosis, without forgetting that this optical distortion known in the tradition of painting was decipherable when observed from a certain angle or with the help of a mirror, which made the entire composition of which the anamorphosis was part unclear.¹¹

Panorama Cat is a member of the lolcat (amusing cat) family, a product of popular internet culture with countless memes causing mirth among recipients. A meme’s cultural capital increases with the growing number of shares and transformations, making it one of the key means of expression in the post‑media culture, while also emphasising its hybrid nature.¹² From this perspective, transformations of lolcat images are consistent with the theory of media hybrids typology formulated by Edmond Couchot almost a quarter of a century ago, referenced by Piotr Zawojski. Two types of hybridity are to be distinguished here initially: the first “concerns the morphogenesis of computer calculated virtual objects,”¹³ the second – the distribution, or the popularisation, copying and dissemination of virtual objects in an era of overwhelming hybridisation.”¹⁴ The third type of hybridisation occurs “between technology and language,”¹⁵ which is of particular importance in the current age of artificial intelligence.

Eva and Franco Mattes, an art duo exploring online culture and drawing inspiration from its peculiarities for many years, have also created another sculpture of the type: Half Cat (2020). It is a thickset bipedal creature, its shape also derived from a glitch in a panoramic digital image of a cat. The image has gained wide popularity as a meme and its various iterations have found their way into vernacular online culture. The artists give material form to digital phantoms by means of taxidermy, making a conscious reference to the work of Maurizio Cattelan, who used stuffed animals in many of his works.¹⁶ Still, seeing a sculpture in an art gallery is different from looking at a funny picture on a screen. The fact that toxic substances were applied to fix it, of which the gallery staff is sure to remind us should we get too close to the exhibit, is not the only reason for that. Another reason is that the materialisation of a meme hybrid gives its form an air of uncanniness, additionally accentuated by the fact that the sculpture is actually a dead animal.¹⁷ At the same time, this is not an exhibit that could be put on display in a natural history museum. This materialisation has an emersive character: the cat emerges from the universe of electronic images because it has never existed in the form in which it appears to us – as a two- or eight‑legged monster.¹⁸ The result of the merging of different ontological orders in one artefact constitutes a prime example of hybridity occurring at a deeper level than a simple recognition of the fact that a cat with an unusual number of legs captured against the background of a photographed ordinary reality looks surprising and produces a humorous effect. Nadim Samman, who curated the group exhibition Poetics of Encryption (Berlin 2024, Copenhagen and Prague 2025) that contained Panorama Cat and Half Cat, points out that the process by which these works came to be is characteristic of the Technocene.¹⁹ On the one hand, their content (here: feline bodies) is subject to dividuation, broken down into its constituent parts; on the other hand, it is processed so that it can combine with other elements (here: the meanings that spring from our knowing that these images have their origin in memes) to create a new hybrid. Both entities inhabit a world of “consensual hallucination,”²⁰ and especially those of its aesthetic realms that are somewhat psychedelic in nature. In this way, Panorama Cat is “an exemplary totem for a new world in which the strange is a matter of course.”²¹ Nadim Samman indicates that it is not the only representative of this species in the art of the Technocene, citing the example of Marguerite Humeau whose oeuvre features sculptural objects in the shape of biomorphic hybrids. The artist’s sympoietic, postbiological approach has been inspired, amongst others, by extinct species of animals as well as “smooth” contemporary design of luxury decorative objects.²² The impression of “biohorror” is heightened as much by the titles of works (e.g. Venus of Fracassi. A 10‑year‑old female human has ingested a rabbit’s brain)²³ as by their monumental scale and, last but not least, the materials used. For example, the sculpture titled Sphinx Otto Has Absorbed Humankind (2017) has been made from so‑called artificial human skin (free of organic components, it is a mixture of dyed resin, Carrara marble dust and glass fibre), coated in extracts obtained from plants used in recipes for black magic potions. That being so, the Sphinx with a name of its own, supposed to have “absorbed humankind,” is a product of the process Nadim Samman aptly calls amalgamation. This and other monsters created by Marguerite Humeau seem to be defending access to their (putatively dangerous) substantiality and, simultaneously, to the unravelling of mystery, while also constantly mutating, as it were, before the eyes of the spectators as they are viewing a sculpture.

Hybrid post‑media attitudes

This type of hybrid could obviously be traced back to Surrealism. The story of Surrealism could be seen as evidence confirming the arrival of the “new normal” since it started as an avant‑garde movement only to become, nearly a century later, commonplace in popular culture. Surrealist motifs, expressed, amongst others, in the form of collages in visual arts, would thus announce the coming of today’s digitally modified visuality: from advertising images to deepfakes. A more contemporary reference point for interpretation would be the art that emerged in the post‑media culture, as indicated, among others, by Piotr Zawojski, who writes about its “hybrid nature” and generic “impurity,”²⁴ the confirmation for which has been provided by research on post‑media and post‑internet art. The activity of DIS,²⁵ an art and curatorial collective operating in a mimicry‑like fashion on various levels that link art with commerce could serve as an example. The actions DIS members engage in include allusive toying with the image of the group (manifestly unnatural posed photographs with watermarks or overt “product placement” for sponsors in their artworks) or running a stock photo site that also acts as an art gallery. In terms of aesthetics, they as curators promote hybrid attitudes, adopting them also in their own creative practice, for instance in the above‑mentioned images which come across as surrealist pieces. Within them collide pastiche, irony, aesthetic flippancy and the post‑internet chaos of copious references to cultural texts of highly divergent content – ​​from stock photography to the “poetry of Shenzhen City.” A postmodernist origin of such actions could be indicated but that is hardly the point here; the thing is not to discover connections by following art historical methods. It is rather to find an approach that will allow us to find our way around the reality that these works tell us about. Piotr Zawojski writes: “Taking into consideration the biological and mythological sources of the concept of hybrid (there are, on the one hand, genetic connotations and, on the other, the memory of mythological sphinxes, harpies or chimeras), also worthy of notice are […] the mechanisms or ways of hybridising content, artefacts or actions that take the form of syncretic wholes frequently combining contradictory views.”²⁶ In an era of interlacing post‑truth and post‑fiction, these are the tropes that carry sufficient validity.

Apart from readily recognisable hybrids, primarily due to their appearance, in the works discussed above, there are interesting, even if less visually impressive, examples of hybrid Technocenic eclecticism to be found in contemporary art. Among the works created by Julian Charrière are sculptures made of a combination of substances of various origin, imitating natural rock. The greyish block that makes Metamorphism XIII (2016), exhibited in a display case, is composed of artificial lava and electronic waste, including motherboards, hard drives and wires, alloyed together. This hybrid geology is remindful of plastiglomerates, or “fossils” characteristic of the Anthropocene which have already found their way into some collections of natural history museums. Similarly, more than a decade ago, Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen used, in works such as H/AlCuTaAu (2014), a hybrid substance obtained by recovering elements from over forty kilos of computer scrap. Employing “impure” and often primitive metallurgical methods, they simultaneously started a process that spotlighted the transformation of “earth into machine, and, conversely, machine into dirty, blackened, earth. On the symbolic plane, the exchange of one for the other is close to an alchemical transmutation.”²⁷ When put on show, the final result of the project, a conglomerate of alloys, is accompanied by a display of the “raw materials” that the artists used – pieces of computers. Such activities could be interpreted from the perspective of a proposed naturecultural terminology, suggested by Jussi Parikka at more or less the same time as he observed this: “Geology becomes a way to investigate materiality of the technological media world.”²⁸ Hybrid substances created in processes involving geology and mining, the production and recovery of plastics and metallurgy, constitute an example by revealing their (un)natural status directly prior to their transformation into the “new normal.”

Before summing up, the problems posed by how artificial intelligence how culture cannot be ignored when considering the transformation of hybrid into the “new normal.” As in the case of the Anthropocene, an extensive analysis of this issue is beyond the scope of this article but it should be emphasised that hybridity is deeply inscribed both in the processes brought about by artificial intelligence and in their visual results. In the early phase of experimentation with algorithmic production of images, it was predominantly those resembling fantastic monsters that reached the public consciousness, perpetuating the myth of the “uncanny” behind the operation of artificial intelligence. Starting from the hallucinatory spaces of Deep Dream, to the cycles of “machine visions” created jointly by Trevor Paglen and algorithms, to contemporary examples of widespread generative graphic tools, the question about the end of “purely human” aesthetics arises in the reflection on artificial intelligence. The moment we are in still belongs to the “in‑between” phase which enables a research debate with the participation of people involved in it on theoretical ground (like Kate Crawford), but also those with a theoretical‑practical input that comes from art which offers space for the testing of possibilities opened up by artificial intelligence on various levels. Apart from the experiments conducted by Trevor Paglen (who collaborates with Kate Crawford) or Davide Quayoli’s works of relative visual attraction (for example, the 2016 sculpture Laocoon, in an almost model hybrid aesthetic, referencing attempts to recreate the complete appearance of ancient sculptures using the example of the Laocoon Group), there are also critical attitudes that are worthy of notice. By applying Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to visual materials, Nora Al‑Badri’s works, including Babylonian Vision (2020) and The Post‑Truth Museum (2021) invites questions about decolonising museums. By producing synthetic images, the artist simultaneously points to the hybrid reality of the production of knowledge and science, as well as the politics intertwined with its official interpretations. The artificiality of produced image resources corresponds to the conventionality of what we have traditionally come to accept as “normal” in cultural history, but what has, in the decolonisation debate, turned out to be a created narrative. It appears that Nora Al‑Badri’s approach is the reverse of the cognitive process under discussion here, which disturbingly flashes a hybrid beneath the surface of cultural normality, one that has been with us for a time long enough for it to become a matter of tradition.

The mystery of the “new normal”

Heading towards a conclusion concerning the hybrid form of, not only visual, culture, it is worth recalling that the correct answer to the riddle the mythical Sphinx asked was: “a human.”²⁹ Yet, according to Nadim Samman, we are still a long way away from getting answers to the questions that arise in relation to hybrid in this sense of the word.³⁰ One possible clue is that we as people continue to find hybrids surprising, while paying scant attention to what we have come to accept as the (new) normal, whatever it may be. Still, giving a wrong answer is unlikely to prove as risky as an incorrect one given to the demonic Sphinx’s riddle. However, when a hybrid transforms into the “new normal” (which, in an era of theory‑fiction, post‑factuality and an overload of “fake” content and images, as well as an increased participation of artificial intelligence in all creative activity, is already underway), we will lose sight of what we are still able to see, even though probably without fully understanding it. The cognitive problem is accompanied by doubts surrounding terminology because the one we have at our disposal may turn out too dualistic to suffice. Writing about the coexistence of physicality and virtuality, Benjamin Bratton points out: “and if we don’t have the right words to name it [other than hybrid], then let’s make them,”³¹ because: “[i]n the short term, hybrids may make sense by way of analogy and continuity, but soon they create confusion, and even fear, as the new evolves and resembles the familiar less and less.”³² Taking this matter seriously, i.e. going beyond the production of impressive neologisms towards real reflection, we are faced with the doubly hard task of recognising and giving accurate names to what we are able to capture today – still in a state of mutation, between a hybrid and the “new normal.”