Sfera (Sylvia Rybak, Marco Winter & Ula Sowa Przybylska)
Info about the residency
1. August 2025 - 30. September 2025IZOLYATSIA: Kyiv, Ukraine
About the artists
Sfera, formed by Sylvia Rybak, Marco Winter, and Ula Sowa Przybylska, is a research-driven collective working across digital art, media theory, and immersive production. With backgrounds in photography, data science, cultural anthropology, and sound, their practices converge around the critical exploration of social and economic structures, speculative aesthetics, and technological mediation. Their current work spans themes such as hauntological aesthetics in video games, the cultural dissemination of systemic imaginaries, and immersive modes of storytelling.About the project
The etymological origin of ‘paradise’ translates as ‘walled garden’ fenced off from a sinful world. It mirrors contemporary techno-utopian visions, where the accumulation of resources and environments promises transcendence, embracing an ethos of peak lifestyle for a selected few. Anthrome mirrors the archetypal libertarian dream of Exit to a new Eden: A Terra Incognita unspoiled by modernity, its societal and economic constraints, and ecological costs. Secessionist projects of startup cities or autonomous zones, such as Praxis, Próspera or Seasteading, are increasingly inscribing themselves into the mainstream discourse, introducing alternative economic and social systems pushed to extremes in visions of techno-elite colonisation.According to Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, it is the reiteration of such ideas, which grants them meaning and authority. The ultra-smooth digital gardens within Anthrome are directly influenced by the online discussions, which iteratively naturalise accelerationist and hypercapitalist alternative societies. The garden reacts to data from forums and discussion platforms, building and breaking, according to user participation. A sculpture grows, mimicking the branching and roots of how this discourse is shaped. Fragments of posts, reflections, and strings of thought are weaved together, overlaying a dismembered dialogue within the temporal hive formed by discussions within the network.
Ultimately, the project reflects how escapist desires—those that forsake collective well-being in favor of individual gain—paradoxically depend on communal participation to materialise. These techno-utopian visions, while rejecting societal interdependence, still require a community to iterate, sustain, and legitimise them. Yet, the communities they form are inherently fragmented: bonded not by shared struggle or solidarity, but by self-interest and abstract ideals. In attempting to exit society, such movements replicate existing exclusions, offering no coherent collective resistance—only the illusion of autonomy within a disjointed digital garden.