“Paradoxically, I used to watch the rides from a distance, I didn’t like to go on the swings myself. That distance constantly provoked me into thinking of rides as a very strange phenomenon,” says Julijonas Urbonas, founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency, designer, researcher and associate professor at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Last year, Julijonas added two new projects to his list of works, Brain Spinner and Regos, projects further exploring the themes of gravity and attraction engineering. His older works have not only been exhibited at the Milan Triennale and the Venice Biennale but also live in the archives of museums and private collectors.
Your work explores themes ranging from amusement park engineering to kinetic art and science fiction. You create surprising critical tools that stir both the body and the imagination. Your latest work is the Brain Spinner, a ride based on Ernst Hoffmeister’s prototype rotor. How did carousels come into your life?
You could say I was born, grew up and lived in an amusement park. My father was the director of one in Klaipėda. My father didn’t like Soviet kindergartens very much, he used to say they were communist indoctrination camps, so he didn’t send me and my sister there. We spent our days in the amusement park, and our nannies were the engineers and supervisors of the rides. Soon I took over the helm of my father’s house and ran the park myself for five years.
Did you go on the rides yourself?
Paradoxically, I mostly watched the rides from a distance, I didn’t like to go on the swings by myself. That distance constantly provoked me into thinking of rides as a very strange phenomenon. Just imagine, millions of people in the world waiting in queues for two or three hours to take a minute to swing. They get the screams, the sweat, the vomit, but the next day they do the same thing again. No other phenomenon gives pleasure in such suffering. This strange situation provoked me into thinking more deeply about it. I called the subject aesthetic gravity and started to explore what carousels could offer to art and what art could offer to carousels.
Brain-twisters became popular in the 1950s. The carousel uses centrifugal force to draw people to the walls of the rides and doesn’t let go until it slowly stops itself and brings people back down to earth. Such nostalgic rides can still be found in amusement parks. Why did you decide to bring these attractions back to life?
The rides I create are not copies of old prototypes. REGOS (Robotic EGO-Motion Simulator) and Brain Spinner are the next generation of rides, elevated to an artistic level. These projects not only provide new aesthetic experiences of movement, they also establish a new genre of art: ego-movement design. I plan to test and promote REGOS in as many different artistic fields as possible: dance, theatre, cinema or even contemporary art. Similar robotic systems are being developed for science, industry and warfare, but not for the arts. REGOS is unique in that it is designed from scratch for the art field. With this system it is possible to reproduce an extremely wide range of movements. It is easy for it to hide both visually and acoustically: it can operate extremely quietly. Everything has been designed with the artist as user and operator in mind, so that the robot’s control interface does not require technical knowledge.
And I actually produced Brain Spinner as a rotating Lithuanian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. It’s an attraction consisting of a rotating drum and a stable platform. Inside the drum, people rotate, standing against its walls, which are specially tilted and shaped based on the physics of artificial gravity. The centrifugal force pulls people strongly against these walls so that their bodies slide upwards and become “stuck” in the air. This image is not just for the riders, as the walls are transparent. Brain Spinner is a kind of changing gravity stage, a rotating lecture theatre, a kinetic town square, even a laboratory exploring the effects of altered gravity on thinking, imagination and pleasure.
Tell us more about ego-movement. What is it?
Ego-motion is a formulation of how a person experiences and perceives his or her movement in space. Transport technology, together with attractions, plays a key role in this. For example, a car could be described as a kind of cinematic machine with an extra-wide stereoscopic screen and special effects, which shows road movies with passing landscapes accompanied by the swaying of curves and rollercoasters. In this case, the evocation is the film itself, with the driver and passengers as the protagonists.
Movement has played a somewhat passive role in art. Whether it’s dance, kinetic art or cinema, it is always the performer who moves, not the audience. Except for amusements. But this entertainment machine is rarely, if ever, identified as an artistic field, and it is also rather limited to a certain vocabulary of movement. What if we combined the aesthetics of the moving arts, the experience of attractions and the cinematic flexibility of robotics? In this way, we would create a whole new reality of movement experiences and a new field of art: ego-movement design. Every new field needs new tools. Ego-movement design is no exception. REGOS is almost the first tool developed specifically for this field.
You are part of the Vilnius Academy of Arts’ Entrepreneurship Programme. How does this contribute both to project development and personal development?
It seems that soon I will be able to add another epithet, “entrepreneur”, to “artist, designer, researcher”. In the Entrepreneurship Programme, I continue to deepen my knowledge of commercialisation strategies, combining them with artistic and design research and experimental development. I feel increasing power to act in the market and act on the market itself.
Is it worthwhile for young designers to develop their entrepreneurial skills?
If a designer is designing for the market, then of course entrepreneurial skills are necessary. If you are not designing for the market, these skills are less necessary. On the other hand, certain tools of entrepreneurship can be successfully applied to all kinds of projects and research.
To conclude, you have been working extensively in the field of critical design for almost a decade now, collecting prizes for your projects, and you are one of the most prominent artists and researchers in Lithuania. What would you recommend to people looking for inspiration and motivation in their lives to see, read or listen to?
The list is endless and non-exhaustive. In my opinion, it is important not to lose curiosity for diversity and strangeness. From texts on the cognitive revolution (e.g. Yuval Harari) to the anthropology of lines (Tim Ingold), from the choreography of everyday movements (e.g. Maxine Sheets-Johnston) to metacognitive science fiction (Ted Chiang), from ghost music (The Caretaker) to body horror films (David Cronenberg).