Curiosity killed the Cat

Solo exhibition of kennedy+swan at discotec presenting the latest works of the artist duo in Vienna.

In the era when technology and the fabric of life are wholly entangled, kennedy+swan invites us into a lucid, paradoxical world. The duo, consisting of Bianca Kennedy and Swan Collective look into the uncanny intersections of non-human intelligence and its impact on plants, animals, machines and humans. Their works navigate between the sentient and the simulated or the organic and the synthetic realms.

Shut Up and Calculate! (2024), a two-channel video installation is at the heart of the exhibition revisiting one of science’s most unsettling retreats: the decision to ignore the strangeness of quantum mechanics in favor of its practical applications. This idea—famously distilled into the Copenhagen Interpretation of 1927—demanded that physicists stop contemplating on the paradoxes of quantum reality and instead focus solely on computation.

The work follows Schrödinger’s cat—trapped in perpetual superposition— guiding the viewer through shifting landscapes, from the Arctic to bourgeois interiors, mirroring the disorienting vibrations between presence and absence, knowing and unknowing. In their intricate blend of animation techniques, kennedy+swan create a kaleidoscope of digital and analog imagery, embracing the contradictions of a universe where observation itself alters reality.

As the work poetically suggests, the ideas that got suppressed by mid-century scientists are still lingering with us, shaping the very foundations of our world. With this show discotec invites you to listen to the echoes of paradox and the ghosts of unanswered questions.