Mateusz Janik The End of the Avatar
10.04 - 22.05.2026
You lift your head from your smartphone. You feel that something is missing. Your skin is where it should be, your memory seems intact — and yet, something is off. What happened to that photo from your 2013 vacation, taken by your best friend at the time? You can’t find the post you shared when you first traveled abroad. What became of the blog where, fifteen years ago, you documented letters sent to yourself from the future?
Mateusz Janik’s project explores the experience of loss that has no clear endpoint — a form of “death” that unfolds during one’s lifetime and often goes unnoticed. Over the past two decades, the internet has undergone a radical transformation: from a space of free expression and everyday archiving into an infrastructure governed by platforms, where access to one’s own data is no longer guaranteed.
At the heart of the exhibition is a virtual reality video game. We take on the role of a digital entity that, after being blocked on social media, ends up in a digital purgatory where, within a limited timeframe, it must confront the content it shared during its lifetime before disappearing completely.
The remaining works presented in the Rodríguez space reflect on the condition of digital identity in its material dimension, combining research processes with artistic practice and raising questions about a future we are already nostalgic for.
The research project “The Death of the Avatar: The Condition of Digital Identity After Losing Access to a Social Media Profile,” no. 2024/53/N/HS2/02764, is carried out as part of a grant awarded in the PRELUDIUM 23 competition organized by the National Science Centre (Poland).
