Daniel Jenatsch has been awarded the 2020 John Fries Award for emerging artists

“To get to the Close World we must come to this world of terrors.
We must touch the return of the time, the innocent earth beneath the grass of words. To get to The Close World we must flock amongst the birds.”

“The judges found Daniel Jenatsch’s conceptual and aesthetic approach well resolved and utterly compelling,” says Ms Kelly.

Daniel Jenatsch

born Sydney, NSW, lives and works Melbourne, VIC

The Close World 2021

three channel sound with animatronics 

Voices by: Franziska Aigner

Animatronic design: Benjamin Creek

Painting: Claudia Greathead 

Daniel Jenatsch is an artist and composer who makes interdisciplinary works that explore the interstices between affect and information. His work combines hyper-detailed soundscapes, music and video to create multimedia documentaries, installations, radio pieces and performances. His work looks at the social construction of subjectivity, with a concern for the ways in which forms of knowledge and power construct and inform our social and mental ecologies. His works have been presented in exhibitions and programs at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Arts House, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Athens Biennale, NextWave Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Liquid Architecture Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the MousonTurm, Frankfurt.

The Close World is a world building exercise conducted in a series of conversations with GPT-3, which is OpenAI’s autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. The Close World was created by training GPT-3 simultaneously on fundamental texts on the philosophy of language, and on the key works of ‘worldbuilding’ authors of fantasy and science fiction.

Contact: Daniel.Jenatsch@gmail.com