Tomáš Svoboda, head of the New Media Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, has long engaged with the practice of the motion picture and the cinematic experience, which have become integral parts of how we understand and relate to the world. The theme of learning through understanding media mechanisms, symbolic systems, and everyday strategies and tactics is a key aspect of his artistic work, which he exhibits both domestically and internationally.

His work strips the ritualized mechanisms of narrative down to general principles that form the relationship between the recipient and the given medium. An important role is played by the altered environment in which we are accustomed to perceiving the medium or in which it is realized. In his film-related work, he has simulated a cinema hall and film scenes, while experimenting with reducing cinematic language and the story being told. Since 2016, when he created the film Jako z filmu (Like from a Film) and the companion exhibition Jako film (Like a Film), he has been examining the ability of the moving picture to function in both the cinema and the gallery.

He also intended to present his last two medium-length films, Kinetopsie (Kinetopsia, 2024) and Solar Sound System (2025), in both formats. At PLATO, they are presented at the improvised Kino Octopus. Nevertheless, it is obvious at first glance that Kinetopsia could work as a multi-channel installation as the film version uses the split-screen effect. We enter the story through the interface of an internet browser, to which the screens of mobile phones are gradually added. Thus, technology is almost constantly present among the viewers and the characters in the film; there is no escape from it. The individual screens come together to form a single shot and almost literally thus emphasize parallel perspectives. An interesting visual labyrinth is created, enhancing the film’s voyeuristic nature. Here, the interfaces act as active entryways into the narrative, even when they are not currently being used, which contributes to creating a storyline with a detective-story-like feel right from the start. An investigation is sparked by classic detective-film motifs – a robbery and a murder – and eventually turns into a generation’s search for the historical responsibility for the current state of affairs.

The protagonists are two young people; while he is a graphic designer who splits his time between work and fun, she is intently writing a text about the socioeconomic transformation of the early 1990s. The unexpected discovery of a banknote, one no longer in circulation, in what was once Discoland Sylvie, which has long since been abandoned, lead the pair to the idea of investigating how this money got there. Under the pretext of a “well-paying job”, they enter the dilapidated building, which, however, seems to be still living its own life. Tomáš Svoboda playfully combines the narrative approaches of the thriller genre with nearly fairy-tale-like elements of a search for a lost treasure, during which the seekers must prove their courage and loyalty and avoid being led astray. While they explore the labyrinth of the former club, the pair finds out more about the life story of the disco’s owner, Ivan Jonák, a post-Velvet Revolution businessman and mobster. In the 1990s he zipped through the streets of Prague in a convertible, sitting alongside naked models. His club was the epicentre of Prague’s underworld as well as a place frequented by the cream of society. The capital that Jonák used to launch this grand disco temple and his wheeling and dealing, however, came in part from a scam that he ran in 1989, when he tricked hundreds of people into contributing money for a supposed fight against communism. The title Kinetopsia (a neurological disorder that makes people think stationary objects are moving) already suggests that Svoboda wants to highlight the flawed or, at the very least, impaired ability to assess one’s own past. These two young people’s investigation, taking place where part of their parent’s generation could have given themselves over to the idea that the best way to fight communism is through a disco, or that such an idea could be profitable, raises a question without a clear answer: Were “the nineties disgusting or naïve”?

Another of Tomáš Svoboda’s films loosely builds on this ungiven answer about the impacts of the sociopolitical dynamics of the 1990s. It is set in a speculative future and recapitulates the Czech government’s repressive approach to a real freetekno festival held in 2005: CzechTek. Svodoba, who attended the festival and witnessed the police raid on it, invents an alternative timeline, exploring what might have occurred if the civil unrest stemming from this event led to change in the Czech Republic’s sociopolitical system. The film titled Solar Sound System is a mockumentary that in part takes a self-deprecating look at the art scene. Real artists close to Svoboda – Dušan Zahoranský, Adéla Babanová, and Kateřina Šedá – take part in a competition to design a monument to CzechTek 2005, whose violent disruption sparked changes that brought society closer together and raised social and environmental awareness. The artists’ presentations of their designs, in which they poke fun at their own creative approaches, are interspersed with interviews with a DJ and CzechTek participant appearing anonymously under the pseudonym Ich, art historian Milena Bartlová, curator Jiří Ptáček, music producer Petr Ostrouchov, philosopher Lukáš Likavčan, historian Ondřej Crhák, economist Martin Pacovský, neurologist Tereza Serranová, and visual culture theorist Andrea Průchová Hrůzová. The point of this interview footage is to present the steps taken to reorganize the state. The film thus becomes the manifesto of a certain social utopia, which is at the same time admittedly self-deprecatory and melancholic. Nonetheless, according to Tomáš Svoboda, raves have the potential to resist top-down control and become temporary autonomous zones. However, whether such energy can leave a mark on everyday life remains more the utopian wish of a lone dancer.

Sylva Poláková