Vytautas Bikauskas (He/him)
Vytautas’ work revolves around time, rituals, and labour. His multimedia practice ranges from drawing and printmaking to speculative Machine Learning, from data visualisations and creative coding to sculpture and performative collaborations.
He particularly focuses on the meaning of repeated actions, the importance and beauty of daily rituals, and labour as a fundamental force in knowledge-making.
Archived notebooks
My aunt Dalia has been filling daily notebooks for the past 20 years. Each day takes a column, while categories range from hours worked to irresponsible behaviour. The notebooks are interpreted as her way of grappling with temporality, identity, and the need for structure. Enveloped in my aunt’s cosmology of theatre acting and maritime journalism, this project is a tribute to a life of transmission.
Together with my bookbinder friend Rūta we non-destructively bound the notebooks to preserve and present them as archival objects. This would not have been possible without her.
Notes
I explored handwriting as a source of identity and the effect of reproduction on its authenticity.
I retraced my aunt’s writing by hand and printed it as a photolithograph. Side by side I display the traced writing and the same text in my own handwriting. Through photolithography, what cannot be duplicated becomes multiple.
To commemorate a life of typing I created concrete poems based on my aunt’s data.
Memories, monologues
Throughout the project I collaborated with Acting and Contemporary Performance Practice students from RCS to interpret the notebooks performatively. During a series of workshops they reflected on their own relationship with passing time, using the notebooks as source material. Additionally, actors perform parts of my interview with Dalia as monologues.
Huge thank you to my performers Lisa, Al, Molly, and Tabitha.
Calendars
I looked at calendars as visual timekeeping systems. Exploring their fallibility, I focused on the historical events of transitioning from Julian to Gregorian calendar. Errors in the former meant a loss of days during the transition.
I created my own calendars to return the missing days. The pocket calendars run in an edition of 100, a material journey through letterpress printing as a medium that changed the relationship between text and time.
