Dot Fiftyone Gallery

In Search of Atlantis

Gabriel Valansi’s artistic practice highlights how visual memory is entangled with the degradation of information. His work poses fundamental questions: What is truly forming within us? What are we really seeing? What are we actually perceiving?

His project Atlantis emerges as a continuation of these inquiries, developed alongside the rise of 3D printing and the everyday possibility of generating objects. Rather than focusing on the finished objects themselves, Valansi directs his attention to the errors of the machines. He consistently works within these “error zones,” forcing glitches, bending linear programs until the systems crash, and exploring the unintended results that appear when tools are used against their intended purposes.

The myth of Atlantis became a conceptual anchor for this exploration. Inspired by both ancient Platonic accounts and later theories that cast the Atlanteans as an advanced technological civilization destroyed by its own uncontrollable development, Valansi connects this legend to contemporary anxieties about technological singularity. As futurist Vernor Vinge predicted in the 1960s, this threshold—where technology becomes so complex that only other technologies can manage it—may arrive around 2030, a moment now uncomfortably nearby.

Through the distorted fragments of 3D prints, Valansi imagines impossible architectures of the lost city: structures born from glitches, deformities, and anomalies. In this way, Atlantis evokes a civilization overwhelmed by its own creations, while also reflecting our present reality of algorithmically generate images, systems that perpetuate misinformation, and technologies that evolve beyond human oversight.

Valansi’s Atlantis ultimately challenges us to confront urgent questions about our relationship with technology, perception, and the risks of unchecked innovation—questions that, if left unanswered, may lead humanity toward an Atlantis-like fate.