What is the story behind your collective’s name and how did the project start?

Pakui Hardware was born in 2014 together with our project The Metaphysics of the Runner. This piece span around the forms of transcending limitations of physical human body, in which extreme fitness cult or more radical and very technocratic ideas of such transhumanists as Ray Kurzweil were a couple examples of that. It was a critical inquiry into the neoliberal pressure to be efficient, rapidly adopting and overly technological body and personality. Thus the installation – both at 321 Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius – resembled an abstracted gym environment, in which the training devices were stripped from their original function and became more of ‘ghosts’ of the real objects, they functioned as pedestals for other pieces to be presented on. This is when we decided to come up with a name for our practice as it shifted quite radically from what we did previously, mostly working with 16 mm film and archival material, and so we felt like we need to articulate this transformation both to ourselves and to others. We asked a fellow curator, Alex Ross, to come up with some possible ideas and he returned to us with Pakui Hardware. It sounded a little weird for us (it still does), but it kind of stuck immediately, mostly because of the energy loaded in. Pakui is a Hawaiian mythological character, a runner that is able to circle an Oahu island six times a day, so it refers to speed and a more mythical, semiotic part of the real, while Hardware is, of course, the matter, the body, hardware as such. It’s always this friction taking place between these two dimensions – one strives for velocity, while the other obstructs it, yet at the same time is the resource for that velocity.

I have read that your work is based on movement of capital through bodies, technology, materials and contemporary medicine, could you explain further?

This focus is kind of programmed in the name itself. When we explore certain case or field, we always strive to see that phenomenon in a wider system rather an autonomous thing on its own. Basically all contemporary science and medicine are firstly driven by profit-seeking and profit-generation. Mostly it could be a result of a lack of public money investment and privatisation of these fields starting in the early eighties with the neoliberal era. Currently it’s not even questioned, it’s just a status quo, like those Covid vaccines for which governments are paying enormous money for the bio-tech companies. So if we dig into diverse forms of contemporary medicine, such as regenerative medicine or bariatric surgeries, we look into how these fields participate in the larger capitalist scheme, how the effort of rejuvenation of bodies and cells is directly related to contemporary requirement for efficiency. Just like the synthetic biology, which we researched around 2015 – 2017, is both an exciting field to think about erasure of such fundamental categories as natural or artificial, to image what forms of life we could design if humans could create life from scratch, but at the same time this field is mostly driven by the idea of reprogramming and rewiring nature for very specific tasks, so that there is less accidental production, but production directed for human needs. Thus capital penetrates even the smallest forms of life and matter.