Yiannis Kranidiotis. Tipping Point

In MOCAK’s audiovisual room, metronomes by the Greek artist Yiannis Kranidiotis speed up to the rhythm of climate data until, at the climax, they all fall silent at once. The installation is part of the 15th Patchlab festival and is on for just four days, from 15 to 18 October 2026. Opening: 15 October, 11:00.

MOCAK on the exhibition: (our translation of the museum’s Polish text; the museum’s English website has no page for this show)

How can we keep the ability to imagine the future consciously, beyond the logic of prediction and optimisation? This question is the starting point of this year’s Patchlab Digital Art Festival, which will take place in Kraków from 15 to 18 October.

The anniversary edition of the festival will be an occasion to look at fifteen years of change in digital art and Art & Tech culture through the lens of technological breakthroughs, promises and disappointments. Since 2012 Patchlab has presented new phenomena at the meeting point of art, science and technology, and has examined how successive innovations change our experience of reality, our imagination and our relations with the world.

At MOCAK, in turn, Yiannis Kranidiotis’s kinetic installation “Punkt krytyczny / Tipping Point” will be presented, showing how models and forecasts can turn an invisible future into a physical experience here and now.

What to expect

This is a single work in a single room, not an exhibition of many objects. According to the Patchlab festival’s website, the installation consists of 21 metronomes built specially for it. Their tempo is driven by environmental data on five major tipping points of the Earth’s climate, from the early 20th century to models of future change.

Sound matters here as much as motion and light. The rhythm starts calmly, gradually speeds up and turns into a cacophony, and then all the metronomes suddenly stop. In the work, that silence marks the crossing of a threshold beyond which change may become difficult or impossible to reverse. If you come in mid-cycle, stay until it ends: without the silence the work loses its point.

On the artist’s website the 2024 work has 24 metronomes and a video projection, and its sequence is divided into five thematic parts, one for each tipping point. The festival gives 21 metronomes for Kraków and does not mention a projection, so the Kraków version may differ from that description.

The installation was commissioned by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre as part of its SciArt Resonances IV programme. Scientific collaboration came from Frank Dentener of the same centre. According to the festival’s website, the curator is Elwira Wojtunik-Láng, Patchlab’s artistic director.

Context

Yiannis Kranidiotis works with light, motion, sound and data. According to his biography on the festival’s website, he studied physics at the University of Patras and optics and lasers at the University of Essex. He is now a PhD candidate at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His work keeps returning to the sonification of data on exoplanets, gravitational waves and the solar wind, and to the climate crisis and plastic pollution.

Kraków is not the first to see this work. The artist’s website lists three earlier showings. It was shown at iMAL, a Belgian digital art centre, in May 2024, at the 21st Athens Digital Arts Festival in April 2025 and at the Global Tipping Points conference in Exeter in June 2025.

Patchlab is a Kraków festival of digital art, run since 2012 by the Photon Foundation (Fundacja Photon). According to the festival’s website, the foundation’s founders, Elwira Wojtunik and Popesz Csaba Láng, are also the festival’s curators, and the festival holds the EFFE Label awarded by the European Festivals Association. This year’s theme is “Dream Sim”, and events take place at several venues, among them the Potocki Palace, the Manggha Museum, Cricoteka, Apteka Designu and Hevre+1.

Tickets and time

The exhibition page gives a 10 PLN ticket, sold at the museum’s ticket desk. The ticket button on the same page leads to MOCAK’s general online shop, but the text points to the desk. The museum’s price list has no line for this show.

The museum does not say whether the 10 PLN ticket also admits you to other exhibitions, or whether a general ticket (standard 30 PLN, reduced 20 PLN) covers the audiovisual room. If you want to see more than this one work, ask at the desk before you buy. Patchlab’s ticket page does not list this show, and neither website says whether the festival pass covers it.

Thursday 15 October does not bring free entry to this show. On Thursdays MOCAK admits visitors free only to the Collection displays on level -1, and sells the reduced ticket instead of the standard one for its other exhibitions. The museum does not say whether that rule changes the 10 PLN price.

The show is open during the museum’s opening hours, 11:00-19:00, on all four days, Thursday to Sunday; the Monday closure falls after it ends. The ticket desk sells tickets until 18:30. The closing event is scheduled for Sunday 18 October at 18:00, an hour before the museum closes.

English on site: the exhibition page is in Polish only, and the museum’s English website has no page for this show. The festival has an English page for the work with an “English” label that it does not explain further; it describes the piece as a kinetic light and sound installation.

Allow about half an hour: neither the museum nor the festival gives the length of one cycle, and the work only makes sense at the silence at the end. It will give most to visitors interested in art built on scientific data and in the climate crisis. If you are sensitive to noise, be aware that the climax is a cacophony of more than twenty metronomes. If you would rather see many works than a single installation, try the Collection exhibition “State of Possession” in the same building. The museum says it shows more than 100 works; it is open until 18 October.

Events

• 18 Oct 2026, 18:00 - closing event of the exhibition - announcement of the closing event

See also

• The State of Possession. The Topography of the MOCAK Collection - Part 1 - the MOCAK Collection exhibition, open until 18 October, exactly as long as “Tipping Point”.
• Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka. Ecologies of Togetherness - a site-specific project built on the artist’s year-long residency, which treats the MOCAK building as a living organism; it also ends on 18 October.
• Fort Sztuki 3026 - the archive, films and performances of Fort Sztuki (Art Fort) at MOCAK; the programme starts on 16 October, and the exhibition in Galeria Beta runs from 18 to 31 October.
• Now Everything Will Be Different: Karolina Breguła - Karolina Breguła’s video and photographs about demolished homes and the changing coastline of Taiwan at the Manggha Museum, which also hosts one of Patchlab’s audiovisual nights; until 25 October.

Museum profile: MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow .