Yiannis Kranidiotis. Tipping Point

From 15 to 18 October 2026, MOCAK showed “Tipping Point” in its audiovisual room, a kinetic installation by the Greek artist Yiannis Kranidiotis with metronomes driven by climate data, shown as part of the 15th Patchlab festival.

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 was a single work in a single room, not an exhibition of many objects. According to the Patchlab festival’s website, the installation consisted of 21 metronomes built specially for it. Their tempo was 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 mattered here as much as motion and light. The rhythm started calmly, gradually sped up and turned into a cacophony, and then all the metronomes suddenly stopped. In the work, that silence marked the crossing of a threshold beyond which change may become difficult or impossible to reverse. According to the artist’s website, the single tick of each metronome is designed to resemble the sound of a Geiger counter.

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 gave 21 metronomes for Kraków and did not mention a projection, so the Kraków version may have differed 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 was 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 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 was 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. The artist has added the MOCAK showing in Kraków to that list as the fourth.

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. The theme of the 15th edition was “Dream Sim”, and events took place at several venues, among them the Potocki Palace, the Manggha Museum, Cricoteka, Apteka Designu and Hevre+1.

Tickets and time

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

The museum did not say whether the 10 PLN ticket also admitted visitors to other exhibitions, or whether a general ticket (standard 30 PLN, reduced 20 PLN) covered the audiovisual room. Patchlab’s ticket page did not list this show, and neither website said whether the festival pass covered it.

Thursday 15 October did 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 did not say whether that rule changed the 10 PLN price.

The show was open during the museum’s opening hours, 11:00-19:00, on all four days, Thursday to Sunday. The museum announced the opening for 15 October at 11:00 and the closing event for Sunday 18 October at 18:00.

The show was aimed above all at visitors interested in art built on scientific data and in the climate crisis. Visitors sensitive to noise had to reckon with a climax in the form of a cacophony of more than twenty metronomes. Neither the museum nor the festival said how long one cycle of the installation lasted.

See also

• Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology - one of this year’s Patchlab venues; MOCAK announced the festival’s first audiovisual night there, with Ryoichi Kurokawa’s “nD”.
• Cricoteka - Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor - another festival venue; MOCAK announced the dance performance “Onirica” by the studio fuse* there, built from records of more than 28,000 dreams.

After the show

“Tipping Point” closed on 18 October 2026, together with the 15th Patchlab festival. Neither MOCAK nor the artist’s website names a next venue. No catalogue of the exhibition was found. The museum’s page mentions only the festival’s anniversary book, “THE BOOK. Patchlab Digital Art Festival 2012-2026”; no publisher, ISBN or price for it was found.

No reviews or press reports devoted to this installation were found. The museum has published no attendance figures.

One temporary exhibition is now on at MOCAK:

• “Fort Sztuki 3026” - the archive, films and performances of the Kraków association Fort Sztuki (Art Fort), back after a 20-year break in Galeria Beta; until 31 October 2026.

The MOCAK Collection displays on level -1 are permanently open and described in the museum profile. For 5 December 2026 the museum announces the exhibition “Eleanor Antin. Retrospective” on level 0, open until 21 March 2027.

Other Kraków museums have exhibitions that take up the threads of light, motion and data:

• “Andrzej Pawłowski. Kineforms” - moving light images from the 1950s and the original projector used to make them, in Tadeusz Kantor’s Gallery-Studio run by Cricoteka; no closing date announced.
• “Born of Passion: Calculating Machines from the Walter Szrek Collection” - arithmometers, abacuses and slide rules at the Collegium Maius, data processing from before the computer age; no closing date announced.
• “Zofia Kulik. Instead of Sculpture. Footnotes” - a 1971 diploma work in which a projection of about five hundred slides took the place of sculpture, at the Museum of Photography on Rakowicka Street; until 20 December 2026.

Museum profile: MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow .