Eight is the circle that returns. Infinity standing upright — the cycle of cause and consequence, power and its shadow. What was meant to preserve can become what destroys.

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John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror — after the Renaissance painting by Parmigianino — was supposed to preserve the soul of the portrayed being against mortality. A self-portrait from the mirror suggests a strong desire for human dedication to self-preservation, now dedicated to self-destruction in our time.

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Oasis, the circled projection video work, shares the same circular shape as the Renaissance painting. Instead of probing the confined soul, it probes the borderline between humans, data, and microbes and the potential threats of biological disasters caused not by nature but by ourselves. Especially after COVID-19, the alarm raised by this artwork is more accurate than ever.

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If we continue developing on the same track as a race, self-destruction is not far off. This may sound desperate; however, safeguard-like alarms and mitigation actions will be needed to stop the disaster. Art is a perfect alarm for collective self-destruction and the best catalyst to activate change. Katja's work operates at the intersection of the biological and the digital with rare precision — intellectually rigorous, viscerally felt. Work like this can trigger more thought experiments in the context of a journey searching for hope — to recognize who we are and what we can do to evolve out of the vicious circle.

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The circle is still open. But the alarm is sounding.

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