Cold to the Touch, Edna Baud’s 2025 exhibition at Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, unfolds like a meditation on the uneasy pact between humans and the infrastructures we both construct and forget.
In a culture that craves seamless, invisible technology, Baud reintroduces us to its material presence, refusing the fantasy of weightless utility. Her works, with their icy monochromes and smooth, metallic surfaces, stage encounters between machines, bodies, and abstractions that blur any neat separation between the human and the non-human. What emerges is not critique alone, but an aesthetic proposition: that our entanglement with machines is not a metaphor but a fact.
The exhibition’s title resonates with its sensory logic. Coldness is not only a temperature but a condition—an estrangement that mirrors how we treat technology as external, even as it becomes our flesh. Baud’s imagery aligns with the narrative tension in Serial Experiments Lain, where the boundary between body and software collapses, but the presence of the physical persists. Her works suggest that the myth of immateriality is sustained only by pushing matter to the periphery of perception. The cold smoothness of a surface, the silence of a server room, the frozen stasis of a human figure rendered as machinery: these are not metaphors, but reminders that the immaterial is always anchored in the physical.
In Baud’s visual universe, networks, cables, and infrastructure take precedence over human protagonists. People, when present, appear subsumed within the same formal language as objects—flattened, mechanical, part of the circuitry. This flattening does not erase agency but redistributes it, placing humans and machines within the same register of existence. The question her works pose—why we resist the recognition of ourselves as machines among machines—is less accusatory than diagnostic. It highlights a blind spot in how we conceive autonomy, vitality, and creativity under technological mediation.
What Baud achieves is a literalization of technological metaphor. She pulls abstract processes—data transfer, storage, communication—into visibility by constructing them in material forms. Broken engines, power lines, mirrored fragments, and reconfigured devices appear as sculptural agents of abstraction, objects that testify to technology’s persistence beyond human oversight. This refusal to romanticize the inanimate, while still granting it presence, places her work at the intersection of philosophical materialism and contemporary aesthetics. Her palette of monochrome metallics underscores this stance: the works are stripped of warmth not to repel but to insist on a different intimacy, one defined by co-dependence.
Seen within the broader cultural context, Cold to the Touch maps our entanglement with the infrastructures of late capitalism. The slick invisibility of interfaces and networks conceals the material weight outsourced to distant geographies, while economic and ecological crises cyclically re-expose these hidden dependencies. Baud does not propose a solution, but she does ask us to inhabit the discomfort of recognition. Her work dismantles the fantasy of frictionless technology, reminding us that the infrastructures we hide away are not inert but evolving alongside us.
In Warsaw, Baud situates her exhibition within a lineage of post-digital critique yet carves a distinctly sensory vocabulary: austere, metallic, and precise. By rendering technology’s coldness tangible, she reframes estrangement as the ground for a more honest relationship with the non-human agencies that structure our lives. Cold, after all, is not death—it is a condition of contact.
