The video installation Pneumatrix (2016) was created in collaboration with several close people for the exhibition of the same name in Košice about a year before the car accident, which was of crucial transformational importance to Erik Binder. According to curator Petr Tajkov, the exhibition’s leitmotif was the symbols of our modern way of life pitted with pitfalls and obstacles.

The used tyres created pneumatrix – a microworld, where this symbol of the ecological burden lives a new, white life. Society’s unsustainable consumption and greed is thus the main theme of the work, which is an audiovisual contemplation about the purification of man free from materialistic desires. The outline of man is also the gateway to the metaphysical world (Same, Same but Different – Golem, 2014), which also includes the glowing Transformers butterflies that arose from car wrecks (2018), and according to the author have flown hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

In Stoic philosophy, pneuma (πνεῦμα) was the concept of the breath of life as an active generative principle behind individual and cosmos, and gives mass its shape and properties. In its highest form, the pneuma establishes the human soul (psyche). The word “pneuma” is a Greek translation of the Hebrew word “ruah” in biblical literature. It has several meanings: air, wind, soul, breath, vital principle. The word “matrix” refers to a cult film that dominated the imagination of pop culture at the turn of the millennium. Liberation from the matrix and knowledge of truth is painful, requiring radical change. In Pneumatrix, it is a child breaking the old order within a person who is renatus in novam infantiam (reborn into a new childhood).