November 13–24
Exhibition project ID
Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design
Participants:
Alexandra Dementieva (Belgium), Eye Wide Shut, 2019
Endless Attractions Museum (Russia), Demons of the Second Nature, 2018–2019
Anna Frants (Russia–USA), Artist Union. From the series “Matter of Chance”, 2019
Elena Gubanova, Ivan Govorkov (Russia), The Enlightened One, 2019
Mario Klingemann (Germany), Uncanny Mirror, 2018
Daisy Latham (UK), The Knobnose Series, 2018. End of the World; Mona Lisa; Three Dolls, 2019
William Latham (UK), Lance Putnam (UK–USA), Formscape VR, 2019
Alexandra Lerman (USA), Swipe Swipe Swipe, 2017–2019
Yves Netzhammer (Switzerland), Formal Conscience, 2013
Bryan Page (USA), Jesse (Writhing); Pax (Writhing), 2019
Roberto Pugliese (Italy), Equilibrium Variant, 2011
Daniele Puppi (Italy), Psychedelic Lock, 2016
Max Philipp Schmid (Switzerland), Paradise, 2015
Student collaborative project, Pratt MFA Digital Arts Program (USA), E.V.O.D.E.V.O.R.E.V.O, 2018
Student collaborative project, St. Petersburg Stieglitz Academy of Art and Design
(Russia), Transitions, 2019
Alexander Terebenin (Russia), St. Sebastian 24 Hours a Day, 2019
Nye Thompson (UK), Backdoored, 2016–2018
Farniyaz Zaker (Iran–UK), The Earthly Paradise, 2008–2010
Farniyaz Zaker (Iran–UK), Puppet Behind the Curtain, Puppet Behind the Window, 2012
Curated by Anna Frants (Russia–USA), Varvara Egorova (Russia), Valentino Catricalà (Italy), Jack Addis (UK), Patricia Olynyk (USA), Carla Gannis (USA), William Latham (UK), Vlad Strukov (UK), Lydia Griaznova (Russia)
Solyanoy lane 13–15
Mon-Sat: 12:00 – 20:00
Sun: 12:00 – 18:00Tickets:
300 RUB – Adult visitors
150 RUB – Schoolchildren, students, pensioners of the Russian Federation and other categories of visitors
Elena Gubanova, Ivan Govorkov (Russia)
The Enlightened One
kinetic installation, 2019
Engineer Aleksey Grachev
Supported by CYLAND Media Art Lab
The Seeker tries to see the Sought-for through the effort of his action. The action results in the unlocking of the Mystery (lotus) where the Seeker stands in front of his reflection in the mirror and understands that he is the Sought-for. Suddenly blinded by a flicker of light from the mirror in which he has just seen his reflection, the Seeker senses that he is the light. A connection with the Light Source takes place through an emotionally blinding flash that annihilates the former illusory personal identity.
Alexandra Dementieva (Belgium)
Eye Wide Shut
interactive video installation, 2019
Supported by CYLAND Media Art Lab
One can talk forever about the eyes, they are celebrated by poets and praised in scientific treatises. They are commonly known as "windows to the soul", which has paradoxically gained a literal meaning with the invention of one of the most effective identification methods, the iris recognition. Its beauty and complexity could be compared with the surface of the planet. The eyes are celestial bodies in infinite galaxies which we observe in the night sky.
Farniyaz Zaker (Iran–UK)
The Earthly Paradise
installation, 2008–2010
“The Earthly Paradise” series is an homage to the Persian carpet and an exploration of its role as a medium of spatial transformation. Carpets both reflect and generate space. They do so through their texture and their intricate designs, such as the garden design, whose motifs and patterns draw on the actual layout and details of Persian gardens. To those familiar with these gardens and with the religious and poetic tropes associated with them, carpets have traditionally served as a refuge from the often arid and harsh climate of Iran and as a symbol and earthly embodiment of paradise. This series’ artistic intervention draws attention to these cultural, historical and spatial contexts, which often no longer exist, have been destroyed or forgotten, and are therefore sometimes lost for contemporary viewers.
Farniyaz Zaker (Iran–UK)
Puppet Behind the Curtain, Puppet Behind the Window
video installation, 2012
The installation is based on Sadegh Hedayat’s short story, where the main protagonist, a young student in Paris, falls in love with a mannequin. It has all the qualities that the student is looking for in a woman: perfection, serenity, interest. The student buys the mannequin and brings it back to Iran inside a coffin. In order to avoid any conflict with his fiancé, he hides the mannequin in his room and starts a very eccentric love-hate relationship with it. When the fiancé eventually discovers the hidden “woman”, she becomes jealous and begins to imitate the mannequin’s looks and ways. One night, when the man returns home and pulls aside the curtain, “the statue” walks towards him. In panic, he pulls out his gun and shoots his fiancé.
Both the mannequin and the fiancé in Hedayat’s story are somehow perfect. While the fiancé is virginal and innocent, the mannequin is perfect in the way that a model in “Vogue” magazine would be. This faultless woman is always behind a barrier, whether it is a shop window or a magazine page. The video exaggerates this uncanny resemblance by showing multiple images of both, so we can see that these women are clones.
Mario Klingemann (Germany)
Uncanny Mirror
interactive digital media installation, 2018
This real-time installation consists of a screen, a camera and a computer. The camera image is processed by a series of generative adversarial networks that transform the spectators' faces into uncanny representations of themselves. Those representations are based on faces AI has previously seen and subsequently learned. Whilst looking into the mirror the machine will incorporate the face of the viewer into its training set, gradually changing the appearance of the faces it generates, and deviate from its initial bias towards a statistical average of the visitors' distribution.
Student collaborative project, Pratt MFA Digital Arts Program (USA)
E.V.O.D.E.V.O.R.E.V.O
video installation, 2018
Participants: Angela Chen, Angie Huang, Richan Li, Zoe Li, MK Luff, Christopher Munoz, Noth Liu, Hoda Ramy, Ofer Shouval. Curated by Carla Gannis
E.V.O.D.E.V.O.R.E.V.O is the work of nine collaborating artists who come from a variety of concentrations ranging from animation to interactive arts. Under the instruction of Professor Carla Gannis, they undertook the challenge of merging together the skills and styles of nine distinct artists into a singular piece reflecting on the evolution of identity and human consciousness.
Student collaborative project, St. Petersburg Stieglitz Academy of Art and Design (Russia)
Transitions
multimedia installation, 2019
Participants: Olga Knyazeva, Vsevolod Markov, Maria Sviderskaya, Maria Terekhina. Curated by Oksana Petrukhina
For many people, Internet and social media became one of the modes of identification, coexistence and socialization. The person independently decides whether to participate in what’s happening on the screen (online), whether to be a part of it. The person remains her/himself, just in another way. Does the person remain her/himself? Spectator is invited to come to the screens that compose an installation, and try on a personality of one of the project’s authors. Her/his virtual world. Her/his self-identification.
Daisy Latham (UK)
The Knobnose Series
sculptures, 2018
End of the World / Mona Lisa / Three Dolls
video with augmented reality, 2019
Daisy Latham explores points of identification in the post-Internet world. An element of this practice is in the craftsmanship of leather mask making and masked performance. With the masks on show here she has performed a series of 20+ performances in night clubs, drag shows, student union bars and karaoke nights around London. Daisy documents these performances as "Knobnose Selfies" — after each performance she takes a series of self portraits for Instagram backstage.
Having gained a substantial following of Knobnose fans online, the artist began to explore performances of gender and identity through Internet-based selfie taking. Consequently she worked to recreate her masks in augmented reality. By balancing the genre of photographic portraiture and digital manipulation, Daisy poses questions on modern subjectivity, lateral identification through sibling relationships and timeless questions of mortality and narcissism.
William Latham (UK), Lance Putnam (UK–USA)
Formscape VR
VR experience, 2019
“Formscape VR” is a new VR experience set on the surface of a vast computer generated landscape. The viewer can explore and rove across its surface, encountering and interacting with floating “mutoids”. The work is inspired by the surrealist painter Roberto Matta’s concept of “inscape”, an interior psychological landscape, which is now reinvented and brought to life using advanced VR modern technology.
Alexandra Lerman (USA)
Swipe Swipe Swipe
installation, 2017–2019
This work explores the invisible abstraction of contract law that exists between the movement of human fingers and the backlit glass of the smartphone screen. The copyrighted, choreographed gestures of the “swipe,” “slide to unlock” and “pinch-to- zoom” are performed by millions each day and are owned by Apple, Inc. A series of clay smartphones are imprinted with indexical “portraits” of these ephemeral and often unconsciously executed touch-screen gestures. These sculptures are installed on a wall painted Rose Gold — a color invented in the nineteenth century by Carl Faberge as a new chromatic alloy of gold and copper. In 2015, Apple released the Rose Gold version of the iPhone and consequently the color was named one of the top trends of 2016 by Pantone. Today Rose Gold is routinely referred to as the “millennial pink” or the “Russian gold.”
Endless Attractions Museum (Russia)
Demons of the Second Nature
kinetic installation, 2018–2019
Participants: Anastasia Krokhaleva, Denis Perevalov
Can a man be fully considered as the inhabitant of a second nature, if he was the one who created it? This question served as an impetus to create the installation of an artificial lawn with plastic plants. Just as doctor Frankenstein, artists revive their creature, setting this synthetic landscape in motion with the help of six motors and artificial intelligence (neuronet) placed in it. Capturing the sounds that the installation produces, AI can change them by directing the micro fragments of the sound stream to various sound gates and reverberators. But what would become AI which has gained access to the man’s creation: a new creator that will continue to refine the world according to its plan, or a demon that will destroy and plunge into chaos all that man has done before it? We'll find out soon.
Yves Netzhammer (Switzerland)
Formal Conscience
digital animation, 2013
Soundtrack by Bernd Schurer
The last part of a trilogy in which Yves Netzhammer studies possible forms of interaction between human beings and their environment. As proxies for us as individuals, doll-like figures move through associative spaces, laboratories, in which different levels of reality intermingle and rearrange themselves. Poetic moments of contemplation alternate with nightmarish scenarios of isolation and loneliness. Attempts at communication and coming together fail because of their inherent impossibility.
Bryan Page (USA)
Jesse (Writhing) / Pax (Writhing)
digital animation with motion activated trigger, 2019
During the formative years of the artist’s life, his mother was diagnosed with cancer and he became a helpless witness to her bodily decline. Her passing inspires this series which investigates notions of corporeal wholeness and the capacity to empathize with other bodies (human, animal, virtual) whose internal experience is potentially incomprehensible.
Bryan Page presents two digital animations, each on an independent television monitor with its own motion trigger. As the viewer steps within the trigger zone for either monitor, the animation starts playing. The body that is approached comes to life and the audio of breathing and writhing can be heard. Upon leaving the vicinity, the animation pauses and the body ceases to live. With participants entering and leaving each activation zone at different moments, each video will start and pause at different times, staggering the animations. The bodies can potentially move toward each other simultaneously, but this interaction is not guaranteed. The semi-randomized viewing experience complicates interactions between all involved parties: between Jesse, Pax, the viewer, and any outside observer witnessing the performance of those that interact with the videos.
Roberto Pugliese (Italy)
Equilibrium Variant
kinetic sound installation, 2011
The work explores the Larsen effect (also known as audio feedback), which typically occurs when a microphone catches the sound emitted by a speaker. The microphone amplifies and reproduces the speaker’s signal with an ever-increasing width. A software, created for this work, manages the position of the mechanical arms, one of which has the speaker and the other has the microphone. The system tends to reach an equilibrium that is physically impossible to attain. The struggle to balance creates an acoustic and visual dimension that is never the same: the frequency of feedback and the movements of the mechanical arms are always different and change in real time.
In nature, the phenomenon of feedback is the capacity of a system to regulate itself. All living beings experience this condition. The project introduces this phenomenon into the world of cybernetics through the use of sound. Sound makes all the movements natural, and the mechanical arms show a movement pattern that is similar to the behavior of living beings, such as two animals fighting or courting. The system changes into a biomechanical organism that has its own life and reacts to external solicitations.
Daniele Puppi (Italy)
Psychedelic Lock
video installation, 2016
Two connected LED monitors appear in a space defined by two angular walls. An image is passed instantly from one monitor to the other accompanied by a forceful rhythmic sound. In the juncture between the two monitors, passing from one temporal dimension to another, a new image, a new space for perception is created establishing a relationship between two distant realities. A sort of “door” which offers similar stories of two diverse periods in time to coexist.
Alexander Terebenin (Russia)
St. Sebastian 24 Hours a Day
installation, 2019
One of the priority fields in the art of Alexander Terebenin is ready-made. A board for knife-throwing in the shape of a person was found in the abandoned and crumbling building of a military academy. The artist identifies the object with the martyr image of Saint Sebastian who lived in Rome, served as a captain of the guards and secretly professed Christianity, for which he was executed.
In time, the image of Saint Sebastian became notably younger and more attractive: while on the 6th century mosaic Sebastian appears as an aged bearded man, in Renaissance paintings he is a beardless youth. The artist is focused on the beauty of Sebastian’s body and not on number of his wounds. In the 15th century, Antonello da Messina has depicted the saint tied to a tree in the middle of one of the Venetian piazzas, however, the execution scene by no means disturbs the leisurely calm of the city: a guard naps and townspeople take a stroll. A martyrdom against the background of a serene landscape.
The metal pierced the flesh hundreds of times, causing unbearable pain and suffering to the saint tied to a tree. The history of human civilization is a story of wars and violence which does not stop for a single day. A pine board covered with wounds. A primitive LED display that is mainly used for advertising cheap stores cheerfully announces that the show of Saint Sebastian’s tragedy takes place non-stop, 24 hours a day.
Nye Thompson (UK)
Backdoored
installation, 2016–2018
“Backdoored” is a software-system-based artwork. For two years this system searched the Internet, collecting screenshots taken through compromised, botnet fodder surveillance cameras by security-testing search bots, and publishing them to the website backdoored.io. The project is named for the hacker slang “backdoor”, which means a defect or feature of a computer system/piece of hardware that allows surreptitious access to data.
The project explores our growing online vulnerability, and the increasing complexity of our relationship with technology. These screenshots are documentations of the process, just as much as they are images, born out of a complex chain of hardware, software and wetware fails. As an archive, they form a kind of global mapping of contemporary anxieties — a document of the things that people are insecure enough about to want under permanent digital scrutiny.
For the show, Thompson has created an installation which offers a unique view of a world under 24-hour surveillance, exploring ideas of voyeurism and complicity. In an age of increasing scrutiny of private actions and thoughts by governments and corporations, this installation explores the uneasy relationship between watcher and watched, and asks what kinds of meanings are available through this act of displaced watching.
Anna Frants (Russia–USA)
Artist Union
installation, 2019
From the series “Matter of Chance”
In collaboration with CYLAND Media Art Lab
“Artist Union” is a reflection on the law of large numbers. Is it applicable in visual arts — to colors in painting, lines in graphics, forms in sculpture, and the image integrity in installations? The law of large numbers is a principle that describes the completion of the same experiment many times. According to this law, the joint action of a large number of random factors leads to a result almost independent of the chance. For example, in the XVI century the length of the English foot was defined, by a royal order, as the arithmetic average length of the foot of the first 16 people leaving the church on Sunday matins. Although the law of large numbers was not yet defined, it serves as the basis for the principle of arithmetic mean used in determining the length of a foot.
Max Philipp Schmid (Switzerland)
Paradise
video, 2015
A man sits in a greenhouse and speaks into a microphone. The literary, philosophical and journalistic text fragments deal with visions of paradise, a longing for Nature and the desire to flee civilization. He continuously rearranges the index cards on which the texts are printed in an attempt to create a meaningful passage. A series of images of gardens and suburban landscapes accompanies the spoken text collage. When not reading, the man creates a soundscape by imitating sounds animals make. The amount of texts and its conflicting content cause him to become increasingly bewildered. In his perplexed state of mind, unreal plant shapes appear and entice him into the darkness beyond the greenhouse.
How do we imagine paradise? How does what we imagine manifest itself in front gardens and urban landscaping? Is paradise, the ideal world, to be found in the untamed wilderness? Why all the small paradises made by humans are fenced in? Is a fence perhaps a prerequisite for the paradise? The video explores the current societal tendency toward withdrawal and separation within the framework of a yearning for an ideal way of life closely linked to Nature.