Translated material
Technogenic futurism
"Victory over the Sun" at the Center for Contemporary Art
The State Center for Contemporary Art provided an opportunity for artists exploring reality with the help of high technology to speak out. Alina and Jeff Blumis, Dmitry Bulatov, Paul Grandjean, Gabriele Leidloff and Vadim Kosmachev visualize the fragile area of interaction between science and art, penetrating the heart and brain, probing memory and the mechanisms of heredity.Optimistic photographs of colorful frogs and their mutant descendants in laboratory flasks are a refraction of the world of genetic engineering in Dmitry Bulatov’s project “Consciousness on Alert.” This project is the result of the artist’s participation in the breeding of living organisms with the property of bioluminescence. Everything is very simple: the “glow gene” is inserted into the frogs, and they begin to play with all the colors of the rainbow: some flicker, others change color according to their mood. Unfortunately, after three or four generations, the grafted property disappears and mutations appear. The scientific project was closed, but the artistic project remained. He lives by raising questions about the meaning of evolution, careless intervention and broadcasting the artist’s warning: “The positive, exalted to the level of hyperbole, breeds disaster.”
Gabriele Leidloff's immersion into the shadowy, surreal world begins with the four-screen video installation "An Ugly Look at the Cast 1.2." Computed tomography, ultrasound diagnostics and radiography are the artist’s main tools. Flickering death masks, X-rays, laboratory mice and brain activity recorded as a sound signal create the illusion of involvement in the author’s field of reflection on the topic of life and death.
A complex model of interaction between a person and his environment is implemented in Vadim Kosmachev’s project “Heart”. This mysterious organ, concentrating emotions and sensitively reacting to any changes outside, appears on the screens as aortic tubes and blood pulsation. The heart is tested by abstract expressionism and computer graphics and returns as a living substance under the hand of a sculptor - a surgeon.
Screens storing the memory of video signals in the video installation “Memory Space” by Alina and Jeff Blumis are a metaphor for the Earth’s noosphere. The thin fabric of memories, their properties and structure is a long-term project of artists to study memory using the tools of the latest technologies.
Purposeful robots in Paul Grandjean's Mating Robots project. Is a mechanism with anthropomorphic properties a parody of a person or an Alien taking over a field where only the living are allowed to play? The artist endowed his toys with a single function: to perform manipulations that could lead to the reproduction of their own kind. The actions of the robots are strictly subordinated to the program laid down by the creator: autonomous movement in search of an object, laser guidance at the target, meeting, long-awaited contact, return to autonomous mode and endless repetition of the cycle until the batteries provide the strength to move.
It is no coincidence that the project “Victory over the Sun” is named after the opera created by the triumvirate: Kazimir Malevich, Alexey Kruchenykh, Mikhail Matyushin. Like the futuristic performance born at the dawn of the 20th century, the new program explores the multidimensionality of reality. Artists pass through the new reality of high technology, broadcasting their worldview, changing our perception of simple and complex things.