Egor Galenko about the Yota Space festival in St. Petersburg

The Yota Space festival is being held for the first time and immediately loudly declares itself: it is an exhibition-collection of the achievements of the latest video technologies. The Frunzensky department store was going to be demolished three years ago, but then it was left in some kind of limbo - of the events held there, one can only remember a strange rave with the participation of the Fischerspooner group. Studios and designers with Yota Space need exactly this - a large and multi-level room. The organizers prefer to call their works “installations,” however, the festival is related not only and not so much to the art world. In general, these are video works from leading studios involved in the creation of videos and presentations, the design of urban space, the arrangement of stages for rock concerts and the accompaniment of fashion shows. Yota Space is a kind of exhibition of the achievements of computer technology, and yes, indeed, installations, a digitized looking glass, dream machinery. Quite an entertaining spectacle - you can easily take children, even preschool age, with you - the festival is no worse than the exhibition "Through the Looking Glass" - a visual course on optics and mechanics, exhibited in the loft project "Etazhi", or the St. Petersburg "Cyberfest", where local artists make hybrid objects that children really like.

The opening (December 5) is scheduled for a concert by the band Hot Chip - discreet English electronic musicians and magnificent melodists, whose songs can easily be imagined on the albums of Prince or the Pet Shop Boys. The Russian duo SCSI-9, who successfully play minimal techno outside Russia, will perform on the same stage with them. Besides them, there are the Masters of Skweee, the main representatives of the squee style, the Scandinavian version of post-dubstep (perhaps the most important events in electronic music are currently taking place in this territory). The opening concert looks completely logical, considering that almost half of the projects presented at Yota Space are somehow related to music.

MSA Visuals. "Body Painting", installation

United Video Artists, for example, have designed shows for U2, Kylie Minogue, The Chemical Brothers and runways for Vivienne Westwood and Y-3. They are already known in Russia: the screen they created, on which a ticker, infographics, and more complex images can be displayed, is the main character at all Massive Attack concerts. In St. Petersburg, the UVA studio will bring a very similar (and also made in collaboration with Massive Attack) installation “Volume”, originally made for the Victoria and Albert Museum: light pillars that respond to people’s movements. Another studio, Musion, has taken rock concert design even further. They created holograms of Gorillaz musicians, replacing real musicians on stage, and repeated the same thing, only on a larger scale, for Tokio Hotel and for the Japanese singer Hatsune Miku. What exactly the object they will bring to Yota Space will look like is kept secret. The third studio related to musical show production, onedotzero, works with clients like the Pet Shop Boys and Lady Gaga. In general, onedotzero is a universal studio, divided into several departments: it includes people involved in the creation of art objects, specialists in effects in video clips, room designers, event managers who organize regular onedotzero festivals, etc. A collection of the latest works of this company entitled "Adventures in Motion" - from video fragments to full-fledged installations, for example, linking tactile sensations with sound - one of its founders, Shane Walter, will bring to St. Petersburg.

Another important figure of the festival is Chris Levine. He is known as the author of the 3D portrait of Elizabeth II, and his installation “All Right Now” will come here, an abstract installation made of screens, 3D projections and lasers. Light is the main tool for him; the artist called one of his works, in which stained glass windows and the singing of a church choir were involved, “LIGHt”. Actually, the works of Chris Levin, based on light painting, give the most accurate idea of the Yota Space festival.

St. Petersburg, department store "Frunzensky", from December 5 to 19

In light of musical achievements