A platform for speculation, mapping, and spatial thinking comprises ongoing research projects that concentrate on practices acknowledging the constant flux at the intersection of body, world, and technology. I experiment and explore how cartography and its connections influence the perception of space, encompassing its visual and sonic trails.
This project delves into the interaction among three pivotal components of theater: sound, actor performance, and the influence of the audience as integral participants in the performance. Observers are integrated as equal contributors to the show.
The lighting design is crafted by the observers themselves. Prior to the performance, five paintings with varying emotional effects were selected and reactions were tested using the Muse - BCI device. We enlisted famous masterpieces to select colors corresponding to the emotions experienced. Subsequently, these colors were incorporated into an AI system. With these colors, our audience can express their emotions through colors, thereby creating lighting projections on the screen.
The second component focuses on sound. We aim to investigate its capacity to shift the audience's attention towards different moods. By completely altering the melody within a scene, we observe its impact on the stage at that moment.
The third component revolves around the human element embodied by our actor. We seek to explore the potency of human presence juxtaposed with various technical elements. At certain junctures, our actor is tasked with altering the scene's mood contrary to the mood set by the sound and lighting.
This work offers individuals the opportunity to observe their emotions in real-time. The neuro interface Muse records and measures the intricate electrical processes occurring in the human brain, capturing the expression of emotional states.
Focusing on Paul Ekman's list of primary emotions, four were selected for visualization: joy, anger, sadness, and pleasure. Following Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, each emotion corresponds to a color: joy is represented by yellow, anger by red, sadness by blue, and pleasure by purple.
During the installation, the color palette of emotional impulses is displayed on the screen, along with overall statistics indicating the percentage of each emotion. Additionally, through Kinect technology, these emotions are tracked to specific areas of the human body.
The results of the experiment were shared on the Facebook group.
Collaborative pressure-cooker focused on prototyping new technologies, gestures and practices, which challenge the ways in which we pay attention. The Augmented Attention Lab #1 was a part of Sensorium Festival in Bratislava, Slovakia in 2019.
Facilitators:
Sissel Marie Tonn
Jonathan Reus
Marcello Lussana
George Profenza
Magda Stanova
Nik Forrest
Alanna Thain
This prototype explores and reroutes one key condition of the pressure to perform in contemporary life–immersion. The “i[e]nterface” immersion is the means by which the viewer can sense thought happen. A 3D printed metamorphic mask combines human and non human features, drawn from the forests that skirt the city of Bratislava. The mask is the entry point to a sensitive sphere of immersive perception, as tactile sensors reading galvanic skin responses translate feelings into soft signals of light. From within and from without, the subjective, free play of feeling is made visible as a world.
During the final days of the Lofoten International Arts Festival 2019 a group of writers, sound artists, graphic designers and media artists based in Russia and Norway gathered together in Svolvaer, Lofoten. With the aim to collectively tell speculative stories about the place, they immersed themselves into topics such as tourism and human-nature relations. They argued, brainstormed, laughed and they shared understandings and misunderstandings. The group then let their personal experience of the place, and the art presented at LIAF 2019, be a starting point for them to reflect upon and question their own perception of the place and topics discussed.
Speculative documentation laboratory was transformed into a digital zine, consisting of speculative stories in the form of texts, field recordings, illustration and animation.
Lofoten International Art Festival
Fridaymilk
Experts:
Oleg Khadartsev(Russia, Murmansk) — visual artist, creative director of Fridaymilk
Hilde Sørstrøm(Norway, Tromsø) — art critic, founder of on-line magazine hakapik.no
Aleksandr Timofeev(Russia, Pskov-Moscow) — digital artist, co-founder of artistic community Fluc28
Dmitry Ulmer-Morozov(Russia, Moscow) — digital artist, co-founder of artistic community Fluc28
Speculators:
Alexander Medvedev (field recording, sound)
Samuel Brzeski (text, voice)
Marion Bouvier (text, voice)
Katja Butorina (3D model, sound)
Zhanna Guzenko (voice)
Ritha Johansen (illustration)
Oleg Khadartsev (sound)
Hilde Sørstrøm (text)
This sketch offers a guided tour through the skeletal structure of the traumatic environment within our present-day science fiction narrative. Our setting is the High-Tech Park, nestled amidst a forest inhabited by acaridae, a science campus, a museum of stones, an institute for geophysics, and a belt-road encircling a large Eastern European city. Themes of traumatic interface, positive panic attacks, curated traumas, surface amnesia, and self-generating catastrophes permeate our collective thoughts and discussions. We navigate through intricate connections that prove challenging to grasp, leading us to conceptualize the idea of a diagram-as-skin.
Participants were invited to intertwine their subjectivities with fictional personas in a scenario provided to the group prior to commencement. Over the course of three days, we immersed ourselves in a fictional narrative where we had collectively experienced Burnout and convened in a recreation room. This scenario was constructed upon deconstructed LARP (live action role-playing) pre-play tactics and corporate stress-test events. The objective was to reduce our creative capacities to a minimum and then, from this baseline, collaboratively construct a shared fiction. The overarching goal was to integrate the materiality of our fabricated psychosomatic states into our collective imaginaries, a concept termed "holed futurism." "Holed futurism" portrays a futuristic narrative tailored for individuals with limited resources, particularly those recovering from Burnout, who must consider the materiality of their bodies, environment, cultural apparatus, and the frictions between them.
Through the process of sharing our semi-fictional situated knowledge, our initial trajectory aimed to identify the agents, attributes, states, and operators facilitating transitions between situations. Holes emerged as active components of the environment, forging assemblages between the human and the inhuman.
Upon delving deeper into trauma, we encountered the interface. Its surface manifested holes, revealing an even more reptilian interface within. Within this interface, objects collided in unfamiliar ways, giving rise to a different logic of interaction: the logic of trauma. Operations unfolded without external mediation, succumbing to internal contradictions. Digital texts obstructed and consumed each other, forming unfamiliar assemblages within a realm of heightened virtuality. They seemed to have existed long before us, awaiting a host.
Model of Frederick Kiesler's Endless House (1950-60)
Image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Department of Architecture and Design Study Center. Photographer: George Barrows.
The body functions as a reference point for any activity, any cognitive process. One of the most important components of cognition is movement, sensory, and tactile experience. The body, as a complex system within an even broader environmental system, finds itself fragmented, embedded in reality, and can only understand itself artificially detached from these connections, represented by some abstract model. But within the experience of being, humans remain inseparable from the environment, from the social and political field.
The body, acting as "0" in the coordinate system, with its position in space and time, determines the multiplicity of entities that come into the field of perception. In conditions of isolation, the body is forced to adapt, remaining in a confined space, and getting used to a different experience of presence, acquiring new sensitivity.
Alex Groznykh
Katja Butorina
Regina Dmitrieva
Marina Blinova
Location:
Kanonerskiy Island Environmental Biennale 3
The city becomes obsolete along with the technology of production, becomes a bulky unnecessary machine.
The emptiness can be clothed in verbal form, or it can be given a rather concrete visual image, which will be metaphorical rather than representational. It is possible to manipulate absence/invisible presence by performing a ritual of self-cleansing and getting rid of everything extraneous.
'Pusto' project is based on the illusion of "Phantom Words" discovered by the psychologist Diana Deutsch. Her work was based on the perception of music and speech, recognizing images in the form of multiple auditory illusions. On the one hand - the russian word "пусто" (empty), which is repeated several times, loses its meaning and turns into a set of meaningless sounds. On the other hand - listening to a voice fragment leads to phantom words related to our knowledge, beliefs and expectations. Repetition is also directly relevant to the notion of ritual, in which it helps us to focus on what is happening. Referring to speech as a material gesture, in which the phonographic structure of the word and its sound becomes a kind of sound architecture, fills the space. Illusions are unstable images, generating the appearance of multiplicity, corroding boundaries, autonomous but freely interpretable, in search of information. The experience of living perception is achieved through listening, attention shifts from the external attributes of space to internal sensations. The video sequence allows one to immerse oneself in a state close to a meditative state.
There is a constant transformation of both geographical images themselves and their certain combinations or systems in connection with changes in the goals of certain human activities and conditions of their implementation.
Formation of geographical images is a process of formalisation and at the same time of compression, concentration of certain geographical representations, their transformation into a "clot". Simplicity comes first, and it consists in stopping and distancing oneself from any existing experience.
A church, a palace, a factory building, a craft school are signs of the birth of a new type of city - an artificial, a factory city.
Factories, water-powered machineries, blast furnaces, rails, manufacture. The city that accompanies the first and second industrial revolutions.
The expedition was organized with the aim of exploring the geographical, historical, and cultural aspects of the metallurgical industry in Russia during the early 18th century. We viewed the organization of it as a shift in the historical narrative, moving the focus from the Sestroretsk arms factory to the north, towards the Olonets factories. Within this context, the area's development history is examined within the broader context of the formation of the metallurgical industry, enabling us to draw connections and parallels with other Karelian territories closely tied to factory production.
From archival materials and historical records, we learned that individuals, along with their families and construction resources, were relocated from the Olonets factories to establish a new factory at the mouth of the Sestra River. Our exploration traces the origins of the metallurgical industry in Russia and interlinked the historical and cultural narratives of various regions.
Following a scientific approach, the expedition merged the cultivation of personal experiences with practical engagement with history, offering insights that can be shared with a wide audience.
"The landscape as the interior of one's own mental experiences and images, but at the same time it, this momentary landscape, is a profound image of the inner unceasing extended experience of spatiality."
Curators:
Boris Shershenkov (Russia, St. Petersburg) — sound-artist, constructor of musical instruments
1999Q (Russia, Murmansk) — interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker
The main locations are two industrial monotowns Apatity and Kirovsk which are situated at the bottom of the monumental mountain chain of the Kola Peninsula — the Khibiny mountains.
The project is going to take place at the unique time when the daylight is endlessly extended and the sun is on the horizon for 24 hours.
Field recording lab is the final stage of the international research project Murmansk Prospekt where artists from Russia and the Netherlands are exploring the Northern soviet heritage and the features of the Arctic urban territories.
