Video Archive
“Death Among Us” documents ordinary people attending an exhibition or walking down the street before coming into contact with a dancing skeleton. The footage recorded via mobile PC allows Elagin to play the live feed juxtaposed with animation on- site, allowing the individuals featured in the video to interact with and react to the animation in real time, blurring the boundaries between the physical and the digital world.
Videostills:
Oleg Elagin is a media artist, musician, who was born in Samara in 1982. Graduated from the Samara State Communication Academy (2004), Independent School of Contemporary Art (2006), The art grant on training in Germany (Stuttgarter kunstverein Stuttgart. Germany) (2014).
The main object of attention of media-artist Oleg Elagin is areflection of absolutely de-humanized art, made by the means of digital technologies. He’s from a cohort of artists – the “alchimists”, assiduous experimenters with the internaltexture, the “body” of the artwork. In his case it is the nonmaterial, digital texture of media. Working in the genre of video art, the artist fills his artworks with visual and sound effects to deform chosen fragment of reality, or create some new image that loose connection with the objective world.
The most attractive themes for Elagin are “mistake”, “malfunction”, and “information noise”. No other artist could scarcely contemplate the screen noise with such sincerity as he does. The system of failure has an interest for him as a self sufficient and self-valued effect, having its own visual potential. What is the way of constructing reality for such kind of art? What consistent patterns in the viewer’s reception of this art are possible? These are the basic questions, which interest the artist.
