Chaos and Cosmos, The Hermitage, St Petersburg, November, 2020
Today, fundamental changes are taking place on our planet, and our entire lifestyle is being re-examined. We see other forms of life existing in what feels like a parallel universe — which we used not to pay such close attention to — and they are now invading our lives. Such inalienable rights as freedom of movement, meeting friends, and saying our last farewells have suddenly become impossible. The pandemic caught us unaware. Like in Noah’s Ark, we are locked up with our families and pets or on our own as we move towards a new technogenic life. Virtual reality has suddenly crept into our lives and is asserting its rights. Social networks are becoming the only form of contact with the outside world, with friends and family. If personal QR-codes contain all the information about a person, including biological data, then where will the boundary lie for state interference in our private lives? Perhaps this crucible of changes will transform society and our everyday reality drastically, help us to shed the unnecessary and superficial things in life, and gain a better understanding of ourselves and the people around us. Naturally, the artist of today makes sense of our present situation, and creatively transforms a vision of the future in the time-honored paradigm of chaos-cosmos.
Places
State Hermitage Youth Education Center
Artists
Phyllis Baldino (USA)
Run the Gamut
02:56, 2020
The video was created by the American artist over two months of isolation during lockdown in France. In her work, she tries to express the feelings she experienced during that period, which cannot be stated in words. Baldino worked with the Internet and limited resources, without the possibility to go outside freely.
2.
Prantik Narayan Basu (India)
Palace of Colors
26:30, 2019
Until recently, the Santal tribe in India did not have its own writing system. Their histories and myths were preserved and transmitted verbally from generation to generation. Each tale has different forms, very similar to the rocks of the nearest hill, which have different shades of color.
3.
Guilherme Bergamini (Brazil)
Plenitude
05:00, 2020
Guilherme Bergamini dramatically juxtaposes documentary footage of a street performance with the song “Ismália” set to a poem by the Brazilian poet Alphonsus de Guimaraens. The artist declares that the Planet Earth will continue to be a home to the kingdoms of Barbarism and Madness as long as at least one person denies the value of all other human personalities and nations.
4.
Mikhail Zheleznikov (Russia)
Souvenir from America
03:59, 2020
A souvenir beer opener becomes a trigger for a historical and geographical essay about the town of Wilkes Barre in Pennsylvania, USA, asserting the nature of the chaos of history and the imperfection of this world.
5.
Ellen K. Levy (USA)
Crying Astronaut
02:29, 2019
This AR work explores the human cost of isolation. The process involves implementing an AR program (Unity/Vuforia); a depicted image in the work on paper (a “tear-collector”) triggers a related video. “Crying Astronaut” deals with some of the issues involved with the unintended consequences of space travel such as physical and emotional stress.
6.
Arina Slobodianik (Russia)
Isolation
01:50, 2020
A kind of phantasmagoria about the alienation which the entire planet Earth may face, where people are constantly displaced by virtual systems developing in parallel, which may take on the form of organisms. This work, filmed in augmented reality (AR), was created during the pandemic to explore human feelings during isolation.
7.
Andréa Stanislav (USA)
Zero Gravity — Nostalgia for Earth
12:36, 2020
A video work resembling a kaleidoscope, which rotates anti-gravitational space architecture between atomized realities and imaginary prospects for space exploration. “Zero Gravity” is based on studies held at the Cosmonautics Museum in Moscow, Russia, including the design projects of the Soyuz spacecrafts and Mir space station, devised by the architect of the Soviet space program Galina Balashova. It studies the complex history of women’s contribution to space exploration in the 20th century.
8.
Jonathan Phanhsay-Chamson (France)
1000 Dreams: Zenti the Invincible
16:50, 2019
The astronaut Zenti is in search of his wife and is attacked by other people’s memories. With various types of animation, perspectives and swiftly moving lines, the artist conveys the feeling of weightlessness and movement in outer space.
9.
Francesca Fini (Italy)
/S)CONFINAMENTO — first chapter
14:12, 2020
The project was created to show the life of the city of Rome as it came to a standstill during lockdown, through a broadcast of footage from surveillance cameras. In the silent emptiness, these brief solitary adventures in the closed city are narrative elements of an anti-Utopian story. With software she developed, the artist transforms the smallest movements into a sound performance and a graphic visualization, and returns this digital flow back to the net, through streaming on Facebook. The open film loop in real time gives a voice to the silent users of a closed city.
10.
Yuki Hayashi (Japan)
Cells and Glass
08:54, 2020
This work is a mockumentary about a glass blower who received a transplant of an animal’s organ, and different fantasies arise in his brain. The process of melting window glass to make vessels resonates with the formation of iPS-cells. The author synthesizes footage found on the Internet, asking questions about the boundaries of forms, and the ambiguity of the life of cells, consciousness and time.
11.
Fay Heady (Ireland–Japan)
Otaku Boi
13:37, 2019
In his tiny 1-room apartment Otaku Boi plays video-games and fights his inner-demons. This animation, which is an adaptation of the “Otaku Boi LIVE” stage show, was created at the Tama Art University, Master Course, Department of Graphic Design, Tokyo, Japan. “Otaku Boi” reflects the chaos of the life of a gamer, migrating between reality and virtuality. It is conveyed through a synthesis of performance, chiptune music, animation and scenography.
12.
Aristarkh Chernyshev (Russia)
Dystopia #02
07:09, 2018
“Dystopia #02” is a critical project about the radical shift of concepts of consumption and post-consumption in modern society. The anti-aesthetics of garbage heaps and endless urban renovation pervade our lives and become part of everyday reality. This gives rise to a feeling of apocalyptic “eternal timelessness”.
13.
Boris Shershenkov (Russia)
Etheroforming
10:48, 2020
VR documentation of an experiment to discover the anthropogenic impact on the ether, continuing the experiments by Thomas Edison. Test generators of pure signals are broadcast to a channel containing an imprint of a historical layer of media.
14.
Tonoptik (Russia)
Zen
19:23, 2019
In this work, the Tonoptik group (Yuriy Tolstoguzov and Alex Inkov) develops the ideas of John Cage and Nam June Paik, particularly Paik’s “Zen for film” (1962), where unexposed film was projected onto a screen. The artists made a study of emptiness using minimalist means, comparing the perfection of mathematical objects with the imperfection of compression algorithms and display devices, and also focusing on the way that people perceive them.