Monday, June 1, 2015

The Treadmill Runner



Intracranial pressure, unpleasant tension in the brain.. Ears like plugged and tends to sleep, but the body cannot stay in peace and requires a movement resulting eventually in a repetitive motion.[1]
Igor and Gleb Aleinikov

Preface
A state of panic, depression or other types of anxiety seem to be the main agents causing the rhythmical expression of the body gestures. Forming a repetitive pattern, in this case, can be seen as the ultimate expression of individual autonomy, perhaps as a form of meditation. Since the brain areas that control cognitive and motor functions overlap with each other, repetitive actions can relieve us from excess nervous energy, thus facilitating concentration in moments of crises. It significantly contributes and facilitates attention or perhaps - it is an attention.
Repetitive actions can also be a big stimuli for mobilizing the physical and mental energy that determines an individual’s market value in general. Using a rhythm as a means for exploiting individual force, in sake of a somewhat communal project, is a practice rooted and traced to perhaps the very beginning of any social formation. Subjecting individuals to a consent rhythm and patterns of repetition is granted as the only way to contribute any extrinsic communal body, be it oared warships in ancient times or a pornography in contemporaneity, revealing sexuality as a “performance, public practice of a regulated repetition”[2]. It is through this externalisation of the performative body that rhythmical repetition is able to constitute itself as an interface between the individual and the social. Rhythm connects the individual with a community and expresses him/her within the collective.
In the social sense the repetitiveness can be compared to the biological processes where several contingent elements have to be subjected to the consent rhythm in order to form a functional superior body. This urge for cohesion from the side of consisting elements can be explained perhaps by acknowledgement of their temporality and awareness of death. But what strives those individuals to the first type of repetition (that is described here as personal)? Most likely the causes are the same: suspense when facing “the void of our own mental screen”[3], as well as of the existence in general.
In utopian society those two polarities would have no separate existence, but in the contemporary world with its increasing convergence of social and geopolitical realms, where individuals are obscured by prevailing social media, the urge for self-identification and self-declaration seems to be the main driving motor creating the binary opposition between those of individual units and social body. But what is an opposition if not the lack of connection and communication, and the absence of valid interface in-between?
Due to rapidly increasing density, humanity seems to overpass the natural state of society, moderated by environmental circumstances (e.g. their correlation to other species), thus approaching the hyper state of implosion when society is absorbed into its own body (an analogy can be found in the astronomical black hole). Constituting units are too converged, thus too active without given chance (or space) for passivity. (I cannot refrain from mentioning Gregory G. Sholette ‘dark matter’[4] as well, where he describes the dominating integral part of society, dense average population - staying invisible but still creating the gravitational field of that society). Overwhelming rhythm seemed to be escalated here to the highest degree, leaving no other option than one of the operational machines to act in the tact to the dictated repetition. The distinction between compulsive repetition and collaboration seems to be fully dissolved in the prevailing noise of machinery convulsion of the social body.
 In contrast, contemporary art is granted freedom previously unimaginable.  Artists' practices are now based exclusively “on personal sovereign decisions that are not in need of any further explanation or justification”[5]. Today it seems that the radical separation between artist and audience that Boris Groys mentioned in his book “Going Public,” is approaching its apogee: rapid increase of participatory art events is perhaps a definite symptom (and not an objection) to this argument. Art is becoming a shelter and asylum for repressed individuality – a means by which one can still provoke and affect the external rhythm. But what is the internal here, described as a “personal sovereign” and how can artistic freedom be understood? Is any kind of mastering the self on some level not a social demand? Maybe this freedom can only be expressed in forms of rebellion – perhaps a voluntary submission of the self to anguish in Phalaris’s bull (as Kierkegaard has described it)[6]? Or perhaps the desert islands described by Deleuze[7]. But what can the artists look for in a place deserted by rhythm, and what is the abovementioned personality of the repetitive motion in this respect? What is the source of that motion that results from that anguish and anxiety? Perhaps the lack of connection again, perhaps the bad interface.
Too many perhapses. I just need to act. I just need to react and wait..
1
Dance / Performance
Nothing is more profoundly, more thoroughly pernicious, than every impersonal feeling of duty, than every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction.[8]
F. Nietzsche. Antichrist.
Rhythm does not requires us to think – it strives to exploit, exhaust and destroy the body. Rhythm despoils us of strength, rhythm deprives responsibility, it takes our freedom away, it makes us functional, it gives an energy, it liberates us from isolation, it strengthens. It variates us from operational machines to creative entities. It does not obligate us to be alive (non-living bodies can be rhythmed). Doesn't that mean it liberates life from obligations?
As Richard Rorty stated once “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.... The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense…” Does the same rule apply to individuals engaged in certain rhythmical repetition or maybe it’s the other way around - the mechanisation of the body liberates our mental capacities?  What is artistic freedom, or what is left to do in this context if we are already deprived of supposed autonomy? Perhaps too late… Perhaps too engaged… We have eaten the apple and have no need to regret it. We created the concept of Humanity and there is no way to retreat from it now: we just need good tools – good interfaces in-between.
If nothing goes right go left. If individuals are destined to be part of rhythmical (or lingual) norms is creative freedom not what resembles the full immersion into those very norms? A submission by renunciation. What still can constitute the self here is some source of pleasure and joy. Pleasure and joy for rhythm is perhaps the distinctive faculty setting a dance apart from a performance; something that personalises and makes possible an action, separating it from operation.
In contrast with a performance, dance does not require a stage, feedback, justification and attention, but just a sense of rhythm. It has no remunerative value. It is liberated from the orthodoxies that constrain just about every other form of activity. It is only attained by the full absence of obligations. Dance does not need a viewer.
The issue with the problem of Public Art in contemporary society with its alienation proliferated by digitalisation of the space, presents itself as a leitmotif for my recent projects. As a public artist, to provoke, challenge and improvise with somewhat conventional connections, feels like the agenda of my artistic practice in general. An artist acting “as legislator, as a sovereign of the installation space - even, and maybe especially so, if the Law given by the artist to a community of visitors is a democratic one,”[9] still retains a distance from that community and remains external to the order he created. He creates a community of spectators “but does so without belonging to this community, remaining outside it”[10] that hinders any possible intimacy necessary for the dance (but still eligible for performance). The strategy I have chosen here is based on the concept of Derrida's Pharmakon as a self-contained medium formed by oppositions in it (poison and cure), and it presupposes this digitalised environment as the remedy for solving the problem. Dancing with a spectator – an activity that requires probably some new means of communication. Exploration and experimentation of that communication is perhaps the main motto and inspiration for my thesis work. 
2
Communication
(Inner experience)
Coming from a culture widely influenced by transitory processes and period of uncertainty, my practice as an artist was mainly shaped by the subject of estrangement within urban areas and social spheres, mainly brought about by the archaic forms of the inherited public relations and transvaluation of those relations. My projects were mostly directed towards an exploration of new and unconventional intersections of on some levels antithetical objects (e.g. destructive properties of nature and digital firmness, public idioms and private feeling, artist and spectator) and the properties gained as a result of combination, forming the new set of possible interfaces, maybe more responsible ones to our contemporary needs.
My artistic activity still bears a deep trace of that initial inspiration keeping me curious to any kind of social or cultural structure. Finding some possible void in them as the means for reformation brings a new perspective of challenges that stimulates my working process on every project. Practicing public art in a Kulturstadt like Weimar in this context seems like a perfect synergy for investigations: the spectator with the aesthetic view shaped through the highly admired ancestors in the field of art and culture, and this authoritarian cultural background of the site where every intervention is prone to bare the mark of vice and kind of blasphemy towards the overwhelming patrimony of the city, became the main incite for my interventions in the public sphere. This hereditary culture fully absorbed by museums and institutions, casting legitimate sovereignty and ambivalent glance over everything that is novel or experimental, presents the problem of the contemporary role of a public artist in this historically inertial milieu of established forms and images. But as I stated before every suspicion, ambivalence and ambiguity is an affect caused by lack of communication, and the absence of a valid interface.
The urge to create a new connection can be traced in all of my previous and recent works. The first investigation within the legacy of Weimar resulted in a video work ‘The Way to Buchenwald’ where I depicted the shift of emotional experience of travellers on a particular road. I regularly took this specific bus and observed the actions of the passengers, thus determining the most characteristic patterns of behaviour. I tried to link those patterns to the possible emotional experience of the travellers of the same road around 7 decades earlier. The image that came to my mind was the concept of a video game where attention is concentrated on the features of the road, amplifying and variating the emotional stream at the same time between hope and frustration, between death and life. Mapping contemporary private/public obsessions and visualizing the possible emotional simultaneity, I tried to explore historical connections based on individual perception of a particular memorial.
Another example in this context is the work ‘The Public Artist’ which I realised during Kunstfest Weimar 2015. The work was an interactive installation which consisted of a pull switch installed on one of the streetlights in front of a student dormitory in Weimar. During the two weeks of the festival every passerby had 24-hour access to switch on and off the light in the private space where I was living, working and sleeping. The work was motivated by the existing gap between the students in Weimar and its inhabitants. Divergence of these two groups probably most clearly presents itself to the program of Public Art (the studying program which presupposes engagement between students and local communities).  By giving a possibility to the public to intervene in my privacy and everyday life I tried to create an engaging form of communication and thus to mitigate the separation.
In some cases I used this tactic to experiment with locally existing urban problems. In 2012, using the same media (as the one in ‘The Public Artist’) of an analogue light I challenged my approach with the problems of underground crossings in Tbilisi: places that seemed so insecure and dark that pedestrians preferred not to use them but instead to risk their lives by crossing streets with huge traffic. Several attempts of municipality to illuminate these spaces was followed by vandal actions (perhaps committed by some group of local adults) of destroying the lights. That problem of alienation between city elements and citizens was not particularly site specific but an effect of the dictatorial past of the post-soviet urban environment (an urban milieu with no democratic formation, only supposed to reflect the power of the system) I tried to renew the dialogue, thus evoking the feeling of privacy by means of interactivity between the opposing sides. The final piece was the lighting system, where every passerby could change light conditions and colour of the particular space from red to blue or vice versa by simply pulling down one of the cables installed throughout the underpass tunnel. Providing the possibility for engagement with the space eventually resulted in the prolonged illumination of that space.
The current project that I’m working on, one part of which is supposed to be realised in the frames of Kunstfest Weimar 2016, is about exploring forms of communication between artist and spectator in respect of the new landscape of digital interfaces that are deforming and reforming any conventional human relationship. ‘The Treadmill Runner’ is focused on forms of artist-spectator relation – improvising it, modifying it and investigating it in the context of contemporary social milieu saturated and mediated by all kinds of algorithms and digital tools. It intends on delving into the traditional collaboration between viewer and performer, and emphasizing the distinctive features of it by converting them into the artistic media - into the consisting part of the artwork itself. Through the transformation of artist-viewer relation from context to content it tries to facilitate the anticipation of possible forms of artist-viewer collaboration in the era of the digital Pharmakon.
3
The prosthesis
In one of the dialogues written by Plato, Socrates describes the myth of Theuth, god of writing and inventor of many other arts (such as arithmetic, calculation, geometry, astronomy) but his great discovery was the use of letters. He proposed his gifts to King Thamus of Egypt who was to disperse them to his people. When they came to letters that according Theuth “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories" Thamus replied that as father of letters and from a paternal love he has been “led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours – he goes on – will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”[11]
This remedy for memory described here is articulated by Derrida in his book Dissemination. To describe the duality, that contains invention of writing in this case, he develops the theory of Pharmakon that represents something essentially ambivalent but irreducible to simple binary oppositions - the notion which already bears its own “opposite” within itself. “The ‘essence’ of the pharmakon lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no ‘proper’ characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical, alchemical) of the word, a substance…It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced”.[12]
The content of pharmakon is quite contradictory: whereas Plato’s approach on writing is quite skeptic, perceiving it to be poisonous to the individual and its psychic memory, Bernard Stiegler elaborates that it is an essential part in development of individuals[13]. It presupposes on some level paradoxical relation of its elements. To avoid any possible ambiguity and uncertainty engendered from this ambivalence, I would rather replace the notion of pharmakon in respect to the emergence of the new digital realm, with the more empirical term of prosthesis (it implies causal consequentiality better suited for my explanation), that would significantly facilitate the comprehension of my work and my practice in general.
To legitimate this shift in terms that are describing the duality of the emergence of such objects as writing or digital media I feel I have to elaborate on the idea in a bit more detailed way. For this reason I will briefly delve into the rational-irrational correlation that can be traced throughout the whole history of human thinking. From the very beginning of philosophical disciplines sensuality was mostly recognized as something deceptive and undermining for thinking and reasoning. Rationality that actually was perceived as the basis of philosophy, was waging war throughout the centuries against any symptoms of irrationality as the fatal enemy of this disciplinary field. Irrationality seemed to be also fatal for the overriding and overarching project that is Humanity, where rational reasoning is the main feature distinguishing humans from animals. Diving into the irrational was legitimately perceived as the most perilous act for society since the rationality that it was based on was quite fragile without any proper backup. To use a metaphor - it is hard to enjoy swimming without shores nearby. My point of view is that during the whole story of mankind all our attention is stimulated and directed towards the creation of these kind of backups for the human enterprise that according to George Bataille was initiated as the shelter against death - as the result of realising the precariousness of our projects in the face of death.
Invention of those backups can be seen as the main driving force constituting every activity of individuals within society, as well as of society itself.
Those social prosthesis, as any kind of prosthesis, are designed to relegate the task onto them, which eventually approached its final phase of development, gained a rigid form and irrelevance to human participation. They are tools that we are creating when we don’t have the capacity or urge anymore to do something on our own - machines undertaking the tasks which become boring for us and through abandonment of which we are acquiring the space and psychic energy for other social economies and new engagements.
The idea of prosthesis can also be interpreted as the act of rebellion of the individual against the socium: their inventions provide a space for personalisation and implements its temporary relief from the project Humanity. We can see through history that these types of emancipation of something personal, sensual, instinctual and perhaps even mystical is always accompanied with the new invention of some social tool eventually causing that emancipation (or vice versa: the strive for personal emancipation causing the invention of some social tool). A convenient example of it can be the case of Blaise Pascal, one of the first advocates of irrationality who at the same time created the first calculative machine “Pascaline”. These tools and machines (that I call prosthesis) are exactly what preserves and flourishes the individual within society, kind of lymphocytes produced against the full absorption into the superior social body.
Beginning from 17th century and Pascal gradually increasing capacity of those prosthesis for rational calculation was directly reflected on the vindication of irrationality. Simultaneously with advancing calculative technology (resulting in all kinds of algorithmic machines prevailing and mediating today any kind of social network) the value of the rational was gradually denigrated, superseded by the value of irrational, and eventually resulted in insignificance and abandonment of that rational-irrational binary differentiation. We relegated the task of computation on machines, thus we relieved the space for something sensual and personal mysticism that is usually viewed as paradoxical in respect to the rationalisation of the public space and prevalence of digital tools and algorithms in contemporary social milieu.
This emancipation of sensuality is becoming explicit in the field of contemporary art. In new tendencies like animism and trans-humanism artists are seeking to establish relations of equivalence between the various components of physical reality on the base of pure sensuality and somewhat mystical perception. Inspired by Erik Davis’ Techgnosis the British artist Mark Leckey mounted an exhibition of a new assemblage of objects placed in connection beyond a linguistic (or rational object-subject) framework. “Something vital and mortal emerges from something as cold and lifeless as code” he said in an interview given in 2013. “…I feel we’ve entered a strange new sensory realm; the vivid and mortal sensations created by the convincing visual surface texture of HD, the warm regard you feel towards your stamped metal devices, or the aboriginal shudder you get watching ASMR videos on YouTube. Paradoxically cold autistic cyberspace takes us back to an appreciation of sensuality”[14] – he concludes, but what he describes here as a paradox is precisely the effect of the emergence of the digital prosthesis undertaking the task of “cold” pragmatic interconnections, thus granting us with the possibility of various new encounters with the objects surrounding us.
Today we are facing another obsession concerning attention and repetition that are bases for the education constituting human beings. As the contrast of it we still have the antithetic image of the animal to wage the war against – that is the unrestricted and unconstrained want as the opposite of intelligence. This animal sensuality still bears the sign of a perilous abyss for mankind and perhaps this is the main motor driving all contemporary disciplines – to unarm that sensuality; to make its existence possible without threatening the ongoing project, perhaps with inventing some new prosthesis to relegate the intelligence on them (to back up the intelligence). And how can this strive for creating Artificial Intelligence be perceived if not precisely as a sign and symptom of this anxiety?
My current work is based on the hypothesis that (perhaps because of hyper state of implosion mentioned at the beginning) social communication as a practice totally overwhelming our activity is also entering (or is forced into) a state of rigidness and irrelevance towards human participation, thus it is gradually relegated to the various algorithms within the social network. 
4
The treadmill runner
What could be vainer than all this running for the sake of exercising the faculty of running? And still they run …[15]
J. Baudrillard.

Description
The treadmill runner is an interactive work that has been implemented in two parts, respectively for offline and online public spaces.
The offline version is a staged interactive installation-performance in a public space. The treadmill with the running artist on it will be exposed to public interaction in one of the central squares of Weimar. The interaction will be established by digital means and algorithmic scripts: the microcontroller attached to the treadmill will detect the clapping coming from the viewer, trace the frequency produced by the clappers and synchronize the speed of treadmill according to this frequency (the higher the frequency, the faster the treadmill), thus leaving the performer no possibilities to control the treadmill but only to obey the rhythmical norms dictated by the public through the means of applause. It gives the viewer full possibility to control the action of the treadmill runner by simply clapping in consent rhythm, thus determining the speed of the installed treadmill by intensity and speed of clapping and in this manner forcing performer to run in accordance to the produced rhythm.
 By placing the performer (whose movement is conditioned by the treadmill’s acceleration) in a vulnerable position towards the public and giving the viewer access of controlling the performer (perhaps neglecting or considering the artist's physical conditions) the project also challenges the conditions of private-public relations by exploring the individual's capacity for reliance on the public as well as the public’s liability towards those individuals.
The online part of the work is an interactive video, where the projected runner vitiates the speed of running, from a slow walking to a fast run, so that the rhythm of footsteps is according to the clapping frequency produced by viewers (or internet users) before the screen.
The duality of the work offers me the possible investigation of the role of the human body in the context of a digitalising environment. On one side we have the live human being, the artist exposed to the public and examined by it; on the other side the digital representation, simulacrum excluding the human aspect from it, thus refining the work to pure entertainment. Whereas the offline version is saturated with all kinds of human and natural agents (fear, anxiety, compassion, weather, environmental distraction, etc.) influencing the artist, as well as the viewer, the online version provides the safe and sterile version of the same action. In the online one, the artist is absent thus leaving his digital replica with the same capacity for communication. The viewer is exposed here to two deferent experiences. We can say that with this duality the audience becomes the one who is exhibited as the active agent, animator and essential part of the work. It is the viewer who is at stake here and through which the work is constituted. And the artist – the artist is just supposed to react.

Conceptualization
As social creatures our actions seem to be fully charged and motivated by an encouragement from other social units. Constant stimulation from other people, that is the essence of every activity or creativity, is perhaps the basic phenomenon that coheirs every society and powers it for further development. The act of clapping by a huge group of people, perhaps as a result of a successfully staged action, is probably the main hallmark of conventional viewer-actor contribution that can be presumed as an encouraging and edifying behaviour toward the actor. To explore this collaboration which is a significant part of social communications I’ll focus on the above-mentioned act elaborating it within a different context by transforming it to the object of artistic research.
Art, as an utterly artificial practice is fully based on subject-object coloration. It is only conceptualized by our presence and constituted by viewer-actor interconnection that places it aside from other human activities. As Nicola Bourriaud puts it: “The concept of art itself is nothing else than artificial reality between subject and object.”[16] He quotes Marcel Duchamp that “it's the beholder who make pictures”. It is this action-reaction based collaboration between viewer and actor that makes art possible. Exclusion of the viewer from this field would place the artistic practice among other private and self-edification practices of the individual. Exclusion of the artist also seems inappropriate - leaving the spectator without a spectacle.
Art is probably the most intimate form of communication between individual and community which is based on energy exchange. Art is dialogue between artist and viewer, a practice where causality seems to be obscured by an exchange economy. An “unhindered flood” - to recontextualize Jean Baudrillards viewpoint – where “energy may be looked upon as a cause which produces effects, but it is also an effect which is self-reproducing, and can thus cease to obey any law of causality.”[17] Indeed, it’s impossible to define which is cause and which effect in this bilateral enterprise: like in dance, both sides are just effects of the rhythm created during the intercourse.
Art is coloration that presupposes equality of both sides, but this perception became explicit only though the history. In ancient philosophy the artist is mostly viewed as an entity having some external connections outside the artist-spectator coloration: access to some divine world or obscured truth behind represented objects. They were possessing some inspirational sources inaccessible to the rest of society, and transmitting the gained experience to the spectators who were just supposed to be effected by that. But to refer to the divine as the source of artists activity today sounds to our ears almost like a joke. On the contemporary scene art seems to have only political existence articulating within the common sources and communal actualities. On this shared ground it’s even hard to separate the viewer from the artist; today we can claim together with Joseph Beuys that "every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions”[18]. It seems to be undermining to the concept of art quoted above from Nicola Bourriaud’s lecture, but we can say that every artist is also a human being, thus constituted by his or her social participation and subject-object coloration.

Digital impact
In the project, the performance with the subjected performer seems to be an effect of the viewers' action. Deprived from free choice the artist is compelled to act according to dictated norms: his behaviour consists of compulsory movements subjected by the interface that connects him with the viewer. Spectators here appear to be the total legislators, but on some level their action is also reactionary insight by the submission of the artist to their control.
Action-reaction based collaboration between viewer and an actor is rooted to the geneses of the spectacle and attractive sights of any kind. Performing and applauding practices are conjunct in a symbiosis that forms the conventional body of the art. In this case it is impossible to say which is the cause here and which effect - they are circulating within the close economy of energy exchange, inciting each other, feeding each other, like a self-contented rolling wheel, like a perpetual machine.
..sounds like an utopia without a friction. But let’s imagine the perfect social interface dissolving any kind of friction to the zero point. Coincidently, or (most likely) consequently to alienation perhaps brought about by "the landscape where human relationships are not the main element any more”[19], the emergence of all kinds of digital and algorithmic prosthesis constituting that landscape seem to be quite handy, giving new possibilities for experimenting and exploring new types of connections and communications.
The interface between the viewer and the artist that is used for the work is attained by those new possibilities and it aims on segregation of the performative form of the viewer-actor communication, repelling the conceptual content, thus concentrating on the very form of implementation. Or to speak in Baudrillard's words, providing the “vacuousness of the action’s content”, thus leaving for communication “no more reason to come to an end”; …to cause the Operational Paradox that he describes in his essay 'The Transparency of Evil': “it's better to have nothing to say if one seeks to communicate... good communication — the foundation, today, of a good society — implies the annihilation of its own content.” This connection between viewer and performer is established here through digital means and animated by impulses of algorithm. Its ambivalence (obscurity in the respect of cause and effect) is reflected (thus reversed) in the mirror of digital contemporaneity. Communication is transformed into an unsubstantial and weightless object, script launched into the public realm.
The task of the artist seems a bit obscure: to navigate through the mist of objects dissolved and pulverized by the analog/digital friction; to create connections where everything is already externalised in some algorithmic forms. But indeed, do we need to strive any more for those new connections when we are already besieged with this network of interactive prosthesis and backed up communications? The only task that remains is perhaps learning to dance with all those prosthesis.




[1] paraphrase from the "Traktors". Film by Igor and Gleb Aleinikov. http://www.ubu.com/film/aleinikov_traktora.html
[2] Beatriz Preciado. Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Pornpower. translated by Bruce Benderson. 271.
[3] Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil. Translated by James Benedict. 12
[4] Gregory G. Sholette. Dark matter, activist art and the counter-public sphere. http://www.joaap.org/new3/sholette.html
[5] Boris Groys. Going Public. Politics of Installation. 56
[6] Søren Kierkegaard. Either/Or. Diapsalmata. Edited by Victor Eremita. Translated by Alastair Hannay. 43.
[7] Gilles Deleuze. Desert Islands and Other Texts.
[8] Friedrich Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and Ecce Homo. Translated by Antony M. Ludovici. Kindle edition. 101.
[9] Boris Groys. Going Public. Politics of Installation. 59.
[10] Boris Groys. Going Public. Politics of Installation. 60.
[11] Plato. Phaedrus. 27d - 275c, trans. 1871
[12] Jacques Derrida. Dissemination. 125-6.
[13] Bernard Stiegler. Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon.
[14] TECHNO-ANIMISM by Lauren Cornell. http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=941
[15] Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil. Translated by James Benedict. 48.
[16] Nicolas Bourriaud. Politics of the Anthropocene. Humans, Things and Reification in Contemporary Art.  Lecture given at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_UOa2MS2Dw
[17] “Energy may be looked upon as a cause which produces effects, but it is also an effect which is self-reproducing, and can thus cease to obey any law of causality. The paradox of energy is that it implies a revolution on the level of causes and a revolution on the level of effects — each, practically speaking, independent of the other. It thus becomes the locus not only of a chain of causes but also of an unhindered flood of effects.” Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil. Translated by James Benedict. 101-102.
[18] Joseph Beuys. Jeder Mensch ein Künstler. Auf dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus. 23 March 1978'. Audio recording.
[19] Nicolas Bourriaud. Politics of the Anthropocene. Humans, Things and Reification in Contemporary Art.  Lecture given at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_UOa2MS2Dw

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

The Way to Buchenwald

The video investigates the shift of emotional experience of travelers on particular road. Mapping contemporary private/public obsessions and visualizing the possible emotional simultaneity, it tries to explore the historical connections based on individual perception of a particular memorial.




Gibbameter

Sound Installation
Weimar. Germany. 2015.

The installation is and functional tool to measure the smoothness of the German roads and its invention was motivated by the mesmerized myth about the roads in Germany claiming that it’s even possible to carry a glass full of water on them without spilling it.




Background:

The carefree lifestyle with the background of ruined roads, this is the main picture captured in my memory from my childhood spent during the last years of the communist Soviet Union, oh yes, and the mesmerized expressions of the listeners upon hearing that on the roads of the capitalistic Germany it’s even possible to carry a glass full of water without any spillage.

The supposedly succeeded model of prolonged social hope of the communistic myth, tracing its images as achieved objectives of socialistic utopias; framed as an reified model of all labourers’ desires of all times and constraining its possession from the externality, or more likely to say, restraining its content from the external temptations, from the charms of the ‘perverted’ world of capitalism, that despite of all its struggles to marginalize it, was still increasing its power to seduce.


The work is an allegory for an existing nostalgic system which, amongst its alternatives, justifies its privilege mainly due to the priority of social/urban surrounding, and where, in spite of the government controlled media and a robust anti-capitalistic propaganda, the existing social guarantees can be overpowered by the myth that when travelling on the road of Germany (FRG) it is even possible to carry a glass full of water without spilling it.




Technical description:

In the project a two coach bus has been used, particularly the middle part (the one that holds the carriages together) – the part that represents the most unstable and turbulent fragment and the only part that represents variable shape within its space. This part also represents a way of measurement for the quality of the travelled road, because unlike the rotation around the horizontal axis due to the bus making a left or right turn, the deviation from the horizontal axis is a representative of the smoothness or the quality of the road, the flaws and imperfections should result on the displacement between the planes of the floorings of the two coaches that should be observable by us.
In this process the air pump is fitted between the two points having a varying distance between them. The force will produce displacement and therefore work, that will apply pressure to inflame the installation. As a result we will get and object that will be sensitive towards the slightest faults encountered on the road and it will be interacted with this specific section of the road (Weimar-Buchenwald).




Plait


Art Installation / Rebar & concrete.Tbilisi, Georgia. 2014.

Geometrical obelisks of their period that have been implanted into unharmed nature and left alone by all urban communications. These urban elements disseminated; so isolated from all city infrastructures and now almost inseparable from organic nature, they have declared their independence from all humanity and found their refuge in the shelter of nature. Being betrayed but still capable to charm us, how amenable can they be towards our interventions and what are the new criteria for permissible edifications?
In this project I used an element which is so prevalent for the post social urban landscapes and tried to intervene by improvising on existing shapes and bringing a new kind of geometry into the chaotic stream of rebar and concrete. The final object is a plait like column formed by the same elements that surrounded it. 





Hand

Land Art Installation.
Dale, Norway. 2014.

The object represents human hand that is composed of natural shapes of row material, fallen branches and leftovers found in Norwegian forest.










Monday, November 4, 2013

Space / Space LAB.MitOst Fest



Interactive Audio-Visual installation.


Description:
Installation represents an illuminated area, where the power of illumination depends on the activity level of people in the room, the intensity of their motion. The intensity of light on the other hand results in sound produced in the same area and determines its frequency and power. The generated sound consists of four waves, whose frequency (wave length) is varying between the dimensions
of the room (2m – 5m).







About:
We are the witnesses of epochal mystical-tectonic changes, where the main actors are these abandoned, dumb buildings, left stoned after collapse of socialistic era.This building layer of past formation, seeking for cohabitation with the sudden reality of open market and new realia, stricken as a lightening in the evening sky of command economy world, are acquiring new actuality, via replacing their functionality (the original medium they used to gravitating with space and time) by creativity - we see, these blocks are turning into the generators, generating their own, original content. These archaeo-futuristic spaces are now free from the shell of function, levitating in the social-mystical field of own radiation.

Public art project.  2013. Leipzig, Germany.