Curated by Anna Frants (Russia-USA), Sofia Kudryavtseva (Russia)
Participants
Antoni Abad (Spain)
Marina Alekseeva (Russia)
Foteini Aravani (UK)
Alan Boldon (UK)
Dmitry Bulatov (Russia)
Alexander Burenkov (Russia)
Ivan Govorkov (Russia)
Marina Gržinić (Austria-Slovenia)
Elena Gubanova (Russia)
Darja Zaviršek (Slovenia)
Alexander Ivanov (Russia)
Valentino Catricalà (Italy)
Sergey Kostyrko (Russia)
Joana Monbaron (Switzerland)
Vladimir Rannev (Russia)
Carla Rapoport (UK)
Andreja Rihter (Slovenia)
Janine Randerson (New Zealand)
Danielle Siembieda (USA)
Vlad Strukov (UK)
YOUTH EDUCATIONAL CENTRE OF THE STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM
Antoni Abad (Spain) - BlindWiki, Unveiling the Unseen
Lecture
Since 2014, Antoni Abad has been developing the mobile app BlindWiki that allows contributors with vision loss, as well as sighted collaborators and friends, to record site-specific audio and immediately post it to the BlindWiki online sensory map. The platform does not just contain information about difficulties and barriers, but is also a repository for experiences, opinions and stories, generating a creative and collaborative cartography of the unseen. The project aims to raise social awareness about the urban landscape as perceived by people with vision impairment or loss.
February 6
7 PM, Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
Foteini Aravani (UK) - Collecting the Present: Digital in Museum Collections
Lecture
Foteini Aravani is a curator at the Museum of London developing the museum’s digital collecting activities. Her talk will explore issues around the acquisition process, copyright, digital preservation, and the intersection of curatorial practice and digital material in museums using the Museum of London as a case study.
February 3
6:30 PM, Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
Alan Boldon (UK) - A Radical Approach to Learning: Facilitating Collective Intelligence
Lecture
Alan Boldon will talk about the international network of learning labs he is establishing with partners across the world. The overarching aim of the project is to define a method for facilitating interdisciplinary and intercultural enquiry. The labs will draw together leading figures from many disciplines, worldviews and cultural backgrounds to consider some of the great challenges of our time. Working solutions to complex problems will be circulated around the network and tested out in different contexts.
February 4
6:30 PM, Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
Dmitry Bulatov (Russia) The Other Side of Sound: Sources and Patterns of Sound Art in Russia
Lecture
Dmitry Bulatov’s lecture is dedicated to the formation of contemporary sound practices in Russia, their interaction with other fields of art and technology as well as the evolution of experimental sound as a whole. Attention will be focused on the analysis of creative work of the phonetic poets of the early 20th century, unusual playing techniques of the so-called jug bands that were an indispensable attribute of theater productions in the 1920s and breaks-through of the engineering thought in the field of design of musical devices that were laying the foundation for contemporary electronic music.
Caption: Performance of the agitprop collective of “Blue Blouse” Troupe in Moscow, 1929
February 9
7 PM, Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
Marina Gržinić (Austria-Slovenia), Andreja Rihter (Slovenia), Alexander Ivanov (Russia), Joana Monbaron (Switzerland), Darja Zaviršek (Slovenia) - Tracings Out of Thin Air. Establishing Oppositional Practices and Collaborative Communities in Art and Culture
Presentation of the book
The central point of this book is to reflect on practices involving collaborative communities in art and culture. For this publication the contributors from Austria, Finland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Switzerland were asked to take into consideration the different histories and experiences of Europe while reflecting and contesting art-educational participative projects with re- and disintegrative aims. This publication is a first step in creating an international community, though a program of presentations in St. Petersburg, Ljubljana and Belgrade that aims at expanding the topics and connections established during the process of the publication.
February 8
7 PM, Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
Valentino Catricalà (Italy) - Rethinking Cinema and Media Through Media Art
Lecture
The “death of cinema” is today a common topic. “Death”, “overtaking”, “aging” are three terms used in contemporary film and media theory. Technological advancement has imposed a new deterministic vision in media studies. This vision is based on a linear idea of evolution. Valentino Catricalà will propose that “death” is not an accurate term to use with regard to the complex spheres of cinema and media, principally because of its connotations of determinism and finality. The practice of artists dealing with technology throws into question the idea of a linear evolution of cinema and media. Without prejudicial interest in the difference between new and old media, artists mix the images, sounds and processes of differing media, giving rise to a new vitality in cinema and media development. In this way they have a bigger impact on the society trying to understand the changes that society is taking on.
February 6
5 PM, Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
Carla Rapoport (UK) - A Brief History of the Lumen Prize
Lecture
How and why did a former financial journalist (FT, Fortune Magazine, The Economist Group) launch a prize for digital art and what has she learned along the way? Carla Rapoport, director and founder of the Lumen Prize, will discuss its origins and review how artists engaging with technology continue to push the boundaries of the genre globally.
February 3
5 PM, Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
Vlad Strukov (UK) Ocular Velocity: Art in the Age of Big Data
Lecture
The culture of the twenty-first century has been described as ocularcentric. The term denotes new modes of production of visual objects and new ways of thinking about vision, including vision being a form of knowledge, literacy and meaning-making. Vlad Strukov, Associate Professor in Film and Digital Culture at the University of Leeds (UK), in his lecture will analyze works by international artists that explore the role of vision in the new economy of knowledge and data. His focus will be on the calibrations of vision in time, or what he calls ocular velocity.
February 4
5 PM, Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
ST. PETERSBURG STIEGLITZ STATE ACADEMY OF ART AND DESIGN
Alexander Burenkov (Russia) - Economics of Attention and Curating Exhibitions in Post-Internet Age
Lecture
In 2013, the American critic Michael Sanchez published in the Artforum magazine his landmark article “Art and Transmission”, in which he described the paradigm of exhibition production, changing under the effect of mass spread of smartphones, and the gallery space that is nowadays viewed as a studio for photographic documentation of artwork. The ubiquity of screens and availability of the internet has changed both the work methodology for artists and curators of contemporary art and the perception of exhibitions by the viewers. The exhibition’s photographic documentation is available online as early as its opening night or even earlier, and the images themselves make it into the complexly-constructed chains of network circulation, competing for the viewer’s attention with the advertisers’ and user-generated content. The lecturer will analyze the relationship between the contemporary economics of attention, social context and post-internet situation that are reflected in the conflictive gallery space and the impact of this space on the work of artists as well as artistic strategies that spring up in response.
February 5
5 PM, Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (Henry Hall)
Elena Gubanova, Ivan Govorkov (Russia) - Technology and Visuality
Creative meeting
Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov, artist painters with an academic background will talk about multimedia projects that have been created by them as part of CYFEST and about how they apply contemporary technologies and new media in their artistic practice.
February 12
7 PM, Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design
Sergey Kostyrko (Russia) - About Some Methods of Data Sonification Derived during the Studies of Biological Systems
Lecture
Over the last several decades, science developed a new method that allows to analyze various processes based on the use of audial reflection of information. The data received in the process of measurements can be transformed into sound oscillations registered by way of sound perception channels. This approach is called sonification. The goal of this lecture is to acquaint the audience with theoretical and practical aspects of the methodology via example of the projects created as part of the platform ART/SCI NEXUS.
February 10
6 PM, Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design
Vladimir Rannev, Marina Alekseeva (Russia) - Opera “Prose” at the “Electrical Theater Stanislavsky”: Analog Technologies at the Theater Space as Illusions of Digital Ones
Lecture
In November of 2017, Moscow held the premiere of opera “Prose” that combined theater and animation. Vladimir Rannev acted as the director, composer and librettist; Marina Alekseeva did stage design and video. Chekhov’s “The Steppe” is sung through; Mamleev’s “The Groom” is represented by a comics video sequence. The opera “Prose” is an example of genre transformation in our time. During their CYFEST lecture, the authors will talk about their work on the project.
February 5
6:30 PM, Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (Henry Hall)
Janine Randerson (New Zealand) - Cloud Worlds: Recent Digital Art from Aotearoa-New Zealand
Workshop
Aotearoa (New Zealand) was named “The Land of the Long White Cloud” by the Māori navigators who first arrived there over 1000 years ago. Today, a growing number of digital artists use weather or atmosphere as an artistic medium to reimagine the cloudy isles. Lisa Reihana’s “Hinepukūhurangi” (“Cloud Goddess”) draws on Māori cosmological narratives; Layne Waerea’s “Chasing Fog Club” invites strangers to chase ephemeral fog; Douglas Bagnall’s “Cloud Shape Classifier” (2006) is a robot software programme that chooses favourite clouds based on predictive algorithms, etc. In addition to screening digital artworks, this workshop will invite discussion on the role of art collaborations with atmospheric scientists and local communities in the context of the climate crisis.
February 4
2 PM, Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (Henry Hall)
Danielle Siembieda (USA) - Re-imagining the Future of Collaborative Communities
Lecture
Danielle Siembieda, Director of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology Leonardo (Leonardo/ISAST), will talk about the society’s work and its history, especially the Leonardo journal founded 50 years ago to serve as an international channel of communication among artists, with emphasis on the writings of artists who use science and developing technologies in their work. Today, documenting and capturing the creative innovators and provocateurs of culture is not enough, so Leonardo is reaching out to pioneers, institutions, thought leaders and the curious to nurture the exploding art/science/technology global community.
February 4
4:30 PM, Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (Henry Hall)