THE 9TH ANNUAL CYBERFEST EXHIBIT PROGRAM

2015_11_25 cyberfest hermitage

THE 9TH ANNUAL CYBERFEST EXHIBIT PROGRAM

November 25 – December 2

Exhibition PATTERNS OF THE MIND

Curated by Anna Frants and Elena Gubanova

The Youth Educational Center of the State Hermitage Museum
Dvortsovaya pl. 6/8
TU – SA 11:00 – 18:00

OPENING: November 25, 6:30 PM
State Hermitage, General Staff,
entrance from Moika River Embankment, d. 47

The 9th ANNUAL CYBERFEST Exhibition, “PATTERNS OF THE MIND”, explores the resurgence of the artist’s message across media and the complex new forms that have evolved to complicate the production and perception of art itself.

Anna Frants – CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Featured works:

Nicola Rae (UK) / “Reciprocal Resonances Refracted”, 2013

Reciprocal Resonances Refracted (St Petersburg version)
Sound installation

This acoustic project involves projecting sound visualisations activated by live audience participation, and was initially shown in a collateral exhibition at Palazzo Bembo within the 55th Venice Biennale 2013. The program Overtone Analyzer allows interactive sound generation to become visual mark-making through reciprocal sonic play, and here is activated by many triangles suspended in the space. In the St Petersburg version an interest in Russian bell ringing and its ways of communicating collectively will be echoed in the way that the triangles are hung and interacted with. Revolvingperspex tubes will refract the sound visualisations into circular patterns that amplify the space, recalling lighthouse beams across water.

Nicola lives and works in London, UK. Her art practice engages with sonic visualizations through sited acoustic experimentation either interactively or through the use of pre-recorded sounds. Since 2012 she has developed the visualization of interplanetary electro-acoustic transmissions picked up by receivers on earth – www.nicolarae.co.uk

 

Anna Frants (Russia-USA) / “Hands”, 2009 / 10:17

Hands
Video

On this video, we observe the hands of an artist. We shall never learn what they would ultimately mold – we only see the unending creative process. Whatever instrument an artist uses – a paintbrush, a chisel or a computer – he holds it in his hands while creating his work of art. And sometimes, as it is the case here, it is done with his bare hands. Hands are a symbol of the artist’s craft, his creative work… and miracle-working.

Anna Frants is an international new media artist and curator.
Anna Frants’ interactive art installations have been exhibited at top venues across the world.
An accomplished artist, Frants is also a distinguished curator active in expanding and progressing the international field of New Media. She is co-founder of Cyland – a nonprofit that organizes an annual new media festival held throughout St Petersburg. Cyland also houses Eastern Europe’s largest video archive and hosts an artist residency program.
Anna graduated from Baron Stieglitz St.Petersburg Academy of Art & Industry in Russia and Pratt Institute School of Advanced Studies in New York. She spends her time split between Russia and New York.

 

Sven Pahlsson (Norway) / ”Running High I”, 2013

Running High
Video installation

Thematically the work deals with the concept of virtuality, especially the electronic network based virtuality, the way it is manifested and implemented almost everywhere in today’s modern society. The art project also concerns the challenges and consequences resulting from the great paradigm shift of our time i.e. the change as we now definitely and irreversibly leave the physical based society and enter the virtual networked electronic based society.
“Running High” will deal with the constant changes and the fast pace of change. The constant development of movement in all areas, the expectation of constant growth. Modern human beings are now more or less in a state of constant motion and at an ever more faster pace. But most people are not physically in motion, actually rather less, due to the ever increasing situation working in front of computers, The high pace and speed is mostly taking place in the mind, leading to high stress levels and frustrations. Both the intensity and speed of change is in stark contrast to how the human species has evolved and developed physically and intellectually over the last thousands of years up until today.

Sven Pahlsson is a Swedish visual artist who was born in 1965. Sven Pahlsson has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the The Field Museum and at the Arkitektur Museet – The Norwegian Museum of Architecture. There have been Several articles about Sven Pahlsson, including ‘Art Review; Architectural Visions Keep Dreamers Awake’ written by Holland Cotter for New York Times in 2002.

 

Carla Gannis (USA) / “The Runaways”, 2010-2011

Runaways
Video

The Runaways is a performance video, where the artist (filmed running in a real landscape) and “I” (artist’s avatar recorded running in a virtual construction of a landscape) converge as operators in an ontological metanarrative.
The central question Carla is posing is “who are we, as 21st Century minds and bodies, existing within the porous frameworks of sublime natural and technological environments? Emerging from this query is in an absurdist “survival of the fittest” race, where she competes against her virtual self, i.e. her “super self”, a seemingly immortal piece of encoded human representation residing in a highly mutable digital land of Oz.
In the realm of the algorithmic mind anything is possible and virtual her can teleport within seconds to an exotic tropical island or to a snowy winter wonderland, but what are the implications of a real woman running down the middle of a rural highway, not yet denatured, on an icy morning, quite possibly imperiling her life? Once digital entertainment value is added, a kaleidoscopic sky and a 3D avatar, thinner and faster than she, do we really care?

Carla Gannis, originally from Oxford, North Carolina, today lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Gannis identifies as a visual storyteller. With the use of 21st Century representational technologies she narrates through a “digital looking glass” where reflections on power, sexuality, marginalization, and agency often emerge. She is fascinated by contemporary modes of digital communication, the power (and sometimes the perversity) of popular iconography, and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of technological virtuality and biological reality.

 

Sandrine Deumier & Philippe Lamy (France) / “gogatsuByo”, 2015 / 14:51

GogatsuByo
Music: Philippe Lamy
Video

In GogatsuByo, an avatar based on the artist is in permanent conversation with its reflection in moments of demise – a contemporary nod to the Greek Narcissus myth and the virtual narcissistic culture of today’s social media. The artists play with numbers, computer interfaces, and word commands accompanied by an electronic soundtrack

Sandrine Deumier has exhibited internationally including in the Miami New Media Festival, at Espacio Enter, BilbaoArte Art Production Center, Maison Folie, and Festival Voix de Femmes#12 in Belguim. Deumier’s work has been included in festivals and screened at many venues including FILE Anima in Brazil, Agence Topo in Canada, the Athens Digital Arts Festival, Contemporary Art Center, Sala Rekalde in Spain, Visualcontainer in Italy, Alchemy film and Moving Image Festival in Scotland, and Streaming Festival in Netherland among others.

Philippe Lamy is a painter and electroacoustic composer. Lamy’s artwork – combining colors, materials and textures with sounds (recordings, voices, instrumental sounds, dialogues) — has been exhibited in France and beyond. Lamy has made albums on the labels La p’tite maison, High Linear Music, Nephogram, Nowaki, DataObscura, Mystery Sea, Taalem, and Ripples Recordings.

 

Ant Dickinson (UK) / Nothing New “, 2014 / 10:00

Nothing New
Video

Over the last 3 years he has collaborated on a number of occassions with Llangollen based photographer, film-maker and visual wizard Andrew Gale. In May 2012 they situated a piano in the middle of a field up a hill near Vivod on the outskirts of Llangollen. Ant tuned the piano as well as he could using a computer based tuning program and an online tutorial on equal temperament (that he mostly ignored) and started to play. He has at this point in time been playing this piano for 10 months and Andrew has been filming the “performance”.
The piano has stood in that field through all weather; The constant rain of June 2012, brief periods of sun, hard frosts and the crazy snow blizzards of January 2013. They obviously have not sat in the filed for all of that time. They have instead visited the piano at regular intervals. Andrew to film it and Ant playing it as it battles the elements and inevitably, like every object does, decomposes and withers. Eventually it will die. Eventually Ant will not be able to get anything from it at all. It will be spent.

Ant is a musician, sound designer and creative technologist based in North Wales. He uses unconventional instrumentation combined with digital practices integrating elements of improvisation, indeterminism and mechanics. Alongside linear editing software he works with Pure Data, Arduino, Openframeworks and Cocoa.
He recently completed two projection mapping pieces working in collaboration with artist Jessica Lloyd-Jones for exhibition at Adelaide Festival in Australia in February 2015 and is currently working with her developing digitally controlled archectural lighting at Plas Heli, Pwllheli.

 

Lei Lei (China) / “Recycled “, 2015 / 05:22

Recycled
Video

The following images come from negatives salvaged from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, where they had been sent to be filtered for their silver nitrate content. Over the years French collector Thomas Sauvin built this archive of more than half a million 35mm negatives, depicting the capital and the life of her inhabitants over the last thirty years.
From 2011 to 2012, Chinese artist Leilei selected over 3000 photos to create the animation you are about to see, an almost epic portrait of anonymous humanity.

An up-and-coming multimedia Chinese animation artist with his hands on graphic design, illustration, short cartoon, graffiti and music also,
In 2009 He got a master’s degree from Tsinghua University.
In 2010, his film was shown at Ottawa International Animation Festival and awarded The 2010 Best Narrative Short. In 2013 his film < Recycled > was selected by Annecy festival and was the Winner Grand Prix shorts – non-narrative at Holland International Animation Film Festival.
In 2014 he is the Jury of Zagreb / Holland International Animation Film Festival. and he was the winner of 2014 asian cultural council grant.

 

 

CYBERFEST is a Production of CYLAND Media Art Lab: