CYBERFEST 10. FORGOTTEN IS BETTER THAN NEVER SEEN BEFORE

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CYBERFEST 10. FORGOTTEN IS BETTER THAN NEVER SEEN BEFORE

The division into traditional and new media in contemporary art, which is convenient for institutions from a technical point of view, is far from adequate for artistic practices as such. In Russia, where the artistic process took place to a great extent on a territory outside the reach of institutions, this division for a certain time served as a marker of progressive thinking, but it never revealed the substantive side of the matter.
Cyberfest is Russia’s only annual event that is focused on art created with the help of modern technologies. It is noteworthy that the festival, intentionally or unintentionally, champions the view of new media as a non-autonomous and nonspecific territory inside greater visual art – from both the point of view of history and meaning. Over ten years, a special style has developed for interaction with new technologies and the reality that they create: the high-tech content and its intrinsic alienation and coldness are obstructed by the image, the work’s reverent content. The festival’s old-timers are inclined to discern the possibility of accelerated aging in digital gimmicks. Having lost its progressive and marketing fervor, yesterday’s novelty that promised to turn the world upside down migrates into the field of personal memory, nostalgia and history. This is the reason that the festival offers so many things that are drawn or handmade, and makes so many references to the cultural context. It is not the delimitation of reality and virtuality that Cyberfest is dealing with, not the anatomy of vision in the age of post-internet. It is equally nowhere near the issues of horizontal network self-organization, solidarity, or interaction between the Net and politics. Quite the opposite, the artists aim for unprecedented technical possibilities to be subordinate to privacy, and woven into the personal, cultural and historical fabric.
The very technology and the strange multilayered and alienated reality that it engenders has almost never become an object of alarmed attention. At Cyberfest 10, as part of the exhibition project “Interpretations”, accommodated in the halls of Art Academy, scientific and technological progress is only viewed as a source of anxiety by the art group Kuda Begut Sobaki (Where Dogs Run). When the viewer approaches their work, it activates an unfriendly glance in return: an eye emerging on the surface of magnetic liquid starts following its counterpart. The sensation of brazen staring is doubled because movements of the artificial eye are projected on to the wall in an enlarged format. But this is the only example. Even Irina Nakhova, who also reversed the positions of the beholder and the beheld in her installation “Rehearsal”, speaks of the possibility of escaping into the blind zone. The spectators are light boxes, arranged like chairs in a movie theater, with photographs of people who are lying in the pose of the character from Manet’s painting “The Dead Toreador”. The show is a light box, set in the place for a screen or stage, with a reproduction of the painting “The Balcony” by the same artist. The copy looks at the copy; the show victoriously surveys the defeated spectator. The harsh sound that from time to time breaks the silence is supposed to be a reminder of the reality that is outside of this self-referencing system. However, the sound, recorded and reproduced, is also a copy. The only loophole in this situation is the memory of the fact that the great original exists somewhere, after all. This “somewhere” points to the limitation of the media field and the possibility to break out of it.
The understanding of images of classical art through the prism of new media has been the main thread of Cyberfest throughout the ten years of its existence. And this time the thread did not break, as is manifested by the exhibition “Interpretations”. Donato Piccolo intentionally brings to life reproductions of famous paintings. Lee Lee Nam makes Vermeer’s milkmaid pour milk infinitely. Alexandra Dementieva animates the church stained-glass panel from Melbourne. Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov, inspired by the myth of Danae, compel mirrors to bend voluptuously when hit by a ray of light. Ludmila Belova turns a mundane video sketch into a grand canvas where each movement is imbued with metaphysical meaning. Susan Kleinberg examines, micron by micron, the surface of an ancient figurine of the goddess Ishtar from the Louvre, turning it into a cosmic landscape. Koen Theys continues the tradition of the guild group portrait in the form of a video, only instead of the bravura vitality his characters show apathy and depression. One could use the same angle to view the work of Vitaly Pushnitsky who, not willing to destroy the classical integrity and autonomy of the painting, introduces a character and action into it with the technology of augmented reality. Igor Molochevski turns the routine filming of a ride on transport into the semblance of an album of a 20th century traveler with an endless drawing. Fabrizio Plessi, in his characteristic manner, projects a multichannel video of a stone falling into the water. The subject, repeated eight times, is a hypnotic spectacle approaching the realm of religious metaphysics.
The other tactic is to harness new technologies to cater to irony, fun and vital disorder. Marina Alekseyeva uses multimedia as the space in which dreams come true and fantasies materialize. A huge toy dog barks while guarding one of the Dioscuri twins made out of plaster. The high windows of the great hall of the country’s oldest art academy contain moving elevators filled with scurrying and energetic eccentrics.
Sergey Katran in collaboration with ::vtol:: (Dmitry Morozov) made a parody of investigative journalism or conspiracy theory. The exciting paranoid story about the power grab by kombucha is accompanied by music emitted by the fungus.
The kinetic object of Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai deliberately absorbs the context of the Raphael Hall of the Academy of Arts. The two wings beating a black liquid are simultaneously Pegasus, Icarus and the winged webbed genius of contemporary art stuck in carbohydrates.
Anna Frants organizes a cheerful kinetic chaos out of robots, pictures and remnants of art that have occupied a rigid geometric structure. Torn-apart, atomized everyday life could not just be a cause for vague comprehension, but also the primary material for a new world order.
Media are capable of creating a prosthesis for modern perception that is overfed by visuality, breathless from the speed of changing images and out of practice in reading nuances and concentrating on an object. With the help of this prosthesis, one could stop the rapidly moving eye, establish a contact with history and cultural legacy and, consequently, overcome the feeling of unparalleledness (benightedness) of one’s own experience and chronological solitude, and fix the time that is out of joint.