15 figures of plastic material printed on 3D printer,
acrylic glass 90 by 52 cm
monitor, media player, video MPEG4
Ludmila Belova – artist, concept author
Alexey Grachev – printing on 3D printer, technical support
Digital world is everywhere now: we are surrounded by innumerable gadgets, robots, computers. When we go on the internet, we accept existence of another virtual world, where – unlike the real one – everything is splendid. There is no time there: it can be stopped by pressing «pause» button. In that world we stay forever young, one can be easily transformed into a hero or a criminal, there is no day or night, no gravitation. Digital world is benevolent, always ready to help, show the way, find the medicine, feed, console and entertain. It is a new pastoral, counterposed to harsh reality. The main image of pastoral – sunny summer day – is transformed here into a blue light of computer screen, that allures us into the virtual reality with its original pastoral eternity.
In the installation “Pastorale”, copies of a porcelain shepherdess produced by a 3D printer are arranged on a screen that reproduces a video imitating a flowery meadow. The sound is a compilation of the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully and the chirping of “electronic birds”.
If a traditionally understood pastorale is the peaceful bucolic scene lit by bright sunlight, the digital pastorale is a digitized world behind the looking-glass that represents what is absent in reality, the reflection's reflection. Instead of sunshine flooding idyllic landscapes, the digital spaces glimmer with the cold silver of the moon – the reflected light of the Sun.
The pastoral music of Lully appeases the spectator who sees a multitude of absolutely identical “shepherdesses” dancing on the grass that is breaking up into pixels. The birds’ chirping creates the atmosphere of a joyful sunny day and invites us into this new digital world which dazzles us with its beauty, goodwill and absence of boarders.