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VIDEO PROGRAM

Hours

November, 17: 16:00 – 18:00

November, 18: 13:00 – 18:00

November, 19: 13:00 – 19:00

November, 20–21: 13:00 – 17:00

Venue

State Hermitage Youth Education Center

Palace square, 6–8

The State Hermitage Youth Education Center is entered from the Palace square through the museum zone of the General Staff Building

Participants

Francesca Fini (Italy)

Aristarkh Chernyshev (Russia)

Ellen K. Levy (USA)

Arina Slobodianik (Russia)

Yuki Hayashi (Japan)

Mikhail Zheleznikov (Russia)

Guilherme Bergamini (Brazil)

Jonathan Phanhsay-Chamson (France)

Andréa Stanislav (USA)

Fay Heady (Ireland–Japan)

Phyllis Baldino (USA)

Prantik Narayan Basu (India)

Tonoptik (Russia)

Boris Shershenkov (Russia)

Curator

Victoria Ilyushkina (Russia)

Today, fundamental changes are taking place on our planet, and our entire lifestyle is being re-examined. We see other forms of life existing in what feels like a parallel universe — which we used not to pay such close attention to — and they are now invading our lives. Such inalienable rights as freedom of movement, meeting friends, and saying our last farewells have suddenly become impossible. The pandemic caught us unaware. Like in Noah’s Ark, we are locked up with our families and pets or on our own as we move towards a new technogenic life. Virtual reality has suddenly crept into our lives and is asserting its rights. Social networks are becoming the only form of contact with the outside world, with friends and family. If personal QR-codes contain all the information about a person, including biological data, then where will the boundary lie for state interference in our private lives? Perhaps this crucible of changes will transform society and our everyday reality drastically, help us to shed the unnecessary and superficial things in life, and gain a better understanding of ourselves and the people around us. Naturally, the artist of today makes sense of our present situation, and creatively transforms a vision of the future in the time-honored paradigm of chaos-cosmos.

— Victoria Ilyushkina, Video Program Curator

Phyllis Baldino

Run the Gamut

02:56, 2020 The video was created by the American artist over two months of isolation during lockdown in France. In her work, she tries to express the feelings she experienced during that period, which cannot be stated in words. Baldino worked with the Internet and limited resources, without the possibility to go outside freely.

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Phyllis Baldino, Run the Gamut, 2020

Phyllis Baldino, Run the Gamut, 2020

Guilherme Bergamini

Plenitude

05:00, 2020 Guilherme Bergamini dramatically juxtaposes documentary footage of a street performance with the song “Ismália” set to a poem by the Brazilian poet Alphonsus de Guimaraens. The artist declares that the Planet Earth will continue to be a home to the kingdoms of Barbarism and Madness as long as at least one person denies the value of all other human personalities and nations.

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Guilherme Bergamini, Plenitude / Entirety, 2020

Guilherme Bergamini, Plenitude / Entirety, 2020

Aristarkh Chernyshev

Dystopia #02

07:09, 2018 “Dystopia #02” is a critical project about the radical shift of concepts of consumption and post-consumption in modern society. The anti-aesthetics of garbage heaps and endless urban renovation pervade our lives and become part of everyday reality. This gives rise to a feeling of apocalyptic “eternal timelessness”.

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Aristarkh Chernyshev, Dystopia #02, 2018

Aristarkh Chernyshev, Dystopia #02, 2018

Francesca Fini

/S)CONFINAMENTO — first chapter

14:12, 2020 The project was created to show the life of the city of Rome as it came to a standstill during lockdown, through a broadcast of footage from surveillance cameras. In the silent emptiness, these brief solitary adventures in the closed city are narrative elements of an anti-Utopian story. With software she developed, the artist transforms the smallest movements into a sound performance and a graphic visualization, and returns this digital flow back to the net, through streaming on Facebook. The open film loop in real time gives a voice to the silent users of a closed city.

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Francesca Fini, _S)CONFINAMENTO — first chapter, 2020

Francesca Fini, _S)CONFINAMENTO — first chapter, 2020

Yuki Hayashi

Cells and Glass

08:54, 2020 This work is a mockumentary about a glass blower who received a transplant of an animal’s organ, and different fantasies arise in his brain. The process of melting window glass to make vessels resonates with the formation of iPS-cells. The author synthesizes footage found on the Internet, asking questions about the boundaries of forms, and the ambiguity of the life of cells, consciousness and time.

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Yuki Hayashi, Cells and Glass, 2020

Yuki Hayashi, Cells and Glass, 2020

Fay Heady

Otaku Boi

13:37, 2019 In his tiny 1-room apartment Otaku Boi plays video-games and fights his inner-demons. This animation, which is an adaptation of the “Otaku Boi LIVE” stage show, was created at the Tama Art University, Master Course, Department of Graphic Design, Tokyo, Japan. “Otaku Boi” reflects the chaos of the life of a gamer, migrating between reality and virtuality. It is conveyed through a synthesis of performance, chiptune music, animation and scenography.

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Fay Heady, Otaku Boi, 2019

Fay Heady, Otaku Boi, 2019

Ellen K. Levy

Crying Astronaut

02:29, 2019 This AR work explores the human cost of isolation. The process involves implementing an AR program (Unity/Vuforia); a depicted image in the work on paper (a “tear-collector”) triggers a related video. “Crying Astronaut” deals with some of the issues involved with the unintended consequences of space travel such as physical and emotional stress.

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Ellen K. Levy, Crying Astronaut, 2019

Ellen K. Levy, Crying Astronaut, 2019

Prantik Narayan Basu

Palace of Colors

26:30, 2019 Until recently, the Santal tribe in India did not have its own writing system. Their histories and myths were preserved and transmitted verbally from generation to generation. Each tale has different forms, very similar to the rocks of the nearest hill, which have different shades of color.

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Prantik Basu, Palace of Colours, 2019

Prantik Basu, Palace of Colours, 2019

Jonathan Phanhsay-Chamson

1000 Dreams: Zenti the Invincible

16:50, 2019 The astronaut Zenti is in search of his wife and is attacked by other people’s memories. With various types of animation, perspectives and swiftly moving lines, the artist conveys the feeling of weightlessness and movement in outer space.

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Jonathan Phanhsay-Chamson, 1000 dreams — Zenti the invincible, 2019

Jonathan Phanhsay-Chamson, 1000 dreams — Zenti the invincible, 2019

Boris Shershenkov

Etheroforming

10:48, 2020 VR documentation of an experiment to discover the anthropogenic impact on the ether, continuing the experiments by Thomas Edison. Test generators of pure signals are broadcast to a channel containing an imprint of a historical layer of media.

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Boris Shershenkov, Etheroforming, 2020

Boris Shershenkov, Etheroforming, 2020

Arina Slobodianik

Isolation

01:50, 2020 A kind of phantasmagoria about the alienation which the entire planet Earth may face, where people are constantly displaced by virtual systems developing in parallel, which may take on the form of organisms. This work, filmed in augmented reality (AR), was created during the pandemic to explore human feelings during isolation.

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Arina Slobodianik, Isolation, 2020

Arina Slobodianik, Isolation, 2020

Andréa Stanislav

Zero Gravity — Nostalgia for Earth

12:36, 2020 A video work resembling a kaleidoscope, which rotates anti-gravitational space architecture between atomized realities and imaginary prospects for space exploration. “Zero Gravity” is based on studies held at the Cosmonautics Museum in Moscow, Russia, including the design projects of the Soyuz spacecrafts and Mir space station, devised by the architect of the Soviet space program Galina Balashova. It studies the complex history of women’s contribution to space exploration in the 20th century.

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Andréa Stanislav, Zero Gravity — Nostalgia for Earth, 2020

Andréa Stanislav, Zero Gravity — Nostalgia for Earth, 2020

Tonoptik

Zen

19:23, 2019 In this work, the Tonoptik group (Yuriy Tolstoguzov and Alex Inkov) develops the ideas of John Cage and Nam June Paik, particularly Paik’s “Zen for film” (1962), where unexposed film was projected onto a screen. The artists made a study of emptiness using minimalist means, comparing the perfection of mathematical objects with the imperfection of compression algorithms and display devices, and also focusing on the way that people perceive them.

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TONOPTIK, Zen, 2019

TONOPTIK, Zen, 2019

Mikhail Zheleznikov

Souvenir from America

03:59, 2020 A souvenir beer opener becomes a trigger for a historical and geographical essay about the town of Wilkes Barre in Pennsylvania, USA, asserting the nature of the chaos of history and the imperfection of this world.

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Mikhail Zheleznikov, Souvenir from America, 2020

Mikhail Zheleznikov, Souvenir from America, 2020

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