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VIDEO PROGRAM
12.10.2022, 19:00
Video Program Part 1
19.10.2022, 19:00
Video Program Part 2
Venues
Armenian center for contemporary experimental art (NPAK)
Pavstos Buzand 1/3
Yerevan, Armenia
Tel. +374 10 568-225, +374 99 568-225
Curator Victoria Ilyushkina
Participants
Part 1
Sonia Balassanian (Armenia)
Andrius Venclova (Russia)
Boris Kazakov (Russia)
Polina Komyagina (Croatia)
Konstantin MiTenev (Switzerland)
Lidiya Rikker (Russia)
Anya Tsyrlina (Switzerland)
Part 2
Alek Borisov (Russia)
Ksenia Galkina (Russia)
Elena Demi-dova, Maxim Kalmykov (Russia)
Victoria Ilyushkina (Russia)
Alexandra Lerman (USA)
Lilia Li-Mi-Yan, Katherina Sadovsky (Russia)
Alena Tereshko (Russia), Antti Kukkonen (Finland)
Silvana Chobanyan, Aram Zurabyan (Armenia)
Aizek (Georgia)
Pole-Fromage (France)
Rinatto L'bank (Kazakhstan)
Curator’s introduction
Using works from the CYLAND video archive and new films by wellknown and young artists, this program examines several aspects of analog and digital fermentation of the moving image. By fermentation, we mean the introduction of a certain reactive element to an artwork, which changes the very “fabric” of the moving image, its structure, and accordingly the message too.
The program includes artistic experiments to shift the boundaries of perception of physical and virtual reality, studying the inhuman and human using new digital technologies.
From the first analogue films of underground directors working with 16mm celluloid film cameras in Petersburg in the 1990s to the works of present-day artists with their arsenal of digital camera, computer editing techniques and media genres accessible for transformation, including found and archive celluloid films, 3D animation and placement in the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 Internet environment.
— Victoria Ilyushkina
Aizek
Burnout
2 min., 2022, generative art
In co-authorship with the musician Digital Moss
Part of the NFT collection “100 WAYS TO FALL APART”
Everything has its beginning and its end/everything comes to an end. The age of decay follows the blink of the Big Bang and vanishing/death follows birth. We are a part of the universe, the same laws work for us, no matter if we want it or not. We d e c a y, we disso☉㊂lve, and the only thing left for us to do is to o .bse/. ∷ rv e=- ∷⠷Ξ∷⦙∷…
Aizek (Mikhail Anoshchenko)
Aizek is a media artist. He works with generative graphic art and sound, and creates performances and installations. He studies algorithmic aesthetics and conveying the internal through the abstract. Participant of numerous festivals of electronic music and arts.
Sonia Balassanian
Haghpat 2
12 min. 20 sec., 1999
A camera observes a nude man and woman in the medieval monastery of Haghpat in the north of Armenia. In the endless aspiration to find each other they emerge from the darkness of clay vessels in which monks kept wine, crawl across the floor and disappear again. It seems that this patient search will never reach its culmination.
Sonia Balassanian
Artist. Born in 1942. Her work springs from an interest in abstract painting, and she experiments with collage, installation, performance and video art. Balassanian’s personal exhibitions have been held in the Armenian pavilion at the 52nd Venice biennale (Italy) and at The Sculpture Center in New York, USA.
Boris Kazakov
Stakes
8 min. 1 sec., 1999
The film uses the technique of scratching: the image is created with a needle on 35-mm film. For the original material, Kazakov used several shots from “Silver Heads” by Yevgeny Yufit. The lead role is played by Nikolai Marton. In 1999, “Stakes” took part in the Berlin film festival (Germany).
Boris Kazakov
Artist and director. Born in 1964. From 1990, he worked with the artist Inal Savchenkov, joining the “Engineers of Art” school. His works were shown at the Rotterdam festival (Netherlands) and subsequently acquired by the cinema museum in Amsterdam. Kazakov experiments with different methods of animation without a camera, and invented a way to shoot movies with a photo camera.
Alek Borisov
Reefs
2 min., 2017–2020
Part of the “Cyberborea” project
The “Cyberborea” project (2015-2021) is based on a posthumanist philosophy and includes experiments with the aesthetics of digital culture. In the “Reefs” series, the artist studies the theme of journeying into the cybernetic future. He uses the mythopoetic image of Reefs (the Riphean Mountains), the imaginary boundary between worlds in antiquity, transforming this boundary into a binary pixel, paradoxically splitting the “atom” of digital material and the constitutive element that forms optical illusions of boundaries of perception.
Alek Borisov
Media artist, photographer, designer. Born in 1976. Received an education in philosophy. Works in the field of photography and computer graphics, and develops the theory of the “noise ontology of media systems” and the aesthetics of visual noise. Founder of the “Cyberborea” virtual space.
Silvana Chobanyan & Aram Zurabyan
The Thing
The Thing
3 min. 13 sec., 2020
Something in the unknown
When searching
Your mind is clinging
To the images,
The blank images
Are slipping...
Silvana Chobanian
Artist, actress, director. Born in 1979. Graduated from the Yerevan State Institute of Theater and Cinematography (Armenia). As an artist, she creates audiovisual installations and video art.
Aram Zurabian
Artist. Born in 1983. Studied engineering in Armenia and art in France. Creates videos and installations, and also works in mixed techniques.
Elena Demi-dova & Maxim Kalmykov
Polarities
2 min., 2015
A poetic generator based on texts by Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilyov. In the center of attention are two Russian poets, husband and wife: two polar worlds, two irreconcilable poles. The authors of the work, also husband and wife, made the generator in a single burst of activity. The lines of poetry move according to the law of magnetic fields, positively and negatively charged particles, visualizing the poetic structure of the text.
Elena Demi-dova
Media artist, performer, curator. Curator of the MEDIA BODY MEDIA research project. Studies the multi-modality of sensory perception. Develops interactive technological sculpture and companion objects, and creates media performances.
Ksenia Galkina
#IAMAHOLOGRAM
6 min. 38 sec., 2016
A documentary about people who have become holograms for various reasons. To be a hologram means not having a body, to become completely digital in the physical sense. It is impossible to return to a body. A holographic person retains memory, consciousness, vision, hearing and speech. Ordinary people see holograms without special devices and can enter into contact with them. Is this a new technology that changes human existence, evolution or just another form of escapism? The first hologram people try to answer this question.
Ksenia Galkina
Media artist. Born in 1988. She originally studied to be a journalist, and in 2016 she graduated from the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia (Russia). She works with video and photography, contemplating themes of the non-material existence of the human and objects, digitalization and the “nullification” of space and actions.
Victoria Ilyushkina
“Cat’s Night Dreams” project
2021
Sound: Thorsten Soltau (Germany), Max Kuiper (Austria), Vasily Stepanov (Russia)
This project was the result of a collaboration between video artist Victoria Ilyushkina and composers represented in the CYLAND Audio Archive. The fermentation of the sound of analogue synthesizers into digital sound is combined with the unusual transformation of images of a night garden and the shape of flowers.
Red Snow
3 min. 35 sec., 2021
Sound: Vasily Stepanov, CAA—12 “Cloud Voice”, CYLAND Audio Archive, 2013
Stepanov studied the possibilities of natural reverberation and reflections of sound. The composition was made from the sounds of the Casio MA-120 synthesizer, recorded beforehand in different spaces.
Night Dream
7 min. 33 sec., 2021
Sound: Thorsten Soltau, Max Kuiper, CAA—15 “Mikrophagie”, CYLAND Audio Archive, 2014
Victoria Ilyushkina
Artist, curator. Born in 1971. Curator of the CYLAND Video Archive and video programs of the CYFEST international festival of media art since 2009. In her creative projects, she studies the link of sound and image, and experiments with video in the field of modern choreography.
Polina Komyagina
Depleted Reality
2 min. 44 sec., 2020
A collage film using various animation techniques. A sound automatically generated by computer heightens the lyrical hero’s sense of being lost as he journeys through the debris of his own dreams and thoughts.
Polina Komyagina
Video artist and animation director. Born in 1991. Since 2020, a student at the Experimental film laboratory of the St. Petersburg School of New Cinema (Russia).
Rinatto L'bank
The Birth of Humanity
2 min. 10 sec., 2022
In this project, which he began in 2016, Rinat Abdramakhnov (Rinatto L'bank) studies visual communications of the phenomenology of the human body in the media. He uses photography, computer modelling and 3D-simulation to create complex prismatic distortions. The impossible metamorphoses of the human body shift the viewer’s customary experience into another dimension.
Rinatto L'bank (Rinat Abdramakhnov)
Artist. Born in Astana, Kazakhstan. Besides receiving artistic education, he also obtained a diploma as a programmer. He works in the field of new media: his interests include sculpture, cinematography, animation and 3D-modelling.
Alexandra Lerman
The Return of the Return of the Giant Hogweed
4 min. 47 sec., 2018
The basis of the video is the song “The Return of the Giant Hogweed” released by the British rock group Genesis in 1971. The song warns of the apocalyptic spread of the poisonous plant Heracleum mantegazzianum, which was brought to England from Russia by a Victorian scientist. The ironic narrative is spoken in Russian from the point of view of the hogweed itself, which is carrying out a mission to exterminate the human race.
Alexandra Lerman
Artist. Born in the USSR in 1980. In her research projects she studies how humans are influenced by ideologies and systems that lie at the basis of the postindustrial world of non-material labor, and how humans themselves influence the planet’s ecology.
Lilia Li-Mi-Yan & Katherina Sadovsky
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Video, 3D, CGI, Artificial intelligence, sound, 2020-2022
The artists investigate the possibility of human beings interacting and combining with other forms of existence. The entities in the project are equipped with special implants and an additional system of organs which help them to survive in the new world. The brain emulation enables new people to become immortal as a neural network in digital reality, or with an augmented biological body. The work was created using artificial intelligence. The AI was trained with collections of works by Sadovsky and Li-Mi-Yan. The artists used a linguistic code to obtain visually unique organoid plexuses of cells that form new systems of organs.
Lilia Li-Mi-Yan (b. 1971) and Katherina Sadovsky (b. 1985) are a duo of Russian artists, currently based in Moscow. They studied photography at the Rodchenko Art School, Moscow. They have been working together since 2016. Their versatile approach to art practice covers such art media as photography, painting, sculpture, photo books, installation, video, sound, intervention in public and natural spaces, and social activism by collecting plastic waste in Moscow. Awards: The science and culture museum at Michigan State University grant, USA (2022), ReStore Digital art Awards, Moscow, Russia (2022), Nominees of the 1st Moscow Art Prize in the category "Art and Architecture" (2020), International Photography Grant, USA – finalists in the Documentary category (2019)
Konstantin MiTenev
Bioloid
2 min., 1992, VJ project, 35 mm celluloid film, analog video, animation
Music: Valery Alakhov, Igor Verichev (“New Composers”)
The underground artist scene in Petersburg once decided to create its own planet in the cosmos. The planet Bioloid was conceived as a model of Earth, but on a scale of one to 1 million. Later Konstantin MiTenev made the clip “Bioloid” with the Flash program, using music by “New Composers”; the visual idea was the basis of the Bioloid Factory project, which he created with Ilya Egorov. The clip “Bioloid” was used for VJing.
Konstantin MiTenev
Director, media artist, web artist. Born in 1957. One of the figures of parallel cinema. In his work he moved from text to film images; then to video, to digital code; now he calls himself a metasymbolist. Creator of the first Internet TV channel in Russia, “Twins TV” (1996).
Konstantin MiTenev & Masha Pentium
Kiber_kino project:
ZOO
1 min., 2003
An Answering Machine
1 min., 2002
Studio: UNDINA-FILM. Music: Igor Vdovin
MiTenev defines the genre of his works as html-film: this is a story in html script, which is read as a text with links to animated images, gifs and running text. As the artist says, before 2004 he worked with an artificial intelligence called Masha Pentium. “At a certain moment we went our separate ways, and I learned to do everything myself. The computer taught me methods that I use in my art. I call it metasymbolism”.
Konstantin MiTenev
Director, media artist, web artist. Born in 1957. One of the figures of parallel cinema. In his work he moved from text to film images; then to video, to digital code; now he calls himself a metasymbolist. Creator of the first Internet TV channel in Russia, “Twins TV” (1996).
Pôle-Fromage
Mymy
47 min., 2022
This video, shot by the artists using a microscope, demonstrates the process of cheese production by mites known as “artisons” (which sounds like “craftsmen” in French). The mites try to make their little planet more delicious by chewing on the rind. The uneven rind of the French cheese “Mimolette” resembles the surface of the moon, and it is formed by cheese mites, whose work is displayed in the video.
Pôle-Fromage
An art group founded in 2015. Its members, Inès Day (born 1990) and Jeanson Péchin (born 1988) are graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts (Paris, France). The group conducts documentary and experimental research, primarily studying living beings and their transformation.
Lidiya Rikker
Braces system
Braces system
2 min. 30 sec., 2021
A video essay in the found footage technique. The film is built on visual metaphor and uses ironic juxtaposition, telling of the strange force that always makes humanity put itself in order, as if it were lining up in even rows.
Lidiya Rikker
Director and media artist. Born in 1982. Graduate of the experimental film laboratory of the St. Petersburg School of New Cinema (Russia). Participant of various festivals in Russia and abroad.
Alyona Tereshko & Antti Kukkonen
“Home Odyssey” project
Episode 1. Acquaintance
7 min. 34 sec., 2020
Episode 4. Concepts
5 min. 6 sec., 2020
The project plays on concepts of everyday life that are important for people (friendship, love, food, work, social organization) in the form of a mixture of various media: installation, video, performance, doll’s theater and watercolor painting. The artist Alena Tereshko and the philosopher Antti Kukkonen – a creative and family tandem – introduce us to their home world of fluffy toys. In game dialogue, they discuss relations in society, the difference between socialism and capitalism, and history and politics.
Alena Tereshko
Artist. Born in 1986. Works in the field of graphic art, performance, animation, video and painting. She is interested in the intertwining of modernity and tradition, relations between images and perception, and generally in opposite categories and their points of contact.
Antti Kukkonen
Philosopher. Born in 1975. He received two master’s degrees in theoretical philosophy and political history at Helsinki University (Finland). He is currently studying the philosophy of history, and writing a blog.
Anya Tsyrlina
All Other Things Equal
19 min. 30 sec., 2020
A film edited from Soviet propaganda clips about gender equality that plays with cinematographic recontextualization, entering into a dialogue with ideas of modern feminism.
Anya Tsyrlina
Artist and director. Works with video, electronic music and new media. Her projects combine the structural quests of experimental cinema with documentary and archive practices.
Andrius Venclova
The January Snowstorm Thunders
4 min. 17 sec., 1991, 16 mm celluloid film
With the participation of Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe
A film/performance. The filming was initiated by artist Vladislav Mamysehv-Monroe. He brought a tape recording of this performance of the song “The January Snowstorm Thunders”, which he made with the help of Yury Kasparyan, guitarist with the group “Kino”. They decided to film a clip. During filming, Venclova experimented with double exposure and other technical tricks: for example, the lens was half-closed, and then the film was rolled back, exposing the second half of the frame (so Monroe’s legs turned in one direction, and his torso in another).
Andrius Venclova
Photographer, director, artist. Born in 1968. Began with experiments in parallel cinema, later moving to video image, computer editing, using special effects and VJing. Worked with Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe and the “New Composers” group. In 1991, he showed his films at the Jonas Mekas “Anthology Film Archives” in New York, USA, with Jonas Mekas. Participant of the Mayday festival in Germany (1996, 1997).
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