Artificial Life catalogue
In the frame of the parallel exhibition program of Manifesta 10, Saint Petersburg, 2014
32 pages
“Artificial Life”, contemporary Romanian and Russian artists
Parallel event to Manifesta Sankt Petersburg
June 28 – July 28, 2014
Bolshaya Konyushennaya ulitsa, 11
St Petersburg
191186
(near Hermitage Museum)
Кураторы | Curators:
Ksenia Podoynitsyna & Cosmin Nasui
Организаторы проекта | Project organizers:
Gallery 21, Moscow and Nasui Collection & Gallery, Bucharest
Участники проекта | Participants
Стас Шурипа | Stas Shuripa
Иван Егельский | Ivan Egelskii
Сергей Лоцманов | Sergey Lotsmanov
Таййяб Тарик | Tayyab Tariq
Лаборатория Медиапоэзии | Mediapoetry Lab
Костя Беляев | Kostya Belyaev
Богдан Раца | Bogdan Rata
Александру Бунеску | Alexandru Bunescu
Раду Белчин | Radu Belcin
Феликс Дяк | Felix Deac
Since origination of the conceptual project, characterized by dematerialization of art and the combination of artistic practice with theory, contemporary art increasingly strives for interdisciplinarity by overcoming its own limits, absorbing alien practices and strategies and crossing over to new territories. Attracting new possibilities of expression and participating in various spheres of human activity such as social criticism, science and education within the framework of the general cognitive process, today’s art speaks about the most relevant problems of the modernity.
“Artificial life” project covers visual explorations based on the principles of combining humanitarian and natural sciences, biological and digital worlds, sociology and mathematics. The swiftly changing reality, in which we exist, poses new problems for art – to evolve in step with the changes taking place in the society it is necessary to establish communication with different forms of cognition and criticism within and beyond the art field.
Such state of art reflects quite well the hybrid reality aspired after by the humanity. Manifested in terms of behavior, evolution and mutation and continuing to be a mystery for science, fundamental life processes are recreated in artistic artifacts.
Art, science and technologies meet in the zone that reveals general functioning and operating schemes in a living organism, society and computer technologies and discloses basic evolutionary processes in language, social relations and biological systems. While combining real and imaginary, art tries to find a place of detached observation by using new technologies, representing scientific knowledge and by simultaneously monitoring day-to-day experience and uncovering the processes hidden behind it. The artist’s main task becomes a search for the language capable of describing the processes characteristic of today’s moment in the world, where rapidly developing technologies change our way of interpreting space and interacting in it. “Artificial life” exhibition in this context aims at showing the audience how new media art creates images able of exposing the processes behind modern world condition using state-of-art technology on one hand and traditional artistic practices armed with only canvas and paints on the other.