The online exhibition “It is Time the Stone Made an Effort to Flower” presents digital works by Art & Science Master's students and participants of special educational projects of the Art & Science Centre of ITMO University: Hybrid Workshops and the online course “Inside Art & Science”.
All works were created exclusively for the exhibition and are presented for the first time.
The title of the exhibition is an extract from Paul Celan's poem “The Crown”. The poetry of the classic German modernist poet is full of the urge to destroy the “fortifications of reality” and enter the world of art, which operates on the other side of fixed meanings. We find a similar impulse in the space of digital reality, whose tools make it possible to realize the gesture of negating the laws of the physical world. The digitalisation of an object is an act of removal from its environment, creating the conditions for its independent development.
Within the digital world, objects are in an endless process of becoming. The variability of their forms and representations depends not only on the will of the author, but also on the conditions of digital representation — quality of connection, protocols or screen size. This scalability creates the possibility of bugs and glitches that establish and destroy the understanding of error as something extrinsic to the work of art.
The curators of the exhibition have created a digital space that captures objects and launches a new cycle of their virtual existence. In this world, the diversity of life forms coexists, but the human being is only a witness. Everything that our bodies have become accustomed to must be forgotten, adapting to the conditions of a different mode of perception and feeling. The virtual ecosystem erases the distinction between animate and inanimate, between static and dynamic, opposing universal laws with the principle of radical difference. This is where the world is being reassembled in a peculiar way, with artistic projects acting as protagonists.
The works collected in the exhibition “It is Time the Stone Made an Effort to Flower” use a variety of digital mechanisms to reinterpret images, events and meanings. The plasticity and openness to change of the digital form becomes a central artistic tool. Here the tree turns to stone, and the stone begins to bloom. Arkady Dragomoshchenko appears as a landscape, and the ramen reminds us of our mortality. This is a world where plants create a museum of man, adapting their bodies to anthropomorphic images. The Cyber Chakra fuels this system with digital energy, and a cyberfeminist goddess sits at its apex. All you have to do is to tune your receptors, adapt your bodies and connect to the exploration of another world.
Exhibition Team:
Roman Solodkov, exhibition Space Artist
Mila Lutsyk, design of the Catalog
Asya Kaplan, editor
Artists:
Olga Arslanian, Anna Bachinina, Andrey Bessonov, Andrey Getmanov, Daria Grigorash, Sofia Egorova, Valeria Efimova, Elina Zazulya, Daria Zakharova, Veronika Kislova, Irina Koroleva, Daria Krivaya, Ekaterina Kulakova, Polina Kudinova, Alexandra Mikhailova, Diana Nemikhina, Nika Neputina, Katya Nikiforova, Lena Poturemets, Ekaterina Smirnova, Elena Sokolova, Victoria Terra, Ivan Titov, Sasha Shchos, Ekaterina Yudaeva, Annushka Petrovich, AXNHER, Kira G, NeonRat, SYMETRIA.
