The exhibition “When Trees Were Analog” is a reflection on the search for stability in a world where time has lost its predictability. The exhibition features 20 works by young artists created as part of the Art & Science master's workshops at ITMO University — a series of courses on bioart, biodesign and living materials, robotic and interactive art, and digital worlds. The rapid acceleration of technological progress makes the present fragile and the future uncertain. In conditions of disappointment and anxiety, we are experiencing a new nostalgic turn: instead of dreaming about the future, we seek support in the past, constructing images of “safe” eras. Nostalgia — the “disease of the 20th century,” in the words of cultural theorist Svetlana Boym — is now taking on digital forms. Algorithms control memory, editing and recreating its fragments. The past becomes a resource: it can be rewritten and relived. The artists in the exhibition turn to the aesthetics of past decades — visual codes, techniques, and poetics that seem simple and yet unattainable. Their works become an attempt to find support and new ways of coexisting with the world: from diary video essays and miniature “dream containers” to “unnecessary” inventions, where irony coexists with a childlike belief in the future.
Artists:
Daniil Volodin, Daria Vostretsova, Maya Goloviznina, Karolina Galanina, Anastasia Guseva, Sonya Elizova, Alya E (Alisa Eremenko), Yulia Izbolina, Valeria Zhuravleva, mikota (Milena Kotikova), Sasha Ostrovsky, Aino Peryshkina, Anastasia Peshin, Vasily Petukhov, Nastasya Romanova, Anel Talgat, Polina Titarenko, Ekaterina Chernukha, ~voolgard~ (Daria Abramova), da veselkov (Daniil Veselkov), Anna Vikhrova
