</Stas Shuripa: Sense of Being Lost Spreads With Every New Crisis, And Now, Disorientation Becomes Ubiquitous>
author: Katya Ceppel
ODRA talks to experts in contemporary art, this time with the curator and artist Stas Shuripa. ODRA founder Katya Ceppel discussed with Stas the impact of global crises on spatiality, the boundaries of the real and the virtual and the new artists strategies of interaction with the urban environment in post-covid era.
Stas Shuripa is a Moscow-based artist, curator, lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Art; he explores the urban environment, depicting it as a desolate computer world with clear geometry and elaborate construction. The seemingly virtual space is oil painted in detail on canvas. Participant of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013), the Manifesta Biennale (2014). Stas Shuripa is also a founder of the Agency for Singular Research (ASI) that was founded in 2014 together with Anna Titova. ASI is dedicated to artistic research in the field of post-documentary.
Stas Shuripa is a Moscow-based artist, curator, lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Art; he explores the urban environment, depicting it as a desolate computer world with clear geometry and elaborate construction. The seemingly virtual space is oil painted in detail on canvas. Participant of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013), the Manifesta Biennale (2014). Stas Shuripa is also a founder of the Agency for Singular Research (ASI) that was founded in 2014 together with Anna Titova. ASI is dedicated to artistic research in the field of post-documentary.
K.C.: URBAN SPACE TODAY IS A CONSTANTLY CHANGING, DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENT, AS WELL AS THE CITIZENS’ FEELING OF INSTABILITY. TAKING INTO ACCOUNT RECENT HISTORICAL REALITIES – THE COVID CONSTRAINTS AND CITIES EMPTINESS DURING THE ISOLATION, THE CURRENT POLITICAL SITUATION – OUR BODIES CAN LITERALLY FEEL THE TRANSFORMATIONS, AND AS A RESULT OF NOT BEING ABLE TO TRAVEL OUTSIDE THE LOCAL AREA, NEW INNER INTERACTIONS ARE ESTABLISHING. SO, WHAT WAYS OF INTERACTING WITH THE URBAN SPACE ARE ESPECIALLY RELEVANT NOW? HOW TO STABILIZE IN SUCH A TURBULENT ENVIRONMENT? HOW DO CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS REPRESENT CURRENT TRANSFORMATIONS? HOW DO THEY PERCEIVE SPATIALITY?
S.S.: The experience of space today is defined by collisions and interlacing of various forms. Some spaces are defined by movements, flows, migrations, transformations. Other spaces are statical, or frozen like spaces of tradition, and ritual. All of them coexist and collide, mutate and fuse. There’s this feeling of growing discrepancy between individual life-worlds, and social mega-systems, between the technological and the ecological, and so on. Focal point of these collisions is body, something that belongs to many worlds: the individual, the social, the technological, and the natural. It’s a question of embodied presence vs data flows.
S.S.: The experience of space today is defined by collisions and interlacing of various forms. Some spaces are defined by movements, flows, migrations, transformations. Other spaces are statical, or frozen like spaces of tradition, and ritual. All of them coexist and collide, mutate and fuse. There’s this feeling of growing discrepancy between individual life-worlds, and social mega-systems, between the technological and the ecological, and so on. Focal point of these collisions is body, something that belongs to many worlds: the individual, the social, the technological, and the natural. It’s a question of embodied presence vs data flows.
‘Grand Project K’
I think of the new work by Agency of Singular Investigations – titled ‘Grand Project K’ - that has been presented last year in ASI space at CCI Fabrika. It is about the (anti)utopian idea of integration of various spatial orders – from personal to planetary, and to non-human – in the name of world harmony and happy end of history where all social, psycho-, and ecological tensions will be resolved. It presents the proposal for a big collective project of production of small black hole, and its subsequent launch to geostationary orbit. As a result, celestial bodies will readjust their trajectories, starting to rotate around the black hole, and new spatial order will arise – Geocentric universe.
Geocentric – because the black hole will be close to the Earth, so for all observers it will look like planets ets will start to rotate around our planet. The project has the form of installation that includes a number of information stands that reveal calculations, schemes, material evidence, as well as documentary account of history of this idea. Since production of a black hole would take a lot of energy, ASI proposes to collect and accumulate individual cognitive energy, residues of energy of thought that all of us have sometimes. For that purpose, specific equipment and infrastructure are to be built.
Like in the other projects of ASI, this work’s meaning unfolds in the gap between the immediacy of viewer’s presence, and verisimilitude of the discourse manifested in images, texts, and organization of the space.
Speaking of recent history of space, such discrepancy between the presence and the discourse was propelled by Covid. The pandemic reactivated energies of alienation and atomization, emptied social spaces, virtualized public sphere, sharpened the feeling of disorientation, and made us more post-human. Online communications interlace the public and the private on infra-personal level. It’s like beginning of quantum counter-revolution of control after liberating molecular revolutions of late 20th century. 2010’s began with the emancipatory wave of ‘awakening of communities’, with hope that planetary multitude could take over. That decade ended with ubiquitous phobia of contagion, fears of the others, with multitude reliably locked down in their homes, controlled and connected.
Pandemic shown that familiar relationship between body and mind has been inverted. It was thought for many centuries that humans have their precious minds (souls) hidden in the depths of perishable bodies. The latter were protection, and jail for the former. Nowadays, it’s inside-out. Our minds live in video conferences, broadband streams, chats, and phone calls. Mind is not located inside body anymore; it is a cloud of cognitive activities that are extended in space through communication and cognition media. Now body is hidden inside cloud of mind. Body is not thought of as disposable envelop that will be thrown away after the letter is received. Right the opposite. Inside the cognitive cloud of mind body is situated like a pearl protected by shell of spirit. Body became precious. It’s groomed and cherished by self-care industries. You have to save your body, not the soul. This inversion of human nature is part of spatial transformations caused by recent technological revolutions. For example, zoom meetings – they make us part of global networks more than ever, and yet they work for the new kind of sedentarization.
Speaking of recent history of space, such discrepancy between the presence and the discourse was propelled by Covid. The pandemic reactivated energies of alienation and atomization, emptied social spaces, virtualized public sphere, sharpened the feeling of disorientation, and made us more post-human. Online communications interlace the public and the private on infra-personal level. It’s like beginning of quantum counter-revolution of control after liberating molecular revolutions of late 20th century. 2010’s began with the emancipatory wave of ‘awakening of communities’, with hope that planetary multitude could take over. That decade ended with ubiquitous phobia of contagion, fears of the others, with multitude reliably locked down in their homes, controlled and connected.
Pandemic shown that familiar relationship between body and mind has been inverted. It was thought for many centuries that humans have their precious minds (souls) hidden in the depths of perishable bodies. The latter were protection, and jail for the former. Nowadays, it’s inside-out. Our minds live in video conferences, broadband streams, chats, and phone calls. Mind is not located inside body anymore; it is a cloud of cognitive activities that are extended in space through communication and cognition media. Now body is hidden inside cloud of mind. Body is not thought of as disposable envelop that will be thrown away after the letter is received. Right the opposite. Inside the cognitive cloud of mind body is situated like a pearl protected by shell of spirit. Body became precious. It’s groomed and cherished by self-care industries. You have to save your body, not the soul. This inversion of human nature is part of spatial transformations caused by recent technological revolutions. For example, zoom meetings – they make us part of global networks more than ever, and yet they work for the new kind of sedentarization.
K.C.: WHAT HAPPENS TO VIRTUAL SPACE WHEN THE PHYSICAL IS LIMITED BY REAL BORDERS, AND ARE THERE BORDERS IN THE VIRTUAL? DO BORDERS IN THE VIRTUAL EXIST?
S.S.: It’s not that there are no borders in the virtual. All borders are virtual in their nature. Borders are symptoms of the virtual, even if they seem real. There are various ways in which borders manifest itself in the Real – they can grow, condense, crystallize, or be actualized in some other way. Borders are produced and transformed by processes of bordering and unbordering.
S.S.: It’s not that there are no borders in the virtual. All borders are virtual in their nature. Borders are symptoms of the virtual, even if they seem real. There are various ways in which borders manifest itself in the Real – they can grow, condense, crystallize, or be actualized in some other way. Borders are produced and transformed by processes of bordering and unbordering.
They are not necessarily defined by withstanding of the global vs the local. The sharpness of this conflict of the global and the local in the recent past resulted from imperfections of early forms of artificial intelligence. Thinking machines of today are more adapted to the localities, more sensitive to differences than before. This means that social spaces are mutating, soaked with force fields of control and communication.
Today, communication networks often work in favor of re-territorialization, ‘genius loci’, the habitual. This is not surprising: by definition, some of the network nodes might play role of local centers. It was exactly this nature of networks that required to break global transport ties to stop the pandemic: because in the air travel connected world new centers of the pandemic appear everywhere. During Covid pandemic it was exactly the technological progress that first demanded to break physical transportation ties (because virus proliferated through air travel networks). And then, again, it was technological development that allowed many countries to close borders rapidly, and prioritize not the global travel, but local health systems. Which is to say that current wave of anti-globalization itself is a part of the globalization process.
Over last several years I’ve been interested in artistic research of these mutations and interlacing of the virtual and the physical. Several projects of artistic research collective Agency of Singular Investigations (of which I am part) address the problematic of spatial mutations in the context of evolution of communication and control networks. In its work, we often address the problematics of spatial mutations in relation to the transformations of temporalities.
Today, communication networks often work in favor of re-territorialization, ‘genius loci’, the habitual. This is not surprising: by definition, some of the network nodes might play role of local centers. It was exactly this nature of networks that required to break global transport ties to stop the pandemic: because in the air travel connected world new centers of the pandemic appear everywhere. During Covid pandemic it was exactly the technological progress that first demanded to break physical transportation ties (because virus proliferated through air travel networks). And then, again, it was technological development that allowed many countries to close borders rapidly, and prioritize not the global travel, but local health systems. Which is to say that current wave of anti-globalization itself is a part of the globalization process.
Over last several years I’ve been interested in artistic research of these mutations and interlacing of the virtual and the physical. Several projects of artistic research collective Agency of Singular Investigations (of which I am part) address the problematic of spatial mutations in the context of evolution of communication and control networks. In its work, we often address the problematics of spatial mutations in relation to the transformations of temporalities.
‘Park Dystopia’, 2015
Connections between documentation, communication media, history, and the here-and-now of viewer’s perception animates the narrative unfolded by ‘Park Dystopia’ (2015). The archive of several hundreds of photographs found by ASI searchers team unfolds the evidence that in 1955 Moscow was destroyed by meteorite. The collision was previewed and precise copy of the city was built in another place. All dwellers were transported to the new city secretly, and transport roots were redirected. Documentation is placed on spiral shaped tables in the installation space.
Besides historic photos of Moscow’s construction sites of the 1940-50’s (they functioned as proof of dissembling and transportation of the buildings), it comprised maps, schemes, and drawings (some of them relate to alchemy, quantum physics, history of avantgarde, or Thomas Hobbes ‘Leviathan’). Besides that the installation includes a scale model of crater left by meteorite in the place where Moscow once was (now it’s full of secret laboratories exploring spatiotemporal anomalies), and an effigy of the ‘dwarf of political theology’.
Narratives define social spaces and various kinds of landscapes: ideo-, eco-, and anthropological ones. ASI often explores possibilities of certain discourses, such as bureaucratic, urbanist, business, or esoteric notions and references that structure the optics of research. Space of the installation is often built around the idea of viewer’s presence as a cloud, or portal, link to other realities. Being present in the physical space, at the same time viewer is also immersed into various discursive flows: texts, photographs, schemes, and drawings may tell many stories. ASI work often addresses these intersections between physical, social, discursive, and imaginary spaces. The narrative feels both documentary and fictional. This contrast between documentary presentation, imaginary grandeur of its fictional content, and viewer’s presence inside the actual space is that which ignites the sensation of complex topology: body of knowledges presented by images, texts, and objects that intertwines with viewer’s experience of the installation as an immersive here-and-now.
Narratives define social spaces and various kinds of landscapes: ideo-, eco-, and anthropological ones. ASI often explores possibilities of certain discourses, such as bureaucratic, urbanist, business, or esoteric notions and references that structure the optics of research. Space of the installation is often built around the idea of viewer’s presence as a cloud, or portal, link to other realities. Being present in the physical space, at the same time viewer is also immersed into various discursive flows: texts, photographs, schemes, and drawings may tell many stories. ASI work often addresses these intersections between physical, social, discursive, and imaginary spaces. The narrative feels both documentary and fictional. This contrast between documentary presentation, imaginary grandeur of its fictional content, and viewer’s presence inside the actual space is that which ignites the sensation of complex topology: body of knowledges presented by images, texts, and objects that intertwines with viewer’s experience of the installation as an immersive here-and-now.
K.C.: WHEN SOME PUBLIC AND HISTORICAL PLACES ARE DEMOLISHED, COLLECTIVE MEMORY ASSOCIATED WITH THEM IS BEING LOST AS WELL. FOR EXAMPLE, THIS HAPPENED WHEN MOSCOW’S ICONIC SOLOVEY CINEMA THEATER WAS CLOSED DOWN. APART FROM THAT, NEW BUILDINGS AND CLUSTERS EMERGE AT A VERY RAPID PACE.
DO YOU FIND SUCH A DYNAMIC CHANGE OF URBAN SPACE DANGEROUS, WHEN THERE IS LITTLE TIME FOR LONG-TERM STRONG SOCIO-CULTURAL CONNECTIONS TO BE ESTABLISHED?
S.S.: Key component of contemporary experience of spatiality is disorientation. Sense of being lost spreads with every new crisis, and now, disorientation becomes ubiquitous. Disorientation became normalized. It doesn’t mean just chaos. It’s about growth of communications, too. What use to look like chaos now is seen as what Karen Barad calls infra-actions and quantum entanglements. Patterns, paths, attractors, elements of various systems are included in the sprawls and flows that form the spatiality of digital capitalism.
DO YOU FIND SUCH A DYNAMIC CHANGE OF URBAN SPACE DANGEROUS, WHEN THERE IS LITTLE TIME FOR LONG-TERM STRONG SOCIO-CULTURAL CONNECTIONS TO BE ESTABLISHED?
S.S.: Key component of contemporary experience of spatiality is disorientation. Sense of being lost spreads with every new crisis, and now, disorientation becomes ubiquitous. Disorientation became normalized. It doesn’t mean just chaos. It’s about growth of communications, too. What use to look like chaos now is seen as what Karen Barad calls infra-actions and quantum entanglements. Patterns, paths, attractors, elements of various systems are included in the sprawls and flows that form the spatiality of digital capitalism.
Disorientation has temporal dimension, as well. Changes start to feel more abrupt and unexpected. Time dissipates into small durations that are ceaselessly recombined. These recombinations loosen feeling of history, which may look like losses of memory. On the other hand, it is the same temporal structure as in TV-series where time leaps back and forth, extends, or shrinks. Reconfigurations of collective memory are determined by communications structure. They don’t simply erase images of the past, but transform the memories. Our memories of the past, are defined by the present, ‘the Now’ with its tides and ebbs of formalization, creative destruction, - those forces that permeate psychic, social, technical, urban systems and ceaselessly producing space, time, and subjectivity.
Most of destruction done by global digital capitalism is in the name of subsequent creation, transformation of reality. This drive for creative destruction is determined by logic of media, finance, marketing, mass fantasies, fears, and military industry. It often presents itself as a response to disorientation, as rebirth of space where something new has to be built after the old is demolished. This utopian pulsation is that which energizes gentrification projects, and economy of enrichment (as Luc Boltanski calls it) when elements of historical memory are reconstructed, their cultural value ‘enriched’, and turned into market form. Creative destruction is a condition for economy of enrichment. Or, as a form of answer to disorientation in mass societies, it can yield to totalitarian impulse.
What looks like erasure of memory might be rewriting of it. All technics is sedimentary memory. More technology means more mediated memory. Memory is less and less considered something individual, like an imprint of experience in the soul, rather an industrial product. And yet, it forms the basis of identity. It is only because memory is active anticipatory structure of predispositions, not passive container. This activation of archive is but one side of the digital technological mutation. Another side is reinvention, or transfiguration of common places. It makes collective memory not just active, but kind of plastic, mutable and open to the future.
Most of destruction done by global digital capitalism is in the name of subsequent creation, transformation of reality. This drive for creative destruction is determined by logic of media, finance, marketing, mass fantasies, fears, and military industry. It often presents itself as a response to disorientation, as rebirth of space where something new has to be built after the old is demolished. This utopian pulsation is that which energizes gentrification projects, and economy of enrichment (as Luc Boltanski calls it) when elements of historical memory are reconstructed, their cultural value ‘enriched’, and turned into market form. Creative destruction is a condition for economy of enrichment. Or, as a form of answer to disorientation in mass societies, it can yield to totalitarian impulse.
What looks like erasure of memory might be rewriting of it. All technics is sedimentary memory. More technology means more mediated memory. Memory is less and less considered something individual, like an imprint of experience in the soul, rather an industrial product. And yet, it forms the basis of identity. It is only because memory is active anticipatory structure of predispositions, not passive container. This activation of archive is but one side of the digital technological mutation. Another side is reinvention, or transfiguration of common places. It makes collective memory not just active, but kind of plastic, mutable and open to the future.
K.C.: YOU WORK WITH THE CATEGORY OF SPATIALITY BOTH AS AN ARTIST AND AS A CURATOR, WHILE EXPLORING AND COMBINING PHYSICAL SPACE WITH VIRTUAL ONE. WHAT ARE THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF THESE TWO ROLES? WHAT IS THE PLACE OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE WORK WITH SPATIALITY?
S.S.: Constant change is core characteristic of our times, - call it Hypermodernity, knowledge society, or surveillance capitalism. Ceaseless transformations of reality are produced by communication technologies. Digital world is based on flat ontology: images, texts, identities – everything comes down to the common substrate – digits, numbers, 0-dimensional entities. It is great democratic revolution of knowledges: everything becomes one click away.
One of its effects is confusion of the virtual and the physical. Tensions between the physical and the virtual are foundational part of artistic experience since early avantgarde era. What you see and what you understand – materiality and meaning – are separate things. The virtual is not limited by the digital. It is the broader realm somewhere between the possible and the real. It is the regime of dematerialization of Imaginary, subtraction of matter from imagination.
S.S.: Constant change is core characteristic of our times, - call it Hypermodernity, knowledge society, or surveillance capitalism. Ceaseless transformations of reality are produced by communication technologies. Digital world is based on flat ontology: images, texts, identities – everything comes down to the common substrate – digits, numbers, 0-dimensional entities. It is great democratic revolution of knowledges: everything becomes one click away.
One of its effects is confusion of the virtual and the physical. Tensions between the physical and the virtual are foundational part of artistic experience since early avantgarde era. What you see and what you understand – materiality and meaning – are separate things. The virtual is not limited by the digital. It is the broader realm somewhere between the possible and the real. It is the regime of dematerialization of Imaginary, subtraction of matter from imagination.
exhibition projects of ASI
Ideas are virtual, while digital images are ideas with minimal materialization level possible today. Painting is another step in the process of materialization of the virtual. Next step of materialization is done by installation where light and space are not pictured, but given as such. It makes painting a knot connecting many worlds, complex (de)virtualization machine that links domains of meanings, images, schemes, materiality of paint, presence of its support, and neural events in spectator’s brain. The virtual does not exist without the material, otherwise it would equal the spiritual, something you have to believe in. Virtual and physical spaces are dispersed throughout each other. Like everyday urban environment: it is physical space populated and structured by signs and meanings. An image on the monitor, or in VR-headset – we might want to think that it’s purely virtual, but in fact it’s mediated by the material all the way from a silicon chip to retina. Digital imagery just looks virtual. It’s less virtual than our thoughts.
It’s possible to imagine a moment when the medium of digital 3D graphics will feel too material, static and noninformative. This will happen when images and other signs will be delivered right into the brain. Humans will be able to perceive images broadcasted to their brains just as vividly as they perceive mental or dream images. Networks are going connect not devices, but brains directly. This will bring new horizons for control and manipulation. At the same time, it’s another level of possibilities to cooperate, of understanding, solidarity, and synergy. Another level of virtualization and enhancement of human nature. Today we call it posthuman. It is the process of approaching that historical bifurcation point where subjectivity, personality, and Ego will part and evolve beyond individual body.
It’s possible to imagine a moment when the medium of digital 3D graphics will feel too material, static and noninformative. This will happen when images and other signs will be delivered right into the brain. Humans will be able to perceive images broadcasted to their brains just as vividly as they perceive mental or dream images. Networks are going connect not devices, but brains directly. This will bring new horizons for control and manipulation. At the same time, it’s another level of possibilities to cooperate, of understanding, solidarity, and synergy. Another level of virtualization and enhancement of human nature. Today we call it posthuman. It is the process of approaching that historical bifurcation point where subjectivity, personality, and Ego will part and evolve beyond individual body.
Michel de Certeau
K.C.: FRENCH PHILOSOPHER MICHEL DE CERTEAU SUGGESTS EXPLORING THE CITY FROM TWO PERSPECTIVES – AT A HEIGHT, FROM A BIRD'S EYE VIEW, AND FROM THE PEDESTRIAN’S VIEW. IN THE FIRST CASE, THE OBSERVER IS LIKE A GOD, WHO RISES ABOVE THE CROWDS AND FUSS, EXPERIENCES COPIOUS PLEASURE AND RECEIVES ‘ALL-SEEING POWER’, WHILE THE SECOND IS THE POSITION OF THE PEDESTRIAN, LOCATED IN THE DARK SPACE OF THE CROWD, BUT THE OBSERVABLE ENDS HERE. WHAT POSITIONS OF OBSERVATION EXIST IN VIRTUAL SPACE? OR, DOES TECHNOLOGY REPRESENT A THIRD DIMENSION AND A PRISM THROUGH WHICH SPATIALITY CAN BE EXPLORED IN A NEW WAY?
S.S.: As Modernity is about split subjectivity, Modern spaces operate under the logic of exclusion: either / or. Glass or concrete, blue or white collars, work or leisure, culture or nature, ‘us’ or ‘them’, war or peace. Contemporary spaces, as opposed to Modern ones, operate not by either-or, but by and-and-and logic; they are defined by topology of flows. In a space of flows, opposites merge into multiplicities of series of signs, images, objects, and bodies. This is spatiality not of distances, but of exchanges, relations, mobilities, interactions; it pulverizes borders, habits, territories, and distances. Most of borders that are being constructed nowadays are to some degree porous i.e., differential. It is because this new space of flows is based on the weak forces, differences, intensities.
S.S.: As Modernity is about split subjectivity, Modern spaces operate under the logic of exclusion: either / or. Glass or concrete, blue or white collars, work or leisure, culture or nature, ‘us’ or ‘them’, war or peace. Contemporary spaces, as opposed to Modern ones, operate not by either-or, but by and-and-and logic; they are defined by topology of flows. In a space of flows, opposites merge into multiplicities of series of signs, images, objects, and bodies. This is spatiality not of distances, but of exchanges, relations, mobilities, interactions; it pulverizes borders, habits, territories, and distances. Most of borders that are being constructed nowadays are to some degree porous i.e., differential. It is because this new space of flows is based on the weak forces, differences, intensities.
Space of flows isn’t a totality, it contains fragments of its others: spaces of places, things, disciplines, taxonomies. Today’s experience of time is mutli-layered composition, partly random, partly logical collage of temporalities. It is because contemporary space is itself a multiplicity – of constellations, networks, conflicts between various kinds of spatiality. These effects of reactivation of older spatial forms become more and more conspicuous. Some observers call it “neo-reaction “, others speak of reterritorialization. However, forces of locality, bordering, disconnection interact with the space of flows, producing new fields, trajectories, and attractors that might be reminiscent of premodern, or even archaic forms, and yet they are characteristic of precisely this historical moment.
Contemporary ‘flowing spaces’ are inclusive: they keep producing points of view, positions, and scenes. It’s what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveilliance capitalism’: devices observe, remember, decide, await, respond – they exist in temporal reality, like subject. Every act of observation is production of reality. Newly produced points of observation are not limited to human body and mind. 21st century Zeitgeist wants to understand how is it to be cephalopod, toothpick, mushroom, Lovecraftian monster, electric cirquit, or garbage dump. Everything has perception, experience, and memory, not only humans, or animals. And yet, humans are not just the subjects, but increasingly the objects of observation. We are the sources of data for machines, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Studying human nature, adjusting and manipulating it, machines will become closer to humans. The more they know about us, the better we’ll understand each other.
One of indicatives of this mutual learning and machine-human symbiosis is unprecedented power that technological images – photograph, film, digital graphics, etc. - have over masses and communities, identities and worldviews. We may still call it propaganda, but what’s important besides the function of such images is their technological nature: our time literally believes in photo, video, and “infographics“.
K.C.: IF FRENCH SITUATIONISTS WERE ACTIVISTS AND SOUGHT TO CHANGE THE CITY, WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE NEW CHALLENGES IN SPACE RESEARCH TODAY? HAS ACTIVISM LOST IMPORTANCE? HAS EVERYTHING SHIFTED TO DOCUMENTING, STUDYING, AND REFLECTING?
Contemporary ‘flowing spaces’ are inclusive: they keep producing points of view, positions, and scenes. It’s what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveilliance capitalism’: devices observe, remember, decide, await, respond – they exist in temporal reality, like subject. Every act of observation is production of reality. Newly produced points of observation are not limited to human body and mind. 21st century Zeitgeist wants to understand how is it to be cephalopod, toothpick, mushroom, Lovecraftian monster, electric cirquit, or garbage dump. Everything has perception, experience, and memory, not only humans, or animals. And yet, humans are not just the subjects, but increasingly the objects of observation. We are the sources of data for machines, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Studying human nature, adjusting and manipulating it, machines will become closer to humans. The more they know about us, the better we’ll understand each other.
One of indicatives of this mutual learning and machine-human symbiosis is unprecedented power that technological images – photograph, film, digital graphics, etc. - have over masses and communities, identities and worldviews. We may still call it propaganda, but what’s important besides the function of such images is their technological nature: our time literally believes in photo, video, and “infographics“.
K.C.: IF FRENCH SITUATIONISTS WERE ACTIVISTS AND SOUGHT TO CHANGE THE CITY, WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE NEW CHALLENGES IN SPACE RESEARCH TODAY? HAS ACTIVISM LOST IMPORTANCE? HAS EVERYTHING SHIFTED TO DOCUMENTING, STUDYING, AND REFLECTING?
S.S.: Nowadays, new connections are formed between activism and research, aesthetic and conceptual elements of artistic practice. It’s not unlike the problems addressed by Situationists. They tried to breach the gap between practice and theory, or activism and research. They lived through transition to society ruled by TV, while we’re in transition to society managed by AI. Both then and now there’s been feeling of necessity to reinvent social spaces. Today this process of transformation of public sphere is even more important. Take cultural institutions. They are not just spaces for expositions, they themselves are exposed to the forces of communication and control manifested as dematerialization, deterritorialization, and their opposites. Archive becomes activated, open to changes, evolving, - like subject. By the way, this is another dimension of enhanced power of images.
French Situationists
‘Amazing trip of a Mischevious Boy’, Anna Titova, 2021-2023
One of the most interesting examples of work that traverses various fields and languages from activist to conceptual is ‘Amazing trip of a Mischevious Boy’ (2021-23) by Anna Titova. It was realized in the Sidur Museum in Perovo, East Moscow. This complex project comprised work with the collection of Vadim Sidur sculptures and archive, rearticulation of exhibition and administrative spaces of museum, collaborations with local communities, environmental work, and rethinking art histories, local urbanism and sociality. Viewers can touch exhibits, labels include braille type, staircases are equipped with specially designed additions for wheels, director’s room is divided into library and young mother’s room with special station where one can relax and feed the baby.
In collaboration with local architects a 3D-map of the Perovo district was created. Viewers are invited to transform the map by adding self-made constructions using set of elements developed on the basis of research of plastic language of sculptures by Sidur.
Vadim Sidur is considered major figure in the local history of Modern art. His most known work is usually perceived as late Modernism classics, pronouncedly masculine and plasticist. Titova actualizes other aspects of his work, more gender balanced and conceptually-ladden. Hero of Modenism starts to tell less heroic, more subtle stories. Labirintine exposition space built by Titova opens other sides of Sidur: documentation shows him cleaning forest from industrial waste, organizing underground parties for intellectuals, and illustrating children books. A character from his illustrations – Mischevious Boy – is haunting the exhibition: we see him in the corners, windows, and then in phantasmagoric animation shown at the second floor. His name is Gopi, he is from fairy tale by writer Vasamurti from India, published in the 1960’s. In the story, the boy turns very small for a day and enters the world of insects where he learns ethics and empathy. This makes the figure of Mischevious Boy the emblem of the network of (re-)connections that results from the redefinition of museum space, and its relations with past and present..
Vadim Sidur is considered major figure in the local history of Modern art. His most known work is usually perceived as late Modernism classics, pronouncedly masculine and plasticist. Titova actualizes other aspects of his work, more gender balanced and conceptually-ladden. Hero of Modenism starts to tell less heroic, more subtle stories. Labirintine exposition space built by Titova opens other sides of Sidur: documentation shows him cleaning forest from industrial waste, organizing underground parties for intellectuals, and illustrating children books. A character from his illustrations – Mischevious Boy – is haunting the exhibition: we see him in the corners, windows, and then in phantasmagoric animation shown at the second floor. His name is Gopi, he is from fairy tale by writer Vasamurti from India, published in the 1960’s. In the story, the boy turns very small for a day and enters the world of insects where he learns ethics and empathy. This makes the figure of Mischevious Boy the emblem of the network of (re-)connections that results from the redefinition of museum space, and its relations with past and present..
K.C.: HOW DO GEOPOLITICAL CONSTRAINTS AFFECT THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE AND HOW THIS IS REFLECTED IN SPATIAL STUDIES AND ART PROJECTS?
S.S.: On one hand, so called geopolitics is not new thing. In the 20th century it took shape of colonialism, world wars, weapons race and ideological struggles. Last century spaces were very influenced by geopolitics: from ‘cubist war’, as Gertruda Stein called World War I, to Paul Virilio’s ‘aesthetics of disappearance’. Today, geopolitics takes form of a shadow of globalization, a doppelganger who wants to take over, simulacrum that tries to bewitch the real. Hostages of geopolitical thinking, we’re all left to see how ties disintegrate, cracks widen, reality falls apart.
S.S.: On one hand, so called geopolitics is not new thing. In the 20th century it took shape of colonialism, world wars, weapons race and ideological struggles. Last century spaces were very influenced by geopolitics: from ‘cubist war’, as Gertruda Stein called World War I, to Paul Virilio’s ‘aesthetics of disappearance’. Today, geopolitics takes form of a shadow of globalization, a doppelganger who wants to take over, simulacrum that tries to bewitch the real. Hostages of geopolitical thinking, we’re all left to see how ties disintegrate, cracks widen, reality falls apart.
The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Paul Virilio
Geopolitics is eclipse of reason, madness of our epoch, overture to triumph of death. A symptom: there must be something in our time that allows it to grow. It is supported by both military-industrial logic, and feeling of marginalization of human subjectivity before the face of ever-evolving systems. In a complex techno-scientifically produced environments many humans feel anxiety and fear to remain superfluous, abandoned by the course of history. That’s why today’s communications work so well if fueled by ressentiment – main fossil fuel of the first half of the 21st century.
Think of the reality as depicted by object-oriented ontology: world of objects hidden in the darkness. Laws and rules that govern the objects are unknowable. Objects can only know about each other what they want to show to each other, ‘perceptible qualities’. This dark world of neo-metaphysics is devoid of universal laws, but full of self-centered sovereign entities. Doesn’t it look like the world according to geopolitics? ‘Empires’ - hungry historical predators free from any common values, - are entangled in the haze of their “interests“ like objects in object-oriented-ontology.
Superpowers, or empires are political hyperobjects. These are the objects that have no fixed borders, they are too big and too complex to be mapped out or submitted to any reasonable laws. Weather hyperobjects in themselves are well-ordered or not, they are experienced as unintelligible sources of chaos and disasters. Just like superpowers that emanate discord, conflicts, conspiracies, and paranoia. At the same time, geopolitical thinking is simplistic, reductionist combinatoric of cliches, common places. Like other dark arts, it pretends to have power over the unknowable by means of simple spells.
That’s why I think that most relevant practices now are those that transgress the limits of geopolitical simplification and depersonalization of social spaces. There are quite a few interesting works by the students of ICA Moscow that try to formulate aspects of somewhat post-geopolitical interest in the ideas of proximity, mutuality, politics of recognition, and activisation of archive. Such is the recent exhibition by Vasilisa Lebedeva at CCI Fabrika where she studies the DIY culture of flower beds, where the natural and the personal collaborate to create spaces of care and rejoicing. Another example is performance and video works by Viktoria Mukhonko that attempt to find the measure to the feeling of deprivation and atomization. Is there a place for freedom under pressure? How can artistic experiment survive and evolve in the thick of the multidimensional struggles of hyperobjects? One can see interesting responses to these questions in the works by such young artists as Nastya Egorova, Maria Kochergina, Julia Dibrova, Alexander Sokolov, Pranna, Mikhail Variushin, and other ICA Moscow students.
Think of the reality as depicted by object-oriented ontology: world of objects hidden in the darkness. Laws and rules that govern the objects are unknowable. Objects can only know about each other what they want to show to each other, ‘perceptible qualities’. This dark world of neo-metaphysics is devoid of universal laws, but full of self-centered sovereign entities. Doesn’t it look like the world according to geopolitics? ‘Empires’ - hungry historical predators free from any common values, - are entangled in the haze of their “interests“ like objects in object-oriented-ontology.
Superpowers, or empires are political hyperobjects. These are the objects that have no fixed borders, they are too big and too complex to be mapped out or submitted to any reasonable laws. Weather hyperobjects in themselves are well-ordered or not, they are experienced as unintelligible sources of chaos and disasters. Just like superpowers that emanate discord, conflicts, conspiracies, and paranoia. At the same time, geopolitical thinking is simplistic, reductionist combinatoric of cliches, common places. Like other dark arts, it pretends to have power over the unknowable by means of simple spells.
That’s why I think that most relevant practices now are those that transgress the limits of geopolitical simplification and depersonalization of social spaces. There are quite a few interesting works by the students of ICA Moscow that try to formulate aspects of somewhat post-geopolitical interest in the ideas of proximity, mutuality, politics of recognition, and activisation of archive. Such is the recent exhibition by Vasilisa Lebedeva at CCI Fabrika where she studies the DIY culture of flower beds, where the natural and the personal collaborate to create spaces of care and rejoicing. Another example is performance and video works by Viktoria Mukhonko that attempt to find the measure to the feeling of deprivation and atomization. Is there a place for freedom under pressure? How can artistic experiment survive and evolve in the thick of the multidimensional struggles of hyperobjects? One can see interesting responses to these questions in the works by such young artists as Nastya Egorova, Maria Kochergina, Julia Dibrova, Alexander Sokolov, Pranna, Mikhail Variushin, and other ICA Moscow students.