Cyberfest has already started in St. Petersburg for the 13th time; the theme of this year is "Space and Chaos". It includes 6 exhibition projects, experimental sound and video art programs, discussions from more than 70 artists from Russia, Austria, Italy, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, Canada, Greece, China, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the USA and Japan. The guests are hosted by students of the St. Petersburg Stieglitz Academy, the Master's program of Art&Science of ITMO University and the School of Young Artists PRO ARTE.
In 2007, a group of St. Petersburg artists and curators decided to start studying a new artistic language in its interaction with traditions and technologies. And for 13 years, their numerous colleagues from around the world, who have joined this fascinating process, have been creating an alternative space, filling it with all sorts of details and unpredictable visuals. These are projects on the verge of art and even more. The scandalous artist of the mid-twentieth century Marcel Duchamp believed that an artist does not have to create a work of art, they can simply choose an unidentified, unknown, found object, ready-made, and place it in the context of a museum or gallery, thus turning it into an "object d'art". In other words, the context of space gives a thing the meaning, endows it with something that may not be there initially…All sorts of things, defined by the new artists as "Space and chaos" will broadcast a consonant meaning.
Anna Frantz , the participant of "Cyberfest" and the author of "Unidentified objects", says: "They may not fly, but they will be ready to comprehend space and explore chaos." The video from Finland called "Photons of Mars" calls for interplanetary research. Its main artifact is the stone found on Mars in 2012. French interactive artists explore the depth of a translucent veil symbolizing the skin in distorted reality – their project is called "Metamorphy". Bettina Forge from the Canadian observatory Mont-Megantic states that more than 4,000 exoplanets have now been discovered, and suggests a new way to build a taxonomy of extrasolar planets using 3D printing - a series of printed models of extrasolar planetary bodies supports the belief about life outside the Earth. A topical conversation about our planet is offered to the visitors by Tivon Rice in his digital animation "Models of environmental Literacy", where virtual landscapes and texts written by artificial intelligence are used. Collective project of students and teachers of The Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design represents a video dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the first human spaceflight. In this project, photographs of Vladimir Shistko, Candidate of Art History and professor of the Academy, come to life – it’s an experiment in printed graphics. In the media installation "The Universe", a group of authors from Russia ask a philosophical question: "Despite the fact that celestial bodies in space move at great speed, a person cannot catch changes, their life is too short for this. There is a theory that nothing in the world happens without consequences. Does a brief moment of human life leave its mark on the universe? And if so, which one? Does it irritate the universe, causing chaos in its well-structured existence?"…
Even if we can't catch the movement of celestial bodies in space, we have a good chance to "catch" the latest and largest Cyberfest exhibition before November 28 – in 13-15 Solyaniy Lane, in the Large Exhibition Hall of the Stieglitz Academy.
As our common inspirer Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky once noted– "There is nothing but atoms and their combinations. There is no atom that does not periodically take part in life."
So do the creative projects of our Film Festival: each of them periodically takes part in cultural and educational life, adds up to a greater whole to explain the common love of earthlings for space. And all this is a wonderful world of potential celestials…