Curator: Daria Parkhomenko
Artists: Memo Akten (Great Britain), Dmitry Kavarga (Russia), Egor Kraft (Russia), creative association "Where the Dogs Run" (Russia), John McCormack (Australia), Lena Nikonole (Russia), Thomas Feuerstein (Austria), Justine Aimard (France), :: vtol :: (Russia),...
Curator: Daria Parkhomenko
Artists: Memo Akten (Great Britain), Dmitry Kavarga (Russia), Egor Kraft (Russia), creative association "Where the Dogs Run" (Russia), John McCormack (Australia), Lena Nikonole (Russia), Thomas Feuerstein (Austria), Justine Aimard (France), :: vtol :: (Russia), Eric Matrei (Hungary)
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the Laboratoria Art & Science Foundation present the Daemons in the Machine exhibition, timed to coincide with the foundation's 10th anniversary. The project is dedicated to the so-called "new demonology" - the artistic interpretation of artificial intelligence, myths and ghosts of the era of autonomous machines. Do they open up new, unknown ways of being? Can neural networks think - and what does the word “think” mean in this case? Most of the works created for the project by artists from Russia, Great Britain, Austria and Australia, together with scientists from IPavlov, MIPT and the Kurchatov Institute, will be shown to the public for the first time.
The Daemons in the Machine project explores current IT technologies, whose potential has not yet been fully explored by developers and specialists in this field: artificial intelligence, blockchain, computer viruses. Participants of the exhibition, studying the ethical and futurological aspects of modern technologies, work with the latest art forms, such as: robotic installations, self-developing objects, digital interventions and neuro-installations.
MORE ABOUT WORKS:
At the entrance to the exposition, viewers will be greeted by a neural network, which, through the surveillance cameras, recognizes everything that passes before its eyes. This interactive neural installation Learning to See by British artist Memo Akten not only builds on previous knowledge gained, including from the Hubble telescope, but also continues to learn in real time, thanks to the participation of every viewer that appears in the object's field of view.
In the interactive installation The Day After Tomorrow of the creative association "Where the Dogs Run", the blockchain appears as a new religion - the search for the Perfect Number. It is generated by a wiring diagram that digitizes the squeaks and chirps of chicks in the incubator. Visitors to the exhibition can also contribute to this process: they receive warnings or revelations generated by the "living sculpture", continuously translating Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" about life outside the human world into the language of electrical circuits.
The central work of the exhibition will be a specially created three-part interactive installation "Tea for Kirillov" by the Austrian artist Thomas Feuerstein. In the first part, the author proposes to meet with the ghost of the engineer Kirillov, the hero of Dostoevsky's novel The Demons, who tests his theories about free will. The ghost of Kirillov cannot be seen, but you can feel his actions and find his image on the monitor of the CCTV camera. In the second part, the public will witness the inner life of the network in the truest sense of the word. Visitors will find themselves in a maze of hundreds of wires that connect abstract objects consisting of control panels, regulators and monitors. The monitoring systems of Kaspersky Lab, a partner of the Daemons in the Machine project, track cyberattacks, botnets and the activity of computer viruses, thereby filling objects with their own lives: they vibrate and emit deep bass sounds. In the third part of the installation, viewers will enter the future, where they will be greeted by two heroes: robotic antique surgical lamps Borgy & Bes, which have received a second life and conduct a meaningful dialogue in the language of the 19th century, discussing the latest news from the Internet. The "brains" of the heroes are neural networks trained by iPavlov (MIPT) based on the works of Dostoevsky.
The Art & Science Incubator section immerses viewers in the process of collaboration between a scientist and an artist. Here is the documentation of the creation of the works, as well as the recording of the conference that took place as part of the project preparation. The Incubator will feature works created by robotic draftsmen by Australian John McCormack and hybrid sculptures by Yegor Kraft Content Aware Studies. To create them, neural networks, trained on the basis of a number of digitized works of the ancient era selected by the artist, recreate the lost fragments of sculptures of demons of Ancient Greece.
ORGANIZERS
LABORATORIA ART & SCIENCE FOUNDATION
The Daemons in the Machine exhibition is timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Laboratoria Art & Science Foundation, whose main task is to create platforms for interdisciplinary interaction of contemporary art and science. Over the years, the foundation has organized 30 international exhibition projects, thanks to which more than 100 international artists have been involved in cooperation with the most progressive scientific laboratories. The Foundation became the first institution in Russia that connects contemporary art and science, as well as the most important platform for the development of Russian technological art.
MMOMA
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) was founded in 1999; this is the first in Russia
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