HSE Art and Design School at the International Ars Electronica Festival
The HSE Art and Design School is participating in the Ars Electronica Festival, one of the main international events in art, science, and technology. Catch the School’s programme on the festival’s online platform from September 9 to 13.
Ars Electronica is headquartered in Linz, Austria. Every year, figures from the world of art, science, and technology gather at the festival to engage in dialogue and visit the large-scale exhibition.
Throughout its decades-long existence, Ars Electronica has brought together exhibitions, educational initiatives, a research centre, the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica award, constant collaboration with scientists, leading universities, and cultural institutions. But 2020 will be, according to the organizers, the most ambitious year in the festival’s history, because a significant portion of it will take place online, which means that even more people will be able to become a part of it.
The slogan of this year's festival is ‘In Kepler’s Gardens: A global journey mapping the “new” world’. The curators describe the project as a journey that this year will be taken not by people, but by their ideas and projects, designed to form a new global ecosystem.
Participants were asked to treat the creation of their programmes as a kind of digital garden, which will be presented on the online platform Ars Electronica. Each of the invited participants therefore created a garden that speaks to the festival’s key themes:
HSE Garden Pavilion
The HSE Art and Design School is presenting student projects in the areas of Contemporary Art, Animation and Illustration, Sound Art and Sound Design.
Programme teaser. Music by Grigory Shmidko
The projects will be exhibited as part of the HSE Garden Pavilion, an online platform dedicated to various issues associated with interacting with the modern environment. By ‘environment’, the programme creators have in mind both offline and online space. The works for the festival were partially selected by curators of the School, and the ‘Sound Art and Sound Design’ project was created especially for the Ars Electronica festival, which this year pays special attention to the interaction of music and artificial intelligence. Read on to learn more about the full programme of the HSE Garden Pavilion.
Get Out
It all begins with Get Out, a 3D game designed by Elena Vlasova, BA student. The world of “Get Out” happily welcomes us at its gates, promising a journey through a positive almost utopian space. However, as we interact with its inhabitants, the story line changes. In the world of “Get Out”, nature refuses to be vulnerable and actively defends itself with a surrealistic mix of objects of nature and Internet artifacts.
Non-Player Piano
The experience at the HSE Garden Pavilion continues with a Non-Player Piano sound performance, created by the Sound Art & Sound Design department in collaboration with Mubert AI App. Non-Player Piano was created specifically for Ars Electronica Festival 2020 and will be shown for the first time as part of the Music x AI festival programme. The performance takes place on a boat sailing along the Moscow River and includes live music improvisations aided by an artificial neural network ‘trained’ to analyze the surrounding environment, such as the weather, time of day, location, speed, and type of movement. The performance was recorded using multiple cameras and drones on August 31, 2020.
HSE Animation Garden
The animation programme of the HSE Garden Pavilion features works by young female directors Varvara Fomicheva, Polina Nevozhay , Daria Ivanova, Nastya Panina, Maria Maximova, and Elena Charobay. This part of the HSE Art and Design School’s ‘garden’ is full of variety. Here, viewers can watch completely different films: from a very personal story that takes place in a mysterious digital garden to a remake of a classic Russian fairy tale set during an ecological catastrophe.
Alexey Ryumin, Lecturer at HSE Art and Design School
‘All these gardens were made by digital natives—authors who were born during the age of the Internet, the medium on which these works are now presented here. Long before the Internet, we all became native users of the urban environment as something that frames our perspective on nature—it is a place from which and through the eyes of which we look at nature; it is a place that is an infrastructural child for nature and a parent for the Internet. The elevator of time has lifted nature several floors higher in Maslow's pyramid, turning it into a garden both more exotic and more intimate.’
The project was prepared by: Elena Vlasova, Varvara Fomicheva, Daria Ivanova, Anastasia Panina, Maria Makhimova, Elena Charobay, Andriesh Gandrabur, Alexey Ryumin, Pavel Zgordan, Evgeny Voronovsky, Valeria Kogan, Viktor Avsaragov, Viktor Glazunov, Eva Richer, Grigory Shmidko, Roman Zharov, Kirill Kustov, Dmitry Levshin, Georgy Safarov, and Irina Ineshina.
The HSE Art and Design School would like to thank Viktor Kupchenko, Evgeny Ruban, and the Aris Project for their assistance in organizing the project.
Alexey Ryumin
Lecturer, HSE Art and Design School
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