While still in school, Anna Frants decided to become an animator. However, in the early 1980s in Leningrad, there was no place to study animation, and traveling to Moscow was required, but she did not go. Instead, she enrolled in the design department at the Mukhina College, where she graduated successfully. However, she never worked in industrial design. She moved to New York to live with her father, where she finally began studying animation. More precisely, she delved into computer animation right as new technologies were emerging, gradually discovering that the technologies themselves fascinated her more than their application. This is how Anna Frants turned to contemporary high-tech art, a field she has been engaged in for the past decade, regularly exhibiting in St. Petersburg. From now on, she promises to appear even more frequently, as this year her joint project with the State Center for Contemporary Art (GCSI), the media laboratory Cyland in Kronstadt, is gaining momentum.
Technology either creates an alternative reality, as demonstrated at the recent Cyberfest at the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Anna Frants invited visitors to wear special glasses that altered the speed of the image depending on the viewer’s movements. In the Borey hall, these glasses allowed visitors to create a living, swaying shadow of an olive tree.
Or, technology convinces you that the alternative reality is you. This is what Anna Frants plans to show in Borey. In one of her new installations, two real fish from Kuznechny Market will have conversations in a setting surrounded by fruits, shells, glasses, and other elements of classic still life, both grand and simple. The setup is rather simple: the dialogue text will be projected onto a screen in the form of speech bubbles, creating a kind of three-dimensional comic strip. However, importantly, the artist does not know in advance what the fish will discuss. The text will be randomly pulled from blogs by a program specifically created by Anna Frants for this purpose. The viewer is free to read or ignore the text, but should understand this: while they watch the fish converse, life elsewhere is happening in much more exciting ways.
Afisha Moskva December 10, 2007