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DECEMBER 19–30, 2006. ANNA FRANTS. “VISIONARY DREAMS #2391–95”

“VISIONARY DREAMS #2391–95”
Video installation / Cyber installation In the gallery halls

Anna Frants is a multimedia artist living in New York.
She was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 1989, she graduated from the Leningrad Higher School of Art and Industry named after V.I. Mukhina (now the St. Petersburg Academy of Design), receiving a classical education. Later, mastering new fields (computer graphics and animation), she expanded the scope of her creative interests.

Frants’ works have been recognized with awards from prestigious competitions. She received a prize for her 3D computer animation Angel at the Autodesk Planet Studio Award. Her short computer-animated film Angel was also part of the competition program of the SouthSide Film Festival (Pennsylvania, 2006) and the New York “Red Shift” Festival in 2004. Her works can be found in the Museum of Contemporary Art Kyoseinosato (Japan) and in private collections.

Anna Frants has participated in—and, in some cases, curated—numerous art exhibitions: the joint exhibition “Touch Me” (2003, Anna Akhmatova Museum, Saint Petersburg), which brought together American and St. Petersburg artists; the “Vivat, Saint Petersburg!” festival celebrating the city’s 300th anniversary (2003, Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art, USA); the final exhibition of the international project “Ghanaian-Style Sarcophagus or The Funeral of a Dreamer” (2005, Berliner Kunstprojekt, Berlin); and the Chinese International Art Exhibition (2006, Beijing).

Solo exhibitions include:
“Sarcophagus Ghanaian-Style or The Funeral of a Dreamer” at the Kvadrat Gallery (2004, St. Petersburg);
“Window” (2005, Kyoseinosato, Japan).

For several years, she has taught media disciplines and animation. Anna Frants is a regular contributor to NY Arts Magazine, which focuses on issues in contemporary art.

“In her work, Anna Frants speaks in a cheerful, light tone about serious, profound matters, avoiding academic clichés and pretentious epithets. Using the principle of interactivity, she involves participants of all ages in her projects. /…/ The artist shows that new technologies are not just for entertainment, but are a powerful means of reflecting the human inner world — with all its complexity and nuance. In this way, computer art is close to traditional painting.”
— from an article by Olga Khoroshilova

At “Borey” Gallery, Anna Frants will present installations: Window, Made in Ancient Greece, as well as a series of works from the Static Video cycle and Video Graffiti.

A booklet is being prepared by the Borey Gallery for Anna Frants’ exhibition, featuring articles written by the artist on cyber and video art, published in NY Arts Magazine.

Olga Khoroshilova. “Anna Frants”

Picasso once said: “At the age of four I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child.”
This aphorism captures the essence of modern art — an art of revolutionaries, iconoclasts, and empirical researchers. Children are natural atheists, understanding the world purely through experience and rejecting established canons. Life is a blank slate, and every step promises discovery. This childlike attitude toward art was embodied by the early 20th-century avant-garde — Fauves, Cubists, Dadaists — and continued by contemporary media artists. Among them is Anna Frants, a digital artist and curator — a mature and accomplished individual, but in essence, a child.

Her creative journey follows the logic of Picasso’s statement. She really did “draw like an adult” for five years: from 1984 to 1989, she studied industrial design at the Mukhina School. She studied anatomy, produced academic studies, and mastered the fundamentals of design — acquiring traditional academic skills. After graduating and moving to the U.S., she realized industrial design was a meaningless pursuit and started anew, like a child, from a blank page. Not surprisingly, she chose computer animation as her new field and studied at Pratt Institute for two years. Then she immersed herself in contemporary art, integrating animation, video, and film, and continues “learning to draw like a child” — making discoveries, exploring unorthodox paths, and bringing fresh, nontrivial ideas to life.

In her work, Anna Frants speaks in a cheerful, light tone about serious, deep topics, avoiding academic formulas and lofty language. Using interactivity, she draws in people of all ages. One of her best-known projects is Touch Me (2002), a virtual studio for interactive collaboration between artists. Each participant modifies a base image using two main elements — video and sound — which are associated with certain colors. The result is a continuously transforming image with a musical background. Among the long-term project’s contributors are Alina Bliumis, Elena Gubanova, Asya Nemchenok, and Vladimir Gruzdev.

Sarcophagus, Ghanaian Style, or The Funeral of a Dreamer (2005) is another of Frants’ “childlike” projects. A white foam ball with fluttering wings hangs over lit candles. Video footage — scenes of life in a Ghanaian village, family film clips, and a spinning eye — is projected onto the ball. Frants wanted, “borrowing the idea from Ghanaian villagers,” to imagine her own funeral — joyfully and playfully. Other artists, including Andrei Bartenev, Maria Baturina, and Alexei Trubetskoy, followed with their own fantasy sarcophagus and funeral concepts.

Frants even avoids clichés in such a traditional genre as portraiture. In her latest project, Static Video (2006), she presented a series of electronic portraits — for example, of the well-known Leningrad nonconformist poet Konstantin Kuzminsky — “painted” using video, computer graphics, and animation. The artist demonstrates that new technologies are not just for entertainment, but are among the best tools for expressing the human inner world — in all its richness and nuance. In this, computer art is close to classical painting.

No matter how cutting-edge or revolutionary Anna Frants’ work may be, it remains deeply connected to the centuries-old heritage of the “three noble arts.” Media art is a bold and mischievous dreamer-child, perched on the shoulders of the academic giant.

Borey Art Centre December 19, 2006

IS IT ALL QUIET ON THE CYBER FRONT?

The “Dada” exhibition opened in June at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with more than 400 objects in every medium existing at the beginning of the 20th Century. It was truly an international, cultural movement with artists organizing demonstrations, performances, and publishing art and literary journals. The Dadaists’ revolt against the traditional aesthetics and culture forever changed the Western cultural landscape and galvanized the new movements, including Surrealism and Pop Art. Ninety years have passed since the first gathering in the Cabaret Voltaire during which the artists, in Marcel Janco words, “began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.”

    Different art movements came to life since then which have received much public attention or stirred controversy. But nothing came close to Dada in the real world or on the web. Why have the advances in technology and communications in the past few decades not fostered a new art movement rebelling against cultural and intellectual conformity at the turn of the 20th century? The past decade is characterized by the major wars in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The uncontrolled economic growth threatens the global environment. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening at an accelerating pace. In the age of the information superhighway, are there cyberartists challenging the prevailing order and breaking the cultural and social taboos? Undoubtedly, there are.
    The project by Brazilian artists Aloice Cristina Caetano, Cecila Noriko ito Saito and Martha C. Cruz Gabriel chooses the format of the video game to create collages from quotes about peace, which appear every time one of the toy solders makes a move. Cory Arcangel, named by New York magazine the Best Emerging Artist for 2005, created a number of projects such as Mig-29 fighter and clouds, Kurt Cobain’s Suicide Letter vs. Google AdSence, and Don’t Touch My Computer Home Users Guide with similar to Dada sensibilities set in contemporary themes and technologies. One can draw a parallel between Duchamp’s Fountain and the homemade animation Bomb Iraq, which Arcangel salvaged from a found computer at the Salvation Army store in Buffalo and displayed at Pace Wildenstein gallery.
    As in the Dadaist’s times, internet artists can come under public fire for opening up a Pandora’s Box of social taboos. In 2002, J.C.C.S., the designer of the Spanish public domain computer game Slaughter Cofrade was “formally accused by the Cristo del Gran Poder of violating section 525 of the penal code, which forbids any sort of ‘attack’ on religious dogma, beliefs, or ceremonies .” Other subjects, such as sex and prostitution, probably lost some notoriety and became more acceptable as a focus of the art projects. The Aphrodite shoes is a high-tech platform version of the prostitutes’ sandals from the times of antiquity, which would leave footprints with “Follow Me” signs. The contemporary version includes a built-in GPS receiver and emergency button. Shoes also are able to transmit their location via APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System). The Platforms panel discussion, which included both artists and university faculty, was able to elevate the project to a dignified academic level by touching on a number of big topics at the intersection of art, sex work, design and technology.
    These are just a few examples of the novel and innovative projects fueled by creative power of the new media artists. There are thousands of them around the world, which is far more technologically complex and information-overloaded compared to the times of Tzar and his friends at the Cabaret Voltaire. As New York magazine said in 2005, “The revolution in digital and internet technologies hasn’t had a major impact on art yet, but the geeks are hard at work.” The power of this impact will depend on the synergy between the original ideas, innovative implementations and creative ways to present and disseminate cyberarts. The success of contemporary digital artists promises the rise of new cyberart movements, which will, undoubtedly, produce the impact similar or even greater than Dadaism almost a century ago.

by Anna Frants, Elena Sokol

New York Arts Magazine (NYARTS) October 5, 2006

TECHNOLOGY OF THE CYBER-BEAUTY

The works of art can make a profound impression on us, and we often are unable to explain why. We can appreciate art without thinking about it or fully understanding the reasons. Sigmund Freud, in Moses of Michelangelo, noticed that “the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unresolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us.”

Further, Freud suggested that our response to art has to be driven by a combination of an intellectual comprehension and an emotional attitude. We perceive art by engaging our senses, and strive to interpret its meaning given our past experiences and knowledge. What we feel and think is deeply personal, but at the same time it is influenced by the culture, socio-economic conditions, our education and the media. The balance between intellectual and emotional also depends on the form of the art. For example, when we encounter conceptual art, we need to understand the idea and the intent of the artist first and then respond to that idea emotionally and/or intellectually.

Computer-based art is often similar to conceptual art in its emphasis on the intellectual comprehension: a spectator needs to understand the artist’s intent. This understanding is even more crucial in the interactive projects, because how we respond depends on our ability to understand an artist’s idea and expectations. Cyberart is more challenging, because it relies on technology and media, which are less intuitive to us and novel in form. Another difficulty lies in the time dimension. Most traditional art objects are static: the colors and shapes are frozen in time. The audience undergoes the change; the painting and sculpture are timeless (if we discount effects of deterioration). Even art films, once edited and printed can be played again and again, repeating predetermined sequence of images.

The use of computers allows the artist and the audience to break away from this deterministic nature of traditional arts. While opening new possibilities for the artists, techno-centric nature of the cyberspace potentially deters the audience from emotional engagement. Cyberart may appear distant, cold and unfamiliar; without emotional clues anchoring viewer to his/her past experiences and memories; looking into cold substance behind the computer screen that (s)he cannot physically feel, smell or touch. The interactive nature of cyberart is not equivalent to a soma-somatic experience of real human touch, which is a one of the basic ways we learn about the world, starting from the childhood with “touch me” books with different textures. We “touch” the cyberart mostly through our cognitive engagement. The depth of our emotional response is related to the degree of abstractness in the idea behind the art project and to the artistic metaphor chosen for the communication of that idea. To illustrate this point let’s consider two projects dealing with a concept of “a passage of time.”

The first project is Fragile by Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima. Fragile is an abstract, digital, 3-dimentional “constellation,” every node of it is a tiny (a quarter- inch) LED linked by almost weightless silver rays. Displays show a sequence of numbers from 1 to 9 (apparently Miyajima never employs zero) and create a digital landscape of time. The landscape of these infinitely progressing numbers is Miyajima’s metaphor: “Everything changes. Everything keeps going on forever. Everything is interacted with each other.” This metaphor is not intuitive, because of the high level of the abstraction and the deep philosophical meaning of the concept itself–”infinite time”–and because there is no a unique experience, emotion or instinct associated for most of us with the progression of numbers. However, once the intent of the artist is revealed, we undoubtedly become overwhelmed by the experience of seeing Fragile time.

In the Sketch of a Field of Grass, American device artist and interaction designer Ryan Wolfe attempts to capture a moment in time, familiar, almost certainly, to all of us–a grass field suddenly coming alive with a turbulent breath of a wind gust. Wolfe ‘s interests are in “…isolating the definitive qualities of remembered experiences and reinterpreting them within the confines of a constructed object, essentially condensing the whole of a lived moment in time in refined, physical interpretation.” The “field” is a collection of small, sand filled boxes, each containing a few blades of artificial grass. Boxes are connected through a system of wires, resembling a web of roots. “Wind” is an electrical signal propagated through the network of computationally autonomous boxes. The diversity of grass responses creates an illusion of an invisible wind blowing over the landscape. While an eye only can see a symbolic, robotic grass plant, the mind perceives the ethereal wind. We can feel this wind independently of our knowledge about the technical details or concepts involved because we can recognize and respond to an emotional queue distilled though a simple, random grass movement.

The two projects illustrate how technology enables artists to find novel ways in conveying complex concepts and ideas. Every innovative work gives us a new glimpse into the infinitely-expanding art universe and teaches us to understand its creative vocabulary. When photography was invented in 1839, many did not recognize its artistic potential and saw just a mere reproduction of reality by mechanical devices, cold and soulless. It took decades before photography became widely accepted as an art form. Hopefully, we, as a society, are now further on the learning curve and can advance faster in understanding and appreciating the new art forms. The beauty will find its way into the mind and the heart of the beholder…

by Anna Frants, Lena Sokol

New York Arts Magazine (NYARTS) June 27, 2006