Series
Anna Frants and Media Lab Cyland
Video in real time, TV sets, old lamps,
video, motion sensors.
2015
The series Personal Space, a multimedia installation inspired by the author’s own experience, was first showcased in 2015 at the State Hermitage Museum. The series consists of interactive works that create an illusion that it is possible for the individual to take a paradoxical and timeless sojourn in the ideal and entirely his own “personal” space made out of inanimate objects from the past. These objects preserve certain emotional and nostalgic information that, after being passed through webcams and sensors, appears in the form of magic memories in a real-time mode. Artworks that are included in the series become partly a fantasy and partly – an instinctive immersion woven by computer programming and robotics.
The series is underlined by a really urgent problem of the modern person, of the artist – this is a problem of realization of his absolute right to the endless nostalgia and to the preservation of his personal cultural space and objects that are inherent in it. What’s also innovative is the artist’s suggestion of how to solve this problem – by way of collective reproduction of personal memories as well as that of collective recreation of this seemingly personal space. Works in this series are built on the virtuoso combination of computer interactivity and “objectification” of the exposition with a current problem of self-isolation of the human being who, under the hard circumstances of contemporary world order, yet again chooses love – of the irrational world of old objects. Each work of this series is, to a certain extent, a quotation from the classics of Russian culture. However, when the “little” man leaves – he also leaves a vast world of memories in his wake.
Natalya Kamenetskaya
Translation by Irina Barskova
PERSONAL SPACE #2
From series “Personal Space”
Anna Frants and Media Lab Cyland
Programming, video, audio, buffalo snow, fans, household items.
2015
Do you own the shadow cast by trees on a bench if you come to the park every day? The paradox lies in that it seems your own; you got accustomed to it, became intimate with it and came to love it. You involuntarily became the source that throws light. Unlike the unemotional “cold” sun, a person that came to love the shadow radiates warmth – the warmth that is neither rational, nor practical, and it eludes accurate analyzing or computation.
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov called it an “individual mystery”:
“[Through the train window,] I saw with inexplicable pang, a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth”.
THE PESTERER
From series “Personal Space”
Anna Frants and Media Lab Cyland
Projector, video camera, robot Rumba, computer programming, video
Computer programming: Aleksey Grachev
2015
From the Free Dictionary by Farlex:
PEST /PESTERER/ n (colloq) a persistently annoying person.
TABLETOP MEMORIES
From series “Personal Space”
Anna Frants, CYLAND MediaLab
Programming and Robotics: Alexei Grachev
Old table lamps, nano projectors, video, motion sensors
Video Installation. Dimensions Variable
2015
On its face, the installation of a table with desk lamps on it has no artistic value. However, as it is often the case with this artist’s works, we should expect the unexpected. The first surprise is that when we switch the lamps on, they pour out the sound and not just the light, and the second is that the light turns out to be moving pictures. The tabletop comes alive with video-memories. They seem to be countless – from a romantic poetry reading under the starry sky to a prosaic view of the rails seen through a gap between the cars of a moving train. Each of us could identify with at least one such memory, but even if not, the tabletop memories will now become our own. When we start interacting with this installation we expect to see some kind of lighting. Instead, we get some kind of enlightening. “Thanks for the memories…”