Work – Page 68 – Anna Frants

ANNA FRANTS’ RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION FROM THE FESTIVAL “BURNING MAN”

Genre: Installations and Performance
Participant: Anna Frants

A video screening prepared by Anna Frants (USA) based on materials from the contemporary art festival Burning Man. Starts at 6:00 PM.

From the festival press release:

“Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never participated in the event is like trying to describe a color to a blind person.”

The festival’s history dates back to 1986, when it was founded by Larry Harvey and Jerry James. In 1990, the park police, concerned about the risk of fire, opposed the annual fire ceremonies. This prohibition led to the creation of an international festival that now annually draws about 25,000 people to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.

Since 1987, every year Burning Man transforms the desert into a stage for showcasing a new format of art. It rejects the dead-end concepts of minimalism that have stripped art down to its barest elements and the fashionable gallery politics of major metropolitan cities. This art form not only attempts to discover and reinterpret its genetic ties with past styles and ideas, but also bursts into entirely new, unexplored realms. It refutes the notion that art is either a market commodity or a divine creation. It frees itself from imposed social constructs and rules, allowing artists and viewers simply to think about art — and live it…

Art no longer imitates life. It is Life itself, born in the labyrinths of consciousness and becoming the eternal essence of beauty.

Weekend.RU November 22, 2004

TOUCHME

The striking multitude of images that have come into existence during the last 30 years can falsely engender the sense that they have brought about great breakthroughs in multimedia art.

The striking multitude of images that have come into existence during the last 30 years can falsely engender the sense that they have brought about great breakthroughs in multimedia art. Critical discourse has barely touched on the radically different dimensions in creativity made possible by recent technological advances, especially when compared to the rampant discussions of the alterations in social paradigms that they have brought on. This is especially true in more traditional, computer-based art. Despite significant advances in software, most artists, because of their lack of technological and programming expertise, still do not utilize it to its full creative potential. The progress of art making depends upon the artists’ thorough understanding of how new, more technologically advanced sets of tools can be utilized for creating stronger visual effects.

The TouchMe™ project, conceived by Anna Frants in 2002, is one of the first examples of a distributed creative potential realized in the unconstrained collaboration between mediums. The project is a prototype of a virtual studio where individual artists’ works interact with one another other in a manner which is both structured and non-deterministic. The result is a work of art that is open-ended and continuously evolving in time. Each new contributing artist actively changes the overall creation and the visual landscape of the project. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In Frants’ work, artists from around the world contribute elements of their individual visual vocabularies. The elements of such vocabularies are video and sound streams that express artists’ associations with specific colors. The TouchMe™ framework dynamically blends multiple images; it then picks sound tracks, based on the color choice made by the participating viewer. The resulting video stream, while related to the chosen color, is not predictable. The randomly selected, blended images, and corresponding soundtracks create a unique sensation that cannot be achieved by a small number of works contributed by any single artist. In early 2004, internationally known video artist Alina Bliumis was the first artist to contribute her videos to the project. These were used for the initial prototype. Seven more video artists contributed their work for the exhibition at the Broadway Gallery — Vladimir Gruzdev, Elena Gubanova, Asia Nemchenok, Maria Shirofutdinova, Mihail Skorodumov, Leo Stepanov and Aliona Yurtsevich.

In the final inception of the project, contributing artists will be storing libraries of their video works on web servers in geographically distributed locations. These works will not be limited to any particular style. The TouchMe™ framework, running on a web server will load and play such distributed videos.

Typically, the Internet serves as network that hosts many individual, fully encapsulated, unconnected artistic efforts. These artistic islands, despite occasionally referencing each other, do not form an internet-based aesthetic whole. Nor has the internet been used as means of building works of art that require a high degree of artistic collaboration, one not possible in the physical world. We only now find ourselves at the onset of an age where artists are presented with the opportunity to evolve in this nearly untapped resource and venue. With TouchMe™, Ana Frants is at the forefront of visual artists embracing the greatest communication medium that has ever existed — the Internet.

by Leond Frants, Elena Sokol

HYBRIS. HYBRIDS AND MONSTERS IN CONTEMPORARY ART

In the modern world, the notion of the “hybrid” has become an inseparable component of everyday life. Mechanisms, computers, products, clothing, methods of education, spaces, bodies, languages—even instruments of war—are all hybrids. Etymologically, the Greek term hybris, from which the Latin hybridus is derived, means sin and arrogance—hubris. The first Greek philosophers viewed humankind and nature as a single entity. The separation from nature was accompanied by pride and boldness (hybris), which brought about chaos and destruction. Such behavior (Icarus, Phaethon, Ajax) is described in Greek mythology as a constant human striving toward a higher dimension, relentlessly punished by the gods. If we view today’s “technological revolution” through this lens, then humanity’s efforts to conquer the world at any cost—and to create hybrid prostheses for daily life—can indeed be seen as modern hybris.

However, in contemporary art, this effort succeeds, sweeping away the cliché of the “vile ordinariness” of the world. Rebellion, protest, and audacity place us once again at the clash between order and chaos; they unflinchingly hold up a mirror to our own identity. Artists, more radically than anyone else, seem to offer a juxtaposition and exchange with the “otherness” that infiltrates our daily lives. What will our future be like if machines become extensions of the human species? What happens if technologies no longer need humans?

The project, exhibited in the gallery spaces of Ca’ Foscari’s library and organized by the MediaArtLab CYLAND, includes works by 19 artists from Italy, Russia, the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, and the United States. The project explores one of society’s fundamental mechanisms—the connection of the unconnectable, the problems in relationships between “the self” and “the other,” blurring the boundaries of clearly defined concepts. In this exhibition, new technologies and old media create a space where the personal territory of each artwork is not confined but merges and influences the others, generating new “hybrid fruits” of artistic perception. Structured cyberspaces, post-Soviet reflections, hybrids of geometry and classics, art and life—this diversity of artistic objects illustrates how relevant this theme was 5,000 years ago and still is today.

The dynamic nature of culture is the result of the coexistence of different languages within a shared cultural space: the more crowded and saturated this space is, the more complex the resulting system—and the more precise its representation of the world around us.

Founded in 2007, CYLAND is a non-profit organization committed to expanding the intersection between art and technology through an annual international festival, exhibitions, sound art, visual art, and educational programs. CYLAND hosts Eastern Europe’s largest online video art archive, organizes exhibitions worldwide, and is the driving force behind CYFEST, the largest annual new media art event in Russia.

Artists: Lucia Veronesi (IT), Alvise Bittente (IT), Valentina Povarova (RU), Irina Nakhova (RU+USA), William Latham (UK), Alexandra Dementieva (Belgium), Peter Patchen (USA), German Vinogradov (RU), Alexander Terebenin (RU), Alexei Kostroma (DE), Vitaly Pushnitsky (RU), Ludmila Belova (RU), Ivan Govorkov (RU), Elena Gubanova (RU), Carla Gannis (USA), Anna Frants (RU+USA), Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai (RU), Natalia Lyakh (FR), Boris Kazakov (RU).