🗓️February 2 – 12, 2018
MULTIPLE LOCATIONS
📍St Petersburg, Russia
◆CYFEST 11, St Petersburg◆
Festival Program
February 2-5
Exhibition Project “We’ll Have Another Chance” curated by Anna Frants, Elena Gubanova, Sergey Komarov. Concerts, performances
Annenkriche
St. Petersburg, Kirochnaya, 8б
12 PM –7 PM
Free admission
February 2–12
Exhibition Project “Weather Forecast: Digital Cloudiness” curated by Anna Frants, Elena Gubanova, Varvara Egorova. Concerts, lectures, performances
Applied Art Museum at St. Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design
St. Petersburg, Solyanoy per., 13–15
12 PM – 8 PM
Admission by tickets from the Academy of Art and Design:
300 RUB – Adult visitors
150 RUB – Schoolchildren, students, pensioners of the Russian Federation and other categories of visitors
February 3–12
Exhibition Project “Proxima” curated by Sofia Kudryavtseva, Elena Gubanova, Anna Zavediy. Lectures
Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
St. Petersburg, Dvortsovaya pl., 6–8
3 PM–5:30 PM (Closed Mondays)
Access to the exhibition is from the Palace Square through the museum zone of the General Staff Building
Admission by tickets from the State Hermitage. Tickets >
Opening Nights, Screenings, Lectures, Concerts
February 2
Annenkirche
5 PM — Festival opening. Presentation of the exhibition project “We’ll Have Another Chance” curated by Anna Frants, Elena Gubanova, Sergey Komarov
5:30 PM — Performance by Sam Conran “Synth 777”
St. Petersburg, Kirochnaya, 8б
February 2
Applied Art Museum at St. Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design
7 PM — Festival opening. Presentation of the exhibition project “Weather Forecast: Digital Cloudiness” curated by Anna Frants, Elena Gubanova, Varvara Egorova
7:30 PM — Concert of the group «Avrorin-Galkina-Dmitirev-Lis»
St. Petersburg, Solyanoy per., 13–15
February 3
Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
4 PM — Presentation of the exhibition project “Proxima” curated by Sofia Kudryavtseva, Elena Gubanova, Anna Zavediy
5 PM — Lecture of Carla Rapoport “A Brief History of the Lumen Prize”
6:30 PM — Lecture of Foteini Aravani “Collecting the Present: Digital in Museum Collections”
St. Petersburg, Dvortsovaya pl., 6–8
February 4
Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (Henry Hall)
2 PM — Workshop of Janine Randerson “Cloud Worlds: Recent Digital Art from Aotearoa-New Zealand”
4:30 PM — Lecture of Danielle Siembieda “Re-imagining the Future of Collaborative Communities”
St. Petersburg, Solyanoy per., 13–15
February 4
Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
5 PM — Lecture of Vlad Strukov “Ocular Velocity: Art in the Age of Big Data”
6:30 PM — Lecture of Alan Boldon “A Radical Approach to Learning: Facilitating Collective Intelligence”
St. Petersburg, Dvortsovaya pl., 6–8
February 4
Annenkirche
7 PM — Performance of Boris Shershenkov “Digitophonia”
St. Petersburg, Kirochnaya, 8б
February 5
Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (Henry Hall)
5 PM — Lecture of Alexander Burenkov “Economics of Attention and Curating Exhibitions in Post-Internet Age”
6:30 PM — Lecture of Vladimir Rannev and Marina Alekseyeva “Opera ‘Prose’ at the ‘Electrical Theater Stanislavsky’: Analog Technologies at the Theater Space as Illusions of the Digital Ones”
St. Petersburg, Solyanoy per., 13–15
February 6
Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
5 PM — Lecture of Valentino Catricalà “Rethinking Cinema And Media Trough Media Art”
7 PM — Lecture of Antonio Abad “BlindWiki, Unveiling the Unseen”
St. Petersburg, Dvortsovaya pl., 6–8
February 7
Berthold Center Space
7 PM — Presentation of the project of Ellen Pearlman and Andrew McWilliams “Art-A-Hack” curated by Anna Zavediy
St. Petersburg, Grazhdanskaya, 13–15
February 8
Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
7 PM — Presentation of the book “Tracings Out of Thin Air. Establishing Oppositional Practices and Collaborative Communities in Art and Culture” with participation of the editors Marina Grzinic, Andreja Rihter, Darja Zaviršek, Alexander Ivanov and Joana Monbaron with the support of the Forum of Slavic Cultures
St. Petersburg, Dvortsovaya pl., 6–8
February 8
Sreda Space
7 PM — Presentation of the digital video program “To Touch the Sky” curated by Victoria Ilyushkina. The Russian premiere of the film by Bjorn Melhus “Freedom and Independence” (2014)
St. Petersburg, Nevsky Prospekt, 35, Bolshoy Gostiny Dvor, entrance from Sadovaya Street across from the Vorontsov Palace, 2nd Floor
February 9
Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage
7 PM — Lecture of Dmitry Bulatov “The Other Side of Sound: Sources and Patterns of Sound Art in Russia”
St. Petersburg, Dvortsovaya pl., 6–8
February 9
Big Data Solutions
7 PM — Concert “Mirrors”, Laptop Orchestra under the baton of Andrey Bundin
St. Petersburg, Gorokhovaya, 47б
February 10
Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design
6 PM — Lecture of Sergey Kostyrko “About Some Methods of Data Sonifiaction Derived during the Studies of Biological Systems”
St. Petersburg, Solyanoy per., 13–15
February 11
Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design
5 PM, (Henry Hall) — Public-talk and presentation of the art project “Content Aware Studies” by Egor Kraft, with the participation of Natalia Fuchs, project’s curator
6 PM, (Screening Room) — Performances: “Neural Module” by Sergey Kostyrko, “Compositor. Opening of the Spirit” by Ruslan Yusipov, “aio” by Nikita Bugayev
St. Petersburg, Solyanoy per., 13–15
February 12
Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design
7 PM — Creative Meeting with Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov “Technology and Visuality”
St. Petersburg, Solyanoy per., 13–15
February 12
Saint Petersburg Sound Museum
8 PM — Performance by Monica Vlad “Lost, but not Lost Forever”
St. Petersburg, Art Center Pushkinskaya-10, Ligovsky Prospekt, 53, Museum Annex, 3rd Floor
Festival Venues
- Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design – 13–15 Solyanoy Ln
- Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage – 6–8 Dvortsovaya Sq
- Annenkirche – 8B Kirochnaya St
- Saint Petersburg Sound Museum – Art Center Pushkinskaya-10, 53 Ligovsky Prospekt, 3rd Floor
- Sreda Space – Bolshoy Gostiny Dvor 35 Nevsky Ave
- Berthold Center Space – 13–15 Grazhdanskaya
- Big Data Solutions – 47B Gorokhovaya
- Masters School – 4а Barochnaya St
This year, CYFEST is partnering with Lumen to exhibit in St. Petersburg 2016 Lumen Prize Gold Award winner, Hyperplanes of Simultaneity by Fabio Giampietro and Alessio de Vecchi, and the 2017 Founders Award, Slide to Expose by Nicole Ruggiero, Molly Soda, and Refrakt, alongside a showreel of selected moving image works.
The human being is constantly looking for a comfort zone. Changes induce anxiety and a desire to stick to the already known, familiar and comfortable. We suggest to treat changes in the realm of the digital technologies, which became integrated to our mundane life, as if they were the weather patterns. As something that is beyond our control, but what directly affects our routine.
Throughout its history, the CYFEST Festival main concerns were to inspect the dialog between new and traditional visual languages and to try to show the technological achievements via artistic conversion.
Art absorbs contemporary technologies and gives rise to the augmented reality in its realm. Artist avails her/himself with ever new instruments for creating images and metaphors of the real world. What our world looks like today and how it moves towards a new visual language; how our communication and our perception of the known are being transformed. We are no longer satisfied with a reflection in the mirror — our images are built out of hundreds digital photographs, and it is possible to travel anywhere without being physically present in place simply using a computer program. To what extent is this sufficient, necessary — or too much — for us?
Artist would always keep its secret box where (s)he could preserve the precious, digitally non-convertible, non-transferred into the ‘cloud’ moments: a true experience, a move or a memory, a coincidental image or a feeling. These treasures are similar to the tiny diamonds used to be the defining element of the clockwork mechanism since XVIII. What is the purpose of combining art and technologies? To expose the language of the future or simply to adapt the rapidly changing world to our past? Digital reality has come to the traditional culture so close that it is barely undistinguishable whether simple human interactions and the real world sounds are enough for us — or we need the digital decoding of those interactions and sounds.
We invite artists and specialists in computer programming to jointly adapt their knowledge and creative energy to the art processes. Through the lens of an artistic statement we propose to look ahead, observe the everyday and compose a “weather forecast” of the real/digital coexistence – at least for the present day.
Digital clouds are storages without shape or boundaries, impersonal and dispassionate. Nowadays, the term ‘Cloud’ is used in the I-technologies as a metaphor based on the Internet’s picture on the diagram of the computer network or as an image of the complex infrastructure that covers up all the technical details. There are already ‘private clouds’, ‘public clouds’, ‘community clouds’ and ‘hybrid clouds’.
In other words, a parallel world has been created, a new environment for the information maintenance. Practically simultaneously with the launch of the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (Amazon EC2) in August 2006, the terms ‘cloud’ and ‘cloud computing’ were used by the Google principal Eric Schmidt. From then on, one can encounter numerous references to cloud computing in the media, publications of the IT-specialists and within the academic field.
Elena Gubanova, curator
Photography by Anton Khlabov, Mikhail Borisov, Yury Goryanoy