EN

Anna Shustikova (RU) – You can touch, You can play “Barbie Girl” by Aqua. Through the experiments with much-talked-about CLIP (text-to-image) AI architecture, this project explores the biases around concepts of “beauty” and “femininity” within machine’s male gaze. Roman Solodkov (RU) – Manifesting Latent Space, Latent space is a hidden, liminal part of the neural network’s algorithm. It is often concealed from the user, while it is exactly this space where the structure and logic of trained neural network manifest themselves, a representation of how an algorithm interprets the given data. It harbors biases and ideological artefacts introduced with the training data set. This project invites participants to explore the latent space by playing with it, in order to make it visible and palpable, accessible for interaction to a human user. It simultaneously poses a question: who can play with the structure of powerful commercial/corporate neural networks, and who is affected by the consequences of these games? Ivan Netkachev (RU) – Stopping Light. The StyleGAN2 neural network is trained on the pictures of churches and is re-trained on a dataset of in-game photography. The buildings from GTA San Andreas mix together with real architectural forms. The churches get stuck between the real world and rough polygons. The light – previously hidden – shines through the stock photos.

Anna Shustikova (RU): Born in 1992 in Samara. Grew up in the closed atomic town Zarechny. Has bachelor degree in physics and applied math. Currently studies at Rodchenko Art School. In her artwork Anna explores the connection and confrontation between body and power. She is interested in the way new technologies create new forms of surveillance and discrimination. She works with artificial intelligence, video, performance, sculpture, and installations.

Roman Solodkov (RU): Moscow-based artist born in 1995. Holds BSc degree in biology and MSc in neuroscience. Currently studies at Rodchenko Art School with a focus on new media art. Works with 3D-graphics, video games, creative coding, interactive installations. His interests revolve around co-transformation of technology and corporeality, biopolitics, materialist media theory, art&science. Current projects are focused on how interfaces structure our relationships with technology and ways to alter them.

Ivan Netkachev (RU) (b. 1998): Moscow-based artist. He holds a bachelor’s degree in theoretical linguistics, and currently works as a researcher in HSE, Moscow. As a scientist, he investigates grammatical patterns in natural languages; as an artist, he attempts at discovering hidden grammatical patterns in the objects of the real world. His interests include generative poetry, text- and image-generating automata, as well as collecting, categorizing and cataloging of images/representations.

Credits

Curators: Helena Nikonole, Oxana Chvyakina Artists: Fedor Balashov aka wasdswag, Katya Galitskaya, Mitry Grankov, Gray cake, Anastasia Koroleva, Yuliya Kozhemyako aka supr, Ivan Netkachev, Xenia Obukhovskaya, Rona Peshekhonova, Alexey Ryabov, Eugene Kruglov, Pavel Seldemirov, Vladimir Sheshak, Anna Shustikova, Roman Solodkov.