The Zarya Center for Contemporary Art for 2 months will plunge into the world of virtual reality 
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VLADIVOSTOK. December 15 at the Center for Contemporary Art "Dawn" (Prospect 100 years of Vladivostok, 155, workshop 2) will open the exhibition Homo ludens / Man playing, dedicated to computer games, electronic gaming technologies and virtual reality. Until the end of February, visitors to the exposition will have the opportunity to see and experience more than 30 iconic game consoles, learn interesting facts about video games and get acquainted with the works of contemporary Russian artists. Entrance to the exhibition is free. There is an age limit - from 16 years.
According to Yekaterina Krylova, curator of the Center for Contemporary Art, the video game, like the object of art - painting, sculpture, installation - is visually designed in a certain way. The specific video sequence and the format of the computer game itself have long penetrated the territory of modern art. In their works, elements of video games are used by well-known representatives of new media art - RSG, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, Mendy and Keith Obedike. Another related point is a social function. As a result of the work of designers, animators and programmers, a video game is targeted and involves the reaction of the viewer. The same can be said about art, considering it historically - as an instrument of influence on the audience.
The Homo Ludens exhibition is a retrospective look at the computer games industry, a subject environment for the personal study of gaming technologies and their impact on contemporary culture, art and human behavior. The exposition will include 8-generation gaming electronics - from Odyssey Magnavox, Pong Atari, Channel F Fairchild and the Soviet game “Wait, wait!” To the latest PlayStation 4 console, released in the United States in mid-November 2013.
In addition to game consoles, the exhibition presents installations by Russian artists - Polina Kanis (St. Petersburg), Rostan Tavasiev (Moscow), the art group CHREVO (Krasnoyarsk) and Anna Parmenova (Vladivostok), inspired by computer graphics, online mythology and ethical issues virtual reality.
Video installation of Polina Kanis “Eggs” is a provocative statement about gender status as part of the system of relations between the sexes prescribed by society. The work is a video documentation of a performance in which the artist explores the themes of voluntary female victimization and natural aggressiveness. As a convincing visual metaphor, the artist chooses the plot of the Soviet electronic game “Well, wait a minute!”, Familiar from childhood. The artist runs right and left, like the Wolf in Electronics, receiving invisible bonus points for agility and speed.
The multimedia installation of Rostan Tavasiev “Everything is complicated…” is like an attempt to transfer interaction with a work of art into virtual reality. The artist suggests imagining that the motionless and dumb museum exhibits are in fact living beings, with a very intense inner life hidden from the viewer. They have their own opinion about the museum, where they ended up by the will of the author and curator, they have an opinion about the author himself (not always pleasant for the latter), about visitors to the exhibition, about their exposition neighbors, who are both their friends and competitors. The exhibits anxiously await the end of the exhibition and worry about their future prospects, carefully read what the press writes about them, rejoice, resent and try to predict how criticism will affect their fate. Thus, what we see in the space of the exhibition hall is only the tip of the iceberg.
In Pause, a resident of Vladivostok Anna Parmenova intentionally materializes images of virtual reality, making each pixel - an elementary particle of a digital image - an object of application of the artist’s real efforts. The physical embodiment of the atoms of computer graphics is a long meditative process of modeling clay, a material familiar from children’s feelings, the first creative impulses, the development of classical techniques of artistic activity. A peculiar protest against the devaluation of everyday reality brings to life a universal image of signal loss, breaking the connection with the otherworldly reality of the screen plane. The artist imposes a visual metaphor of No signal on the image of the city, conditionally recreating its landscape with the help of thousands of man-made cubic “pauses”.
The work TROJAN.INFINITY.OK will also be presented, where the CHREVO art group manifests the consequences of a new type of addictive behavior - dependence on virtual reality formed by social networks and game consoles. The illusion of action in a space more comfortable and less demanding of the real you, conditionally more “safe” than drugs or alcohol, attracts you with the ability to quickly and relatively “cheaply” relieve anxiety, socialize, and approach potential happiness. The result of a gambling Internet attraction is a gradual change in consciousness, an upset of habits and drives.
The exhibition was attended by: Synergy company, Royal Credit Bank, Kew digital equipment store and Anna Nova gallery. Children under 16 years of age are admitted to the exhibition.
For reference:
* Lev Losev (1937 - 2009) - a famous Russian poet, literary critic and essayist.
The name of the exhibition was given by the work of the Dutch historian and culturologist Johan Hoyzing (1872 - 1945) "HOMO LUDENS. The experience of determining the game element of culture ”(1938). In the dark years of Europe - the heyday of the fascist regimes - Johan Hoizing, among other neo-humanists - famous philosophers, cultural scientists, writers such as Hermann Hesse, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Thomas Mann, made an attempt to identify, explore and describe the universal element of culture, capable of preserving the “human” in man, a serious counterbalance to barbarism and the false system of values promoted by the ideologists of Nazism. Heizing proclaimed the game as such an element - a reconciliation space universal for all cultures, which offers each participant equal chances of success and the possibility of free choice within the framework of general rules that cannot be doubted or evaluated.
Polina Kanis (1985, St. Petersburg) - artist, laureate of the Kandinsky Prize in the nomination “Young artist, project of the year” (2011), nominee of the State Prize “Innovation” in the category “New Generation” (2011), graduate of the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia named after Rodchenko. The list of personal exhibitions: “New Flag”, gallery “New Holland” (St. Petersburg, 2013); “1, 2, 3, 4”, “Mystetsky Arsenal” (Kiev, 2012) and the Triumph Gallery (Moscow, 2012); “Perfect photography, Paperworks Gallery (Moscow, 2012).
Rostan Tavasiev (1976, Moscow) - artist, graduate of the Moscow State Art and Industry University named after Stroganov and the Institute of Contemporary Art Problems (course "New Art Strategies"). Since 2004, collaborates with the Aidan Gallery, nominee for the Innovation Prize (2006). The works of Rostan Tavasiev are included in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru, NCCA, Multimedia Art Museum, MMSI and others. The installation "Everything is complicated…" in 2013 was presented in the Anna Nova Gallery (St. Petersburg), and then in the Multimedia Art Museum (Moscow).
Anna Parmenova (1983, Primorsky Krai, lives and works in Vladivostok) - artist, graduate of the faculty of painting of the Vladivostok Art School (2003), studied at the Far Eastern Academy of Arts (FESA) in 2003-2004, and graduated from the St. Petersburg Art School in 2011 -Stiglitz Industrial Academy in the direction of “Art Textiles”, currently teaches artistic textiles in the interior and fabric painting in FEFU.
The art group CHREVO was formed in the summer of 2011 in Krasnoyarsk by the brothers Ruslan and Roman Chernakov. Each tandem work is the result of social research expressed in a metaphorical form. Objectivizing the lost or distorted initial functions of familiar things, artists emphasize the ambiguity of the problems of modern society. "CHREVO" - participants in many prestigious exhibitions of contemporary art across the country, among them the X International Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale "Love of Space", the festival of contemporary Russian art "Form" (Moscow, PKiO Krasnaya Presnya), the project "New Names" in the Museum non-conformist art (St. Petersburg, art center "Pushkinskaya 10"). The works of the Chernakovs are in the collections of the Krasnoyarsk Museum Center, the Museum of Non-Conformist Art, the Museum of Modern Art "Artazh" (Vladivostok).
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