NVAIR 2020 - International Online Exchange Programme for Art Residencies
The programme was established by the NGO Congress of Cultural Activists, based on the Nazari Voitovich Art Residence, which has been operational since 2017 and is situated in the Ternopil region.
The aim of the programme is to support young artists through international residency projects and artist exchanges with partner organisations in Germany and Slovakia.
This year, due to the pandemic, physical programmes have been postponed until next year. However, in collaboration with Schafhof - European Centre for Art Upper Bavaria, we decided to explore the online format, resulting in a successful collaboration between Ukrainian and German artists.
Artist is absent - a collaboration of artists with artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
Programme curator: Lucy Nychai
The presentation was made possible through the institutional support of the UCF.
We all worked in different cities: Poltava, Cherkasy, Kyiv, and Munich. Our only task was to communicate, act as ambassadors for our respective locations, and develop an algorithm for comfortable cooperation. The theme, which served as a general framework for the project, was an inverse message and a reference to Marina Abramović’s performance "The Artist is Present" — in our case, "The Artist is Absent".
The meaning of such a framework was conducting the program without being present in the designated location, as this is an INTEGRAL component of our programs. This is also a new experience for the Nazar Voitovich Art Residence, as the presence of artists was the main value for the location, namely intervention in the local context, research, and coexistence with the community. We didn't have a holistic vision of the program, only confidence in mutual interest.
The tools for organization were ZOOM, Google Drive, and Telegram. The curator's role was reduced to process facilitation. Each project participant became a co-creator of the cooperation algorithm, decisions about timing and deadline, choosing the location for project presentation. Creative processes began with a co-authorship game involving a random selection program to move from complete author control to artificial intelligence intervention, which already questioned authorship and rather provoked collective creative consciousness. This is probably the closest to imitating collaboration processes that arise in physical programs with close artist interaction.
During the process, it was determined that the main idea for work within the project should be the search and research of creation processes that can be interfered with by outside activity and reflection on these processes. Each artist had their own, quite different themes they worked with before. These included the interplay of material and form, transformations of the visual and influence of time, conflicts and ecological disasters, practices with digital tools and interest in artificial intelligence. All this together, intersecting in the process, turned into the project space in Mozilla Hubs.
Vartan Vartan Markarian developed the central hall according to the curator's concept in collaboration with all program participants. This is a virtual model of our real program. In the middle are 4 empty chairs - this is an image from the real central workshop of the Residency. An additional plus in virtual space is the complicated mobility, only regular users can feel comfortable there. In the central gallery, 4 corridors are built leading to isolated halls with projects of individual artists. Overall, the room is a virtual image of the real situation under quarantine conditions in general.
THE GAME. Bohdan Svyrydov
We made our moves turn by turn. AI recognized something in my drawings and I saw something in the results he gave me back. During that process, I had a strong feeling that AI was trying to lead the image to some standard. I had added a new element on the image and AI had removed it on the next step like it was never existed there before. I had stood on my and after few steps, AI added something in that place. Turn by turn we had modified the image. I liked the idea of losing straight control over the process
FREEdom. Vartan Markarian
Are we free in our choice of desires, or have they sometimes imposed things? Today, man does not belong to himself, although we find ourselves free and independent. Social networks have access to our preferences, photos, travel routes, statistics on the time of our stay in different places. By using and imposing a product on us for commercial gain. As soon as we think about something, advertising immediately begins to haunt us.
Virtually unseen. Johnny Linder
In these days, relations between humans and the mediation of artworks have become a rather difficult matter. an important part of our everyday life seems shifted to the digital world as some sort of supplement. This project tries to focus on the autonomous creation and reaction of works based on physical transformation and the factor of time. in different approaches, I looked for ways of creation and variation of images that are similar to digital processing or algorithms but totally stay in the analogue world. no matter if the material is light, liquids, paper, or optical copy machines, the works always exist in a physical form that is subject to changements and instability. the fact that things are actually present but not clearly visible for everybody underlines the intention of the video works where pictures are shared in public space but can only be seen during a short period of time. This conception tries to comment on the meaning of reality beyond virtual space by questioning the relation to the public and traditional conceptions of artworks in a way that might be as well a symbol for human interaction
Erasure Room. Online 3D scene editor. 3 MB. Constanze Budcke
The Virtual Reality-Installation follows an artistic approach, in which what one sees is recognized on the level that lies between the material and the visual. So that the image that you see is not what you recognize, but what you feel. That the material properties are used in such a way that they cancel each other out and form the first level of meaning. The actual statement takes place on the second level, where the idea is presented as a singular aesthetic experience