between technology and reality

      Almost all works of Ekaterinburg group of artists “Where the Dogs Run” are about movement – a relocation of objects in space or moving images in the video. Among historical predecessors of the group are Moscow and Leningrad kinetic artists from 1950-1960. Kinetic artists (“Movement” group and others) were making their art in the atmosphere of enthusiasm surrounding new technologies, which prevailed in Europe 50 years ago. An optimistic belief that technology will play a crucial role in establishing peace around the globe was most convincingly expressed in the “Atomium” – half building and half sculpture built in 1958 in Brussels for the Universal Exhibition. Now the worship of high technologies is only possible in marketing or ideologically, as is the case of “innovations” and “modernizations” in Russia. Both irrational and healthy scepticism about technologies fall back, not without a good fight though, only when faced by such great projects as the Large Hadron Collider. The art works of “Where the Dogs Run” demonstrate that technologies cannot be treated as a single panacea for the imperfection of human nature. Artists now work in the age of prevailing doubt about harmony as the ultimate goal which supposedly could be achieved if there existed, theoretically, a neutral observer of the first and second nature (i.e. culture). One will also fail to find here a plot structure of the “Exposition-Climax-Denouement” type characteristic of narrative arts. The group is interested in transitions between different states of matter, Brownian motion of objects and change in perspectives. Something similar to a literary plot appears only in “Sunrise” video installation of the four in 2010, although it is impossible to summarize it. “Sunrise” refers to the cited source just as a story of Vladimir Sorokin “The Blizzard” relates to its prototypes – A. Pushkin’s and L. Tolstoy’s literary works. V.Sorokin takes a literary form from the school curriculum and blows it up with fantastic and frightening details, alien to the rules and values of the 19th century classical writers. “Where the Dogs Run” transform familiar images of the Soviet teenager blockbuster “The Elusive Avengers” (1966) into a cheat like Maurits Escher’s graphic puzzles do. As the four horseman start approaching the audience, their shape changes and they turn into either bums carrying their possessions on the shoulders or mutants roaming the lifeless landscapes of planet Earth after the Armageddon. The vagueness of the characters is an essential condition of their existence. A definite transformation of the four avengers into the characters of other film, a Hollywood one for example, would have made “Sunrise” just a postscript to the age of cultural crisis in Russia. The artists are exploring the structure of this image much deeper. “Sunrise” makes us feel as if we are looking at history from the inside. “The Elusive Avengers” is a good example of how events and people of the first years of Civil War were romanticized by making an indirect comparison of Russian fighters with American cowboys that were seen as both protecting the boundaries of the young republic and expanding them. “Sunrise” questions not a particular version of history, but an opportunity for its romantic interpretation, not heroism but an existence of hero as such. At the same time, “Sunrise” is also a deconstruction of childhood memories that belong to the authors and audience, a clear statement that past cannot be restored, and its understanding is impeded by an extensive accessibility of the most recent opinions on revolution, films about revolution and cinema in general. A set of sensual pleasures that is offered in “Dawn of the Dead”, a zombie-epic by George Romero shot in 1978, is completely different from those ways that the authors of “The Elusive Avengers” could use to affect the audience in the cinemas. A clash of two systems gives birth to a zone where the characters of “Sunrise” keep moving forward pointlessly but persistently. The route of “zombie-avengers” presupposes no final destination. The group sees this absence of the denouement as a vital part of the content of their art works. This is also a result of their passion for technologies and mechanisms which dictates the user’s position in space and time.

 In “The Road” video, made in 2002-2003, four men are mowing a snow desert, leaving a fluffy trail behind, the one that snowmobiles usually produce. A romantic theme of a lonely traveller placed in an indifferent environment is overlaid by the myth of Sisyphus. However, tragic perception of the world is to be found nowhere near “The Road”. Quite the contrary, a dynamic advance of the four mowing men towards the horizon is filled with rhythmic optimism. A vigorous participation in changing your way in life is possible. An absurd action doesn’t look like renouncement of will but rather like an immense misfortune, a strategically planned failure. This is an emotional background of Victor Tsoy’s “The Aluminium Cucumbers” (1982) and not Thomas Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922). Although there is a possibility of interpreting “The Road” in a completely opposite way. Haymaking is a period of time when the land is being prepared for the next agricultural season, but nothing grows out of snow. Snow is a layer, which, in the countries that have it, only preserves winter crops. Mowing the snow is a gesture of cultivating the void that cannot accept the productive care. And yet this video is well beyond just another verbalisation of the collective sociocultural myth about Russia as a dead end for all efforts of engineers of the human souls. What is important is that this work generates a metaphor of the post-industrial world which declares the emergence of creative approach to routine and engages in the (often) shallow quest for knowledge.

Repetitions of movement, and its infinity, typical of the works of “Where the Dogs Run”, appear not only for the sake of philosophical satire or making a statement about the vanity of existence. A person becomes a robot in “The Road” and a computing machine in “Knitting And Crocheting The Mandelbrot Set” (2011). “Beklenischevo” (2006) places a trite landscape seen by a passenger from a car window into a virtual space. The birch tree forest that has been an icon of Russian nature is made dependent on the speedometer and the calculator of distances. A piece of the Ural landscape is turned into a fractal which grows more junctions after every demonstration of the work. In “Beklenischevo” the artists review the fundamental principles of the cinematic text that is generated in the age of infinite and almost automatically produced flow of images. The train of the Lumiere Brothers have arrived a million times in the full view of the whole world, but it was fixed in time and space. The Ural village stays in the same spot, but takes up all of the broadcasting in strict accordance with the basic laws of the information transfer. The first people to see “The Arrival of the Train” in 1896 thought that they would be run over by it. “Where the Dogs Run” don’t assume that the audience of “Beklenischevo” can experience a similar participation effect. The effect has been programmed as an integral part of the installation and it doesn’t require any additional psychological efforts on our behalf. If the audience of a football match is expanded by the television and Internet, then thousands of new dwellers are moving into the village thanks to the artists.

We also see an opposite transformation in the art works of “Where the Dogs Run”. The artists subtly interpret the impact that technologies exert on constructing human relations and work on designing and testing a point of view that would be independent of the organic creatures. The installation of “A Self-Observing Landscape” (2008) presents a machine of complex design that carries out neutral observations of the reality and itself. Cryptic filter of reality excludes aesthetic and emotional selection. Life is placed in a test tube. While other works, on the contrary, humanize the technologies. Here the fixed algorithms are produced in order to solve the problems which are far beyond the technological breakthroughs used to improve human life. “Where the Dogs Run” are bewitched by the irrationality of technologies. They challenge the world of things to reproduce human behavioral patterns, and this is when crazy mincing machines, turned by artists into freely moving particles, come into life. A different installation features hands of robots melancholically scratching the walls.
 
A new work of the group “Trialogue” develops the same theme. Three balls resemble mincing machines as much as transcendental mind resembles common sense. The artists grant technical devices with human reflexes and instincts, including the most mysterious of the senses – the sense of smell (in the “Faces of the Smell” installation made in 2012). All works of the artists exist on the brink
between the individual will which is in charge of the aesthetics, and impersonal laws of physics, by programming the artist-built machines. They postpone the rise of the machines, forcing the devices to carry out a set of meaningless actions devoid of any instrumental function. Human beings, though, also seem nothing more than an insignificant unit that tends to lapse into automatic performance.