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ÁKKTA / Egor Kraft

Egor Kraft

ÁKKTA

Anna Nova Gallery is pleased to announce the beginning of cooperation with the interdisciplinary artist Egor Kraft, who was included in the “New East 100”, a list of people, places and projects, shaping our world today, by London based Calvert Journal in 2017. ÁKKTA - his first exhibition in the commercial gallery, where his main projects of recent years are shown. The visitors can see the works, presented earlier at dierent art-institutions over Europe and Russia, such as “Air Kiss”, “The New Colour”, “Kickback” and “Now Is Just Right Now” as well as new works from the ongoing project “Content Aware Studies”.

About Egor

Kraft Egor

Kraft often explores the emerging territories and possibilities of communication and their correlations to topics such as information, identity, chaos vs. order, time and perception. The artist aims to juxtapose these perennial questions to the ways in which we organise power and infrastructures, and explore the roles of contemporary technologies in these processes. As an artistic method Egor Kraft looks for ways to produce work which sits on the boundaries between reality and its misrepresentation, exploring reality’s perversion and the consequences. He raises question of impossibility of reality representation due to the nature of communication as a flawed means. Egor Kraft is interested in investigating how media advancements aect and influence our fragmented perception of reality and intervene with its seemingly invincible logic, while shaping economies, politics, morals, ethic and aesthetic values.

A fictional word from the project “Air Kiss” in the film context means a political crowd that uses the tracking system’s geo-addressing patterns in order to heavily impact local legislation through spatial distribution.

Content Aware Studies, 2018 Marble, Polyamide, Machine learning algorithms; dual-channel video installation The project initiates an inquiry into the possibilities of AI and particularly Machine Learning to reconstruct and generate lost antique greek and roman friezes and sculptures by the means of algorithmic analysis of 3D scans of antiquity. It concerns about the potentialities of methods involving data, ML, AI and other forms of automations turning into semi- and quasi–archeological knowledge production and interpretations of history and culture in the era of ubiquitous computation. An algorithm capable of self-learning is directed to replenish lost fragments of the friezes and sculptures. Based on an analysis of models, it generates models, which are then 3D printed in various materials and used to fill the voids of the original sculptures and their copies. The synthetic intelligence that tends to faithfully restore original forms, also produces bizarre errors and algorithmic speculative interpretations of, familiar to us, Hellenistic and Roman aesthetics, revealing a machinic understanding of human antiquity.

Air Kiss, 2017 Film, FullHD Air Kiss is a film and web based project portraying a scenario where citizenship is a digital membership – and ownership – to a collectivized system in which governance is done by AI. The project explores the social, political and aesthetic repercussions of algorithmic decision-making executed based on citizens’ location and behavior. It takes a critical standpoint towards a future society – neither a dystopia nor a utopia – where state and corporate governance is rendered obsolete through collectively owned and globally distributed neural networks which provide state functions as virtual services. It receives requests, predicts, suggests and decides on infrastructure, production and resources and has reached such an endpoint of governance as to actually be a psychotherapist – or inner voice – to its citizens. The film is a series of vignettes into a speculative future of ubiquitous computation, looking at it through the subjective lenses of citizens, objects and AI. It speaks in a poetic language while pondering upon political and philosophical questions of humans and technologies. Kickback, 2015 Intervention The intervention was carried out in August 2014 in St. Petersburg, when the artist bought a few white T-shirts from the Swedish clothing chain “H&M”. Without removing any tags from the T-shirts, the artist used professional screen printing techniques to print the T-shirts with texts such as: “Please Ignore This Text - Keep on Shopping” etc., as if they had been originally designed as such. The next day he went back to the store in order to return and be refunded for his newly modified T-shirt, telling the store’s cashier that it just didn’t fit him. The store’s sta member did not suspect anything, they took back the T-shirt and refunded the artist with his money. The next day the artist returned to the store to find that, his subsequently self-modified T-shirt, was now on sale again complete with its magnetic anti-theft tag which had been reattached. The T-shirt’s new guise had even prompted the store to display it in an even more prominent space on the clothes rack. A series of similar events has since been conducted involving printing dierent texts onto T-shirts as a comment on contemporary consumer culture and the absurdity of slogans that modern objects of consumerism often come with.

Now Is Just

Right Now, 2012 Site specific neon installation “How long is now?” — the unanswered question posed in grati on the wall of the legendary Berlin squat Tacheles, which became a symbol of the independent Berlin of the ’90s. While comprehending the question and it’s premises, one involuntarily might find himself wondering — how do you find an answer to this question and go further towards understanding the idea of an ongoing existence? The main line of the Egor’s suggestion is to stop focusing on the concept of the “now-moment” and approve of its permanent presence. The project makes you think that the only thing we have is the present moment, which instantly turns into the past.

The New Colour

2011 Online intervention “The New Color” is an online intervention consisting of a faux (imitative) website for a non-existent American company (ACI) specializing in the field of developing chemistry. On the website, the fictitious company announces a fictitious breakthrough consisting of a previously “undiscovered” color. The website is the presentation of non-facts as news explores the intrinsic power of the media to transform public perception and stand in for new forms of knowledge production. A viral sensation with broad social impact, “The New Color” continues to attract significant online attention. Hundreds of visitors a week come across the website, having been referred to it by online search engines and social media. Emails are received nearly daily, the Facebook page subscribers are growing, Google search “New Color” often delivers thenewcolor.net on top of the list. A book as a documentation and an outcome of the intervention was issued in 2015.