Monday, January 24, 2005
Plugging In [Art Digital Festival in Russia]
Image credit: Lorenzo Pizzanelli / M’ARS Center of Contemporary Art
There won’t be a canvas in sight as video artists gather for an international festival at the M’ARS Center of Contemporary Art this week. Instead, visitors will watch a robot drawing Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” and play computer games with a philosophical twist.
The Art Digital festival, which opens Wednesday and runs for three weeks, aims to prove that computers, digital cameras and Internet technology are all part of an artist’s armory. And that’s a concept that is still relatively new to this country, believes the festival’s curator, Antonio Geusa, a doctoral student of Russian video art at London University.
“Access to high technology, to computers [and] to cameras happened later here, basically because of lack of money,” Geusa said. The expense of buying equipment has long deterred Russian artists, and video art remains a minority, noncommercial area, unlike in Western Europe and the United States, the curator said.