Media Art in Russia

23. April 2012, 11.00 bis 13.00 Uhr Kollegiumgasse 2, IC Lecture Room, 3.OG

Die Abteilung Interface Cultures lädt zum Vortrag von Ksenia Fedorova

The lecture will address some of the key tendencies in the development of media art in Russia taken in the context of the country’s cultural history. Paralleling the processes in the West, it at the same time succeeded to its own background. A quest for new utopia, special quality of the dialectics of mind and body, “sotz-art” and conceptualist project to break through ideological constructions (and constrictions) enacted itself in net and software art of the 1990s and early 2000s, leading to contemporary “populist”/critical position of Electroboutique, re- & de- politization of art media technologies, as well as their purely aesthetic explorations. Referring to the analysis of post-Soviet culture by Boris Groys, Michail Epstein, Oleg Aronson (among others) I focus on recent projects by Russian media artists, such as Alexey Shulgin, Aristarch Chernyshev, Andrey Smirnov, Dmitry Bulatov, as well as representatives of the younger generation – Provmyza, Dmitry Kavarga, Andrey Bartenev, Ilya Trushevsky, Masha Sha, Veronika Rudyeva, Vladimir Logutov and others. A brief account of the institutional infrastructure and an overview of the main festivals and exhibitions, including video showcases, will also be presented.

Ksenia Fedorova
Media art researcher and curator. She has been an initiator and curator of the "Art. Science. Technology" program at the Ural branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts (Ekaterinburg, RU) where she has curated a number of international exhibitions and events. She has taught classes on media art theory and history at the Ural State University and the Danube University, Krems (AT), gave lectures at the ZKM| Karlsruhe (DE), University of Colorado, Boulder (CO) and has participated in many national and international conferences and workshops, including in Toronto, Copenhagen, Oxford, Moscow, Los Angeles. She is an author of articles and essays in Russian and international editions and is a co-editor (with Nina Sosna) of the collection of articles on media theory (in Russian, with contributions by A. Galloway, W.J.T. Mitchell, J.L. Déotte, G. Lovink among others; coming out in 2012). She served as a member of the 2011 selection committee for PRO&CONTRA, a symposium and media art contest based in Moscow, Russia. She holds MA in Philosophy and Art History. She is currently completing her PhD in Philosophy at the Ural Federal University (Ekaterinburg, RU) and is a PhD fellow at the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, University of California, Davis (USA), with the dissertation focusing on the concept of the ‘technological sublime’ in media arts.