artists:

Yan Posadskiy, Vadim Epstein, Anna Tagantseva-Kobzeva, Kirill Makarov, Digital Object Alliance (Anna Leonova and Sasha Puchkova), Sophia Skidan

curator:

Nikita Nechaev

alt text

The Digital Public Art Festival Rosbank Future Cities took place in six Russian cities in July 2021: Moscow, St Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Krasnodar, Krasnoyarsk and Nizhny Novgorod. It became the special project of the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art and united mentors, artists and urbanists under the topic “Cities of the Future”. Traditional public art concept in the meaning of urban environment art was reconsidered. Artists integrated their projects in the high-tech layer of cosmopolitan cities, which is physical but invisible in everyday life.

Guests of the festival could explore the art projects thanks to AR-technology. It helps to create alternate reality, visually combines two initially independent worlds – the worlds of real and virtual objects. Each visitor of the festival became a co-creator of an art piece. He had an opportunity to make his own unique content by opening an AR-object with the help of a smartphone camera and moving it into the context of real constantly changing urban surroundings (or sometimes by including himself or other people into it).

“The Rosbank Future Cities Festival took place in 2021 for the first time. With the help of alternate reality, dozens of thousands of people had a chance to look at the world around them differently. It was important for us to draw attention to the issues of sustainable development, creation of comfortable urban space, of interaction between people and communication in the era of total digital transformation. The language of art is universal; it influences our mind, feelings and perception of the world around. This award is the result of efforts of Rosbank experts and partners that are passionate about their work and innovative thinking. It is a well-deserved honor that inspires for new achievements and creative projects”, - emphasized Elena Kojadei, Rosbank Communications & Advertising Department Director.

The technical partner of the Festival is PHYGITALISM.

text by Nikita Nechaev:

The technological layer of the city, consisting of traffic and pedestrian control systems, online services from geolocation to food delivery, digital platforms, and economies, creates new types of infrastructures - tangible but invisible in everyday experience. Such environments are responding to the needs of citizens and changing the scenarios of cities, while at the same time the development of digital technologies depends on the consumers of these services themselves. The Future Cities festival integrates artist's work into the city's invisible digital infrastructure and redefines the traditional notion of public art as art in urban environments.

The festival invites artists to take a fresh look at familiar urban spaces through augmented reality (AR). The festival's main programme is curated by Nikita Nechaev, curator of research at Garage Digital at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art: "What is 'space' for the algorithmic layer of the urban environment that redistributes labour, time and other resources of the urban dweller? Acknowledging the non-neutrality of public space, including digital space, this year's AR project calls to address strategies of unification and engineering co-creation.

text by kirill makarov:

We dream of efficiency, automation and scientific methods implemented in cities, crystallized in data embedded and existing in our files. The city is a collection of vibrating, resonating, listening, sounding machines and bodies for rational management, calculations, desires and experiences. The city is developing an artificial nervous system, a lattice membrane, the fabric of the city, which includes the requirement to make a person visible and audible, to quantify his condition, to create a digital portrait. This requirement of transparency under the gaze of the Other is necessary for the city to assess reliability and determine the rights of people. In systems of this kind, only a measured person can be a subject. Meticulous instrumentalization of a person leads to the automation of inequality - the “unreliable” individuals, marginalized by the gaze of hybrid intelligent systems directed at them, become even more marginalized, under the influence of algorithmic clichés and are imperceptibly included in the loop of injustice. Such mechanisms are not inclusive, but would like to appear to be; they only increase fragmentation, excluding trust. Trust is what defines context in social interactions. The intention to visualize the environment as data leads society to an algorithmic assembly in which any decision-making, like a filled CAPTCHA, will form templates for political and social regulation. The impossibility of accessing raw data gives rise to distrust in such hybrid intelligent systems. Trust, as a type of relationship that is fundamental for the social field, turns out to be missing - collapsed and excluded through the layer of digital platforms, and the inaccessibility of the language of big data, and the logic of their interpretation gives rise to anxiety

Audio record:

Запутавшийся агент информационного мира? Не можете полагаться на информационную систему ценностей? Заметили, что коммуникации осуществляются в отношении вашего цифрового профиля, заместившего личность? Гибридные интеллектуальные системы, транзакционные связи, требование прозрачности, манипулирование дезорганизованным пространством увеличивают цифровое отчуждение?

Покровительственная рука, тонущего в прозрачном камуфляже автократа, потерявшего доверие, больше не радует вас? Рост, повышение, снижение уровня, динамика, увольнение в связи с утратой, покупка, продажа, индекс делового…. Доверие - скомпрометированная сущность современного мира, распадывающийся мост над потоком информации

Translation:

A confused agent of the information world? Can't rely on an information value system? Have you noticed that communications are carried out in relation to your digital profile, replacing your personality? Hybrid intelligent systems, transactional communications, the demand for transparency, the manipulation of a disorganised space increase digital alienation?

The patronising hand, of a drowning in transparent camouflage autocrat who has lost his credibility, no longer pleases you? Increasing, rising, declining, trend, dismissal due to loss, buying, selling, business index of.... Confidence is the compromised essence of the modern world, a disintegrating bridge over the flow of information

Credence

Credence

artists:

curator:

text by Nikita Nechaev:

text by kirill makarov:

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