OWN PROJECTS

"What is my movie" — it is the most popular search query on the Internet forums dedicated to finding movies by description. People usually try to formulate what they once saw in a movie using a few words. Sometimes their description is informative — the film can be found. And sometimes the description is so expressive that it deserves a screen adaptation itself. This book is made up of comics based on descriptions, making it difficult to recognize the source movie. However, this makes it easier to imagine another one that has never existed.

"An imaginary movie is a great idea, in the spirit of Borges. However, everyone can dream of a nonexistent film, and only the most desperate can embody it on the pages of the book. Such as the author of this comic book of someone's bizarre fantasies did."

Anton Dolin, film critic

It is incredible. In the electronics store, the customers have a peculiar habit: it is necessary to test the camera on a smartphone or tablet by taking their portrait. No matter what the results will be, the person moves on to the next device, and the pictures remain on the previous gadget. Perhaps everyone thinks that all the photos themselves will be deleted. But these photos are stored in the device memory. Sometimes there are hundreds of them. I collect the best.

At the moment, there are more than 500 images in the collection.

The exhibition is an offline version of an online project of the same name by the St Petersburg- based artist Eldar Karkhalev. The concept is simple: the artist scans his graphic works and puts them through an image search engine (Google, Yandex, etc.). Then he picks out the most interesting suggestions and places them on the project’s web page. For the exhibition, the artist was offered to do the same trick using works of several young artists: Polina Grinberg, Ilya Grishaev, Mikhail Zaikanov and Asya Marakulina, all of whose graphic works are equally notable for their abstract and polysemic imagery. Everyday life used to be a fertile soil for creating art works. Quite predictably, perhaps, the search engine uses everyday visual material, too, in order to activate the possible meanings and sensations contained in the art works. But it does so with a known measure of randomness. The development of the theory of computer vision, of course, would require not only the works picked by Eldar, but also all those that were left behind his artistic selection.

In this way, the project serves more as the possibility of creating such a computer theory — in the sense that the artist’s experience is verifiable, repeatable and can be further explored by the viewer.

Andrey Shabanov, curator