Nikolai Selivanov "LEGOAD and other Construction Sets"
Olivie
Opening of the exhibition on March 11 at 19.00
Such construction sets as LEGO, Meccano, ZOLO, Zometool are well known all over the world. But this exhibition is of a different type. For example, such as the picturesque fantasy image by Hieronymus Bosch, accidentally discovered by the artist Nikolai Selivanov on the back of his "Visions of the Underworld". Or a set of profiles of the capitals of famous ancient monuments of architecture, used in a museum game with students in the Hermitage, in order to use them to assemble into a single structure the words and images of the artistic cosmos of European civilization, generated by the artists of Ancient Greece, not a single work of which has survived.
The video reconstruction of the old project "After Surgery" (gallery "School", 1993) expresses the author's concept of a three-part model of semantic construction from three "primary elements" - Perception / Sign / "Living" object. The artist's research in the field of visual semiotics began with him. The kinetic installation "Infinitum" tells how the infinity of the universe is limited by illusions constructed by people, immensely ambiguous and indefinable "great" words. But with the help of these words, a person creates a "firmament" in the void and can design his future. LEGOAD is about today, about the Anthropocene and huge efforts that turn the earth into hell, where plastic is the material from which hell is made, and LEGO is the intelligence of plastic, about the construction of a post-industrial world on the ruins of the industrial world. A total of 13 projects will be presented at the exhibition.
Each era, each artist creates his own constructor. Constructors are embodied intermediaries between a person and the surrounding space. From a sometimes random set of elements, a new one is assembled, which changes our inner reality and includes us in the general process of the surrounding life. This process is called autopoiesis - self-reproduction (ancient Greek αὐτός auto- - itself, ποίησις - creation, production), the main sign of life. One of the main tools of autopoiesis are constructors created by all forms of life. Constructors created by man are developed by fantasy and their constructive basis is semantics.
The main idea of the exhibition is that for designing it is necessary to make a constructor, and to create a constructor, a constructor is also needed. We are talking about constructors designed to create constructors (this is like the cybernetics of cybernetics of Heinz von Förster). The exhibition consists of such projects.
In a sense, the LEGOAD and other bricks exhibition is the epigraph for the book, which is being prepared for publication. It will be a book about constructors, their origin in antiquity, history and modern development, about the philosophy and psychology of constructive activity.
Nikolai Selivanov - artist, theorist, teacher. Works in the forms of hybrid art and educational projects, light-kinetic installations, sculpture, media art. In recent years, he has been working on the theory of artistic constructive activity in the context of biosemiotics and enactivism. Develops sets for constructing artistic images based on the principle of combining replication and improvisation - patterns, virtual constructors, semantic constructors.