Video episodes, FullHD, 2 channel audio, 2020 – 2022

One by one episodes are uploaded onto the platform of the “The Agency of Nowhen”. They are subjective essays that consider special cases of data deformation and reveal the problem of measuring systems through the optics of each “agent”. All plots are included in the general arch and exist in the form of one of the media formats: text, video, or an interactive object. The overall platform design, which resembles that of a player, brings together fragmented episodes and allows various hints and guesses to be combined into a structure so habitually subordinate to institutional needs – the list structure. After a while, the phased appearance of episodes will be balanced by an equally phased deletion. It will happen in the future, when the memory of the limitation of the presence in real life and the upcoming media turn will be erased, as the files on the server are erased.

Web-stream, Google Earth Pro letsplay. 2020

The game stream as a way of distributing knowledge has recently attracted the attention of researchers and popularizers of science, replacing the format of the usual lecture. Artist turns to the streaming genre using Google Earth’s storytelling engine, which combines the features of a geographic stimulator, a virtual flight journal and hypertext.

Taking a kind of speculative walk between spatial and temporal coordinates, artist explores how the subjective perception of two-dimensionality and concepts of the dimension of space developed. Through parallels and implicit comparisons, the history of interface and computer graphics, baroque literature and technological discoveries are touched upon. In constructing her lecture-journey, the artist studies the intersections of different points of view and the views of weak (i.e., excluded from the agenda of the majority) actors on speculative models of space.

HD video, graphics, objects. 2018

In her new work, the artist addresses the problem of searching for and describing the ‘elementary particles’ of this biocapitalist universe, the points where objectivity and consistency create the conditions for unforeseen breakthroughs in subjectivity through the fabric of exchanges, interests and interactions. This entity is almost indiscernible in data and image flows. The artist has called her Asset. The name comes from economics and programming where it signifies a unit of gaming, an elementary game spirit, a source of game meaning that animates the diversity of digital universes. As the basic semantic node of virtual reality, Asset in the work of Sara Cumann is also a guide, inviting the public to travel to other worlds, on occasion that have yet to be explored and that is emerging at the intersection of digital networks, the corporal presence and the imaginary.

HD video, objects, 2015,2021

The project is based on a proposal of the artist to classify countries around the world on the principle of digital resolution – the higher the cultural and economic development and impact of a particular state, the greater pixel resolution. In the exhibition Cargocento, Sara Сulmann considers the influence of the Christian ” 4K – culture” ( starting with the Renaissance ) to countries with lower gross national income .

Computer game. 2016, 2021

In the “Skolkovo.The game” Sara Culmann continues to explore the possibilities of virtual quests. The computer game for the culture of the late 90s is becoming more than just an individualized leisure. The network of computer clubs that emerged at that time combines several personal computers, turning the game process into a paradoxical reassembly of a collective virtual body. I remember how, in the early 2000s, almost the only way of socialization for us was going to gloomy basements, where we, each connected to our own device, played network games that replaced football, after-school clubs, and sometimes the school process. We preferred to train cognitive neuroreactions, sharpen our attention and engage in pixel hunting, microcontrol of the movements of the eyes and hands that grabbed the mouse. The public field was literally abandoned, we went underground to look for new friends and socialize in the ruins of bodily deprivation and extreme isolation. This is the paradox of computer games as a phenomenon: their virtual structure feeds on our bodily separation, but brings together our disparate psychic abilities, representing a socialization without connection, a romantic unity of lonely bodies. In this world, revolution is almost excluded: when you stand shoulder to shoulder with a comrade, only a rush for the zerg is possible.

It is no coincidence that Sara Culmann exhibits a plotless quest in the once public space of the gallery, a game without a goal and passage, emphasizing its ghostly nature. For this, the selected spectator mode is best suited, giving the feeling of an disembodied gaze at the location. The wandering hero walks along the “highway to nowhere, to the urban legend”, to the large-scale project of Skolkovo, – along the tracks from the residential quarters of the Skolkovo district to the construction of a techno-hub. This quest reveals the characteristics of the contemporary as a set of various “lost futures”, all impossible projects, in the promise of which we are stuck. Philosopher and cultural critic Mark Fisher calls this state a time of constant respite, constant scaffolding, where we can only wander through the blueprints of an unrealizable future. The game is as free as possible: you can stray off the highway and go in search of embedded secrets, riddles and Easter eggs, without any opportunity to collect them into a single narrative plan. Black-and-white painting and chopped layered textures reinforce the feeling of an unmanifested and out-of-date landscape.

Moreover, the very fact of the presentation of the Skolkovo game has a social interpretation. This is exactly how, in the mode of an uninvolved spectator, today’s person feels any urbanistic and “innovative” solutions from above, monuments without motivation and meaning are poured on him, his environment is constantly being recreated as in some Simcity, and he can only wander and feed on it planning atmosphere – empty grandeur or digital mock-ups of promised museums, virtual pseudo-post-industrial “innovation”. He is doomed to a point of incoherence and non-communication, to a liberated alienation within a quest without direction or purpose. And if Stanley Parable at one time became a wonderful expression of office alienation at the level of an individual, then the Skolkovo. The Game ”tells us about the lost political macro-management at the level of the entire country, which designs, digitizes, but receives, as always, the same cromolny national idea of the unfinished and half-working

Boris Klushnikov

HD video, prints, sci-fi novel pages. 2017

C.A.R.R.I.E. The work C.A.R.R.I.E. presents the material world from the point of view of contemporary materials science and informs of the latest discoveries in the field of material physics. In this installation video essays are arranged alongside four excerpts from an imaginary science-fiction book on the possibilities of communication with the material world. Artist’s research is divided into four parts, connected with the behavior and external appearance of material: its size (the nano-scale dimensionality of atoms), structure (crystallography), alterations (ultra-high pressure and low temperature), and behavior (capacity for self-regeneration and shape memory). They are illustrated by quotations from the novels of Walter Scott and the cinema epic Terminator, as well as depictions of medieval Arabian mosaics and examples from video games. The artist portrays the world of materials anthropomorphically, with the materials themselves taking the role of heroes in a contemporary drama. A special place is taken in this work by text as a format of communication between the human and non-human, between the intellect and the subatomic world. Science fiction thus becomes the interface between visible and invisible materials, and a means for the articulation of both scientific knowledge and religious perspectives. By way of example, op-ed questions posed by the main character from the series Sex and the City are presented in the form of algorithms describing the behaviour of materials. Subatomic relationships and the factors behind the existence of certain materials and processes come across as a portrayal of mass culture.

HD video, 2017

Digital video investigates the political sensibility of objects included in daily household ritual of modern citizens. The artist puts the focus on individual items, called “props”, which simulate human relations concerning the problems of a geopolitical treaty.The image rendering system used in video games, as well as the subjective camera’s view, theso-called spectator mode, is put on the basis of the image visualization, which is a mode of the observer in which there is a physically impossible operator floating like a spirit above the photorealistic world.

HD video, graphics. Commissioned for V-A-C, Expanding Space. exhibition. 2015

Like the sacred mount Fuji, observed from various points throughout feudal Edo, the sacral focus of contemporary Moscow is the Moscow City business centre. without fulfilling the actual role of a finance centre, it is a landscape and symbolic dominant that has transformed into a cultural imprint of contemporary Moscow. The crisis experienced by the Russian economy over recent years has frozen the construction of office space, unexpectedly making a peculiar necropolis of half-empty business-centres on the territory of the metropolis. The system formed by the master skyscraper and the remaining vassal-buildings presents itself as a scheme in which the centre is the zero-point, surrounded by peripheral meanings. such is the way in which, between economic frustration and addiction to power, landscape is born. The project comprises 36 potential views of the Moscow City complex, following the number of coloured engravings by Katsushika Hokusai which are placed beside these desolate class “a” business centres. Through the transparent stands set up for the purpose, observers can see combined depictions of the “sacred mountain” and the nearby urban landscape.

How to make an alloy from metals, how to transform a human being into a demon, an herbivore into a predator, how to take up the task that pursues the aim of endless acceleration? Arnold and Gregor, the protagonists of Robert Sheckley’s “Necessary Thing”, tried out all possible materials to obtain identical boards to repair their spaceship after an accident. The device they took on a journey could produce anything. However, either its functioning principle or the pursuit of pleasure didn’t allow it to produce an object from the same material more than once.

The driver behind the decision-making process is the principle of pleasure or the principle of quasi-pleasure, as Sheckley puts it. The system demonstrates its evolution: it proceeds from innocent passion to obsession. Aerospace coating technologies have been rapidly developing as a response to various factors threatening the fragile spaceship.

The laws of physics and economics go together. Lightweight protective armor shields radiation, reflects the heat away from the spaceship and keeps it cooler; it is capable to function in the micro-gravity environment and endure overloads. Armor is cheap. Otherwise it would float in space with other space debris as a reminder of the failure.

According to libertarianism, economic principles lie at the heart of all the relationships in the world. Money starts working, it moves along a curve in the coordinate system, where speed is on the x-axis and time is on the y-axis. While the Bronze Age lasted for twenty centuries before it was succeeded by the Iron Age, Elon Musk has proceeded from the SX300 superalloy to the SX500 superalloy for one tweet.

The mechanisms of perfectionism and survival, obsession and decision-making. The whole history of progress is dedicated to the construction of one machine – the pleasure machine.

Sara Culmann

Found footage based HD video.2014

Copyleft Production is creating something from license free materials, clips or previews, images that Hito Steyerl has termed “poor images.” Twenty years ago, Mark Getty, the grandson of “the greediest millionaire” Paul Getty, founded a stock photo and video agency, Gettyimages, a bank of images to be used as a universal language for visualization. Before purchasing a video, users can download for free a watermarked preview in low resolution and with an ID stamp in the corner. Each such clip comes with keyword tags to describe its contents and has a limited length, usually somewhere around 5–30 seconds. These technical limitations define the narrative framework: short scenes, heightened emotions and stereotypical, depersonalized locations.

Stock video sexualizes business, which is only logical since most of the video content is used in commercial presentations, website headers and startup promos. This representation of the power of capital takes on the traits of office masculinity, and is set in executive boardrooms, private jets and financial district streets. A standard-issue moneymaker in the Gettyimages world is a person packaged as a dummy image of a white male businessman. This dummy may be regarded as a concept encompassing gender and race variations: a woman or an Asian person is governed by the general social architecture—the same dress code, the same corporate choreography. As any other preset provider, Gettyimages offers out-of-the-box solutions for business. Producing a proper shoot staged with actors, cars and professionally executed dolly shots along glass walls is expensive, whereas the royalty-free license allows one and the same image to be sold an indefinite number of times. Amid the crisis of overproduction of digital images and pirating of paid content through torrenting or off-brand sites, the policy of Copyleft Production is based on free content, free license and legal loopholes.