Immersive art, which has been most actively spread abroad in recent years, is increasingly beginning to fill the domestic art space. At the same time, both contemporary artists and digital companies readily respond to new aesthetic and technological demands. But the main thing is that the audience is fully prepared for such rapid changes in the forms of influence.
Samskara digital art exhibition is an interactive project by American artist Android Jones, which demonstrates and simultaneously explores a new phenomenon of perception of visual art. The scale of the project and the integration in one space of such a variety of audio, visual, performative and projection technologies clearly reflect the multidimensionality of modern thinking. And they naturally follow from the declared theme of the exposition.
What is the most powerful way to demonstrate the very essence of any phenomenon? Of course, present it in the most concentrated form. The Samskara exhibition project operates precisely on this principle. Multidimensional images, expanding and overlapping projections, video and volumetric installations, interactive games – all these numerous forms create the effect of complete immersion in virtual reality. This reality cannot be touched, cannot be felt by the physical body. It exists only reflected in the mind of the perceiver. And the longer the viewer comes into contact with her, the more imprints – “samskaras” she leaves in his mind. The artist and author of the exposition, thus, involves the viewer in a kind of game in which he demonstrates how the imprints of perceived reality are formed in the mind. And he offers to experience this process here and now as a direct experience.
The Samskara immersive installation was created using Full Dome technology in collaboration with the Russian studio 360ART. The project has already received many awards at international festivals such as Immersive Film Festival (Portugal), Fulldome Festival Jena (Germany) and Fiske Fest (USA), but it is presented in Russia for the first time. For the Moscow public, the creators of the exhibition came up with something special. In addition to the permanent exhibition of bright art objects and installations, the exhibition space hosts costume shows and performances, large-scale audio-visual, animation and full-dome 360˚ shows, and much more.
Numerous DJ performances, concerts of live and electronic music, performance meditation with crystal singing bowls from Daria Vostok and gong meditation with the Yoga Gong Studio project have already taken place within the framework of the project. Visual art was presented by laser paintings from the Art of Love project and neon paintings from LIFE SHOW. Theatrical projects embodied the images of the exposition in their own way. The magic theater “Alice & Anima Animus” created stylized images based on the paintings of Android Jones especially for the exhibition. Theater “Staging Shop” embodied mystical celestial beings in a dance performance. And in the theatrical images of Wild Tales, the metaphysical motives of the exposition were continued. The visitors of the exhibition were not deprived of intellectual food, and even mystical insights. The program of the exhibition included a lecture-excursion with culturologist Stanislav Zyuzko, as well as vocal improvisations based on the texts of the Tibetan and Egyptian books of the dead.
The exhibition project “Samskara” accumulates, it seems, all the means of influencing the viewer’s consciousness available to art. It is not for nothing that the concept of immersiveness is interpreted as such a way of perception, in which the transformation of consciousness takes place. In the context of the content of the exposition images, such intense immersion is perceived as a literal expansion of perception. The artist Android Jones, with his paintings alone, already takes the viewer beyond the boundaries of the familiar world, immersing him in mystical spaces and images. And by influencing the senses so voluminously, it allows you to see this virtual reality from an even more unusual angle. To look at reality in a new way means to overcome samskara.
At the exhibition, visitors are also invited to play interactive games. Putting on a special helmet, you can be transported into virtual reality and try to catch a virtual butterfly or fill in the voids in XNUMXD Tetris. Also a kind of allusion to the property of the mind, seeking to capture, fix in the mind, catch the elusive reality. The main thing here – as in life – is not to get too carried away. And do not forget that all this is just a game, another trap for the mind. This reality itself is an illusion.
The quintessence of the exposition in terms of the power of impact and involvement is the full-dome projections and the 360˚ Samskara show, created in collaboration with Full Dome Pro. Expanding in volume, images and symbolic paintings, in addition to visual imprints, raise a whole layer of cultural associations from the depths of consciousness. Which become, as it were, another semantic stratification in this multidimensional digital reality. But this layer is already conditioned by purely individual samskaras.
The exhibition will run until 31 March 2019 year
Details on the website: samskara.pro