21 June 2021, the Laboratoria Art&Science Foundation, the first nonprofit research center in Russia working to integrate contemporary art, science, and technology, opened a new permanent exhibition space in the West Wing of the New Tretyakov Gallery.
The inaugural Laboratoria Art&Science exhibition in the new space became the international science art project “May the Other Live in Me”. The project offers an opportunity to learn about the new ways and forms of interaction with non-human agents: plants, animals, bacteria, Artificial Intelligence, and physical processes of the global scale. The exhibition features 11 projects by artists from Russia and beyond, who, in cooperation with scientists and engineers, are looking for ways of learning to see themselves as part of hybrid communities, of communicating in new ways, crossing the border between the species, and of thinking non-anthropocentrically.
Paradoxically, in this age of the Anthropocene, technology opens new possibilities for constructing a communal ecology. Artists come up with new interfaces that in the future might become the basis for new ways of understanding of the Other. At the exhibition, the viewers will encounter works that will give them a chance to experience different strategies of interacting with the non-human: from observing it, to having an active dialogue and achieving the symbiosis, merging with the Other into a hybrid technobiological community.
Daria Parkhomenko, Exhibition curator and Creative Director of the Laboratoria Art&Science
Artist Danja Vasiliev created a new work – participatory network installationWannaScry! – especially for the exhibition in collaboration with the Kaspersky Lab, a long-term partner of the Laboratoria Art&Science.
Collaboration of our experts with the international contemporary artists helps us take a broader view of our achievements. Through the integration of innovation and science, the art of the digital age lets us imagine the quickly approaching cyberfuture and take a new view of the directions in which the technologies that surround each of us in our daily lives are advancing.
Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab
The education program will start on the first day of the exhibition, June 22, with a series of artist-scientist talks. Participants include artist Sasa Spacal, biologist Mirjan Svagelj, artist Danja Vasiliev, engineer Alexander Gostev, artists Marion Laval-Jeantet and Helena Nikonole.
In September, the exhibition will host the conference Art&Science: The Art of Dialogue with the Other. It aims to reflect on the human, biological, and technological dialogue through the means of contemporary art. The participants include artists from Russia and abroad, curators, scientists, philosophers, and tech specialists. They will reflect on the artworks presented at the exhibition.