AROTIN & SERGHEI Infinite Screen

AROTIN & SERGHEI Infinite Screen

from Light Cells to monumental installations at Centre Pompidou

AROTIN & SERGHEI Infinite Screen

from Light Cells to monumental installations at Centre Pompidou

AROTIN & SERGHEI

Centre Pompidou

Kraftwerk Berlin

Contemporary Art, Berlin

Pluridisciplinary Art Center, Paris

Art Centre, Berlin

Ars Electronica

Espace Muraille

Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien

Museum of The Future / Festival for

Centre of Arts, Geneva

Museum of Fine Arts, Vienna

Guerlain / Parcours privé de la FIAC

Palais Rasumofsky

Artcurial

Perfums & Art creation, special

Sanziany Collection,

Auction House Paris / Monaco /

exhibitions for FIAC Art Fair, Paris

art foundation, Vienna

Gujral Foundation

WDR / Wittener Tage für Neue

Belfry group

Art Foundation New Delhi / London

Kammermusik

innovation & technology

/ Venice

German Broadcasting Company,

Arts, Technology and Society

Brussels / Vienna

Budapest / Vienna

Köln / Festival for Contemporary Music, IRCAM-–Centre Pompidou

Witten

Fondation Beyeler

institute for creation & research of

Museum for Modern and

acoustics & music, part of Centre

Wien Modern

Contemporary Art, Basel

Pompidou, Paris

Festival for Contemporary

La Biennale di Venezia

Impressions

Art, Architecture, Fim, Dance,

Multidisciplinary Arts Festival, Vernon

Wiener Konzerthaus

Music, Theatre, Archive

Giverny

concert hall, Vienna

Bildraum

Klangforum Wien

exhibition spaces,

Ensemble for Contemporary

Vienna

Music & Art, Vienna

W&K Vienna-New York Gallery for Modern & Contemporary Art, Vienn

Music & Art, Vienna

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

AROTIN & SERGHEI would like to thank all the participants for their support, especially the participating art institutions, the patrons and generous sponsors and the art collectors who accompanied the research, the creation and the production of Infinite Screen since the very beginning, and all our artistic collaborators, technicial parters and friends.

Special thanks for the institutional support and the work commissions to

Paolo Baratta Ivan Fedele Sabine Haag Sven Hartberger Dimitri Hegemann Peter Paul Kainrath Sam Keller Ulf Küster Serge Lasvignes Laurent Le Bon Frank Madlener Caroline Messensee Franz Pichorner Mikhail Rudy Gerfried Stocker Günter Schönberger Harry Vogt

Special thanks for the generous

Special thanks for the participation,

support to

collaboration and support to

Caroline & Eric Freymond

Polycarpe Anani Kira Marina von Bismarck Aureliano Cattaneo Titus Engel Ludivine Freymond Beatrice & Martin Guesnet Bernhard Günther Johannes Kalitzke Ebi Kohlbacher Holger Liebs Marie-Claudine Llamas / Guerin Projects Martina Mazzotta Brice Pauset Dominique Renaud Gerhard & Peter Rezac Yury Revich Jean van der Stegen Hervé van der Straeten Bertrand du Vignaud Alexandra Villegas Michael Wendeberg Lui Wienerroither

and to

Zoltan Aczel Belfry Group Herbert Baltliner / KHM Jacques Font Peter Gloger Ircam–Centre Pompidou Marie-Ève Lafontaine Kira A. Princess of Prussia Foundation Zsolt Nyerges Adrian Riklin Foundation

Many thanks for the support to

Georgina Alioth Catherine Barré Carine & Gregory Blatt Isabelle & Werner de Borchgrave Geraldine Bourguignon Corinne Fabre Philippe Guegan Feroze Gujral Françoise & Etienne Gounod Philip Jakober Jean Philippe Julia Etienne Kairis Margot de Nicolaï & Alban Mackay Gordana & Eric Megevand Flore de Brantes & Amaury de la Moussaye Matthias Naske Oswald Oberhuber Anne Palffy Didier Plasch Evelyne & Aubert de Proyart Nathalie Maus & Andy Sommer Roseline Schelcher Andreas Schmitzer Antonis Stachel Irene Tappeiner Karine Tissot Laetitia D’Ursel, Loik, Philippine & Hubert D’Ursel Martine & Olivier Vodoz Richard Wadhams Gudrun Ziegler/ Luxembourg University Stefan Zeisler Victoria Wyman

Special thanks for the technical

Many thanks to all

support to

collaborators and staffs of

Enrico Bardin Gael Becourt / Pixelight Angelika Bühler Manuel Bretterbauer Nicolas Christol Patricia Daumarie Malo Delarue Pedro Deltell Yuliya Draganova Günter Ebenauer Emil & Ernst Eypeltauer Korbinian Frank Bea Gernert Andrea Glanninger-Leitner Maxime Jourdil Lena Kern Christoph Kühl Henning Lohner / Active Image Irene Makovec Patrick Micale Bernhard Miks Jürgen Mertens / Satis-fy Mariapaz Montecinos Marine Nicodeau Alain Nicolas Olivia Palazzolo Bjela Proßowsky Agnès Rudy Tjabo Reuter Sabine Seifert Olaf Schulze Alex Sutter Melanie Tiller Atej Tutta Christian Wahle Sascha Worrich Alexander Zach Piotr Znaikowsky

Ars Electronica Artcurial Fondation Beyeler Bildraum Centre Pompidou Espace Muraille Hatje Cantz Hervé Van Der Straeten Maison Guerlain Festival Impressions Vernon–Giverny Ircam–Centre Pompidou Klangforum Wien Wiener Konzerthaus Kraftwerk Berlin Kunsthalle Wien Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien La Biennale di Venezia Studios Architecture Paris Sammlung Sanziany Collection / Palais Rasumofsky Vienna TEFAF Maastricht / Galerie Flore, Brussels Gallery W&K Vienna–New York / Palais Schönborn-Batthany Vienna

CONTENT

Introduction



From Light Cells to monumental installations at Centre Pompidou 14



AROTIN & SERGHEI



Introduction to the artworks



GERFRIED STOCKER – Pictures of the other end of the light



Interview with AROTIN & SERGHEI 26



talk led by GERFRIED STOCKER



Intermedial paintings 68

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the artwork cycles and exhibition views



followed by documentations of the large-scale installations

BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 150 Infinite Screen, tribute to Andrea Mantegna

IVAN FEDELE



ARS ELECTRONICA | Brucknerhaus Infinite Screen, tribute to Ludwig Wittgenstein



Everything We See Could Also Be Otherwise



MARIE-CLAUDINE LLAMAS

162





ARS ELECTRONICA | Deep Space

174

White Point

ARS ELECTRONICA | Post City

180

Vers La Flamme / Radical Atoms

FONDATION BEYELER 190 Prometheus

ULF KÜSTER



KARINE TISSOT – An oneric space of free thinking



GUJRAL FOUNDATION | PALAZZO BENZON VENICE Faces of an Infinite Screen



MARTINA MAZZOTTA

204



KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM VIENNA



The Tower of Babel



SABINE HAAG



W&K GALLERY / PALAIS SCHÖNBORN BATTHYANY VIENNA Metamorphosis



BERTRAND DU VIGNAUD – The negation of the wall

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228

PALAIS RASUMOFSKY VIENNA 238 Gateways to Elysium

GUERLAIN / FIAC / ESPACE MURAILLE Infinite Time Machine



CAROLINE MESSENSEE – Futurs Antérieurs

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GIVERNY 252 Impressions, Dialogues avec Monet

GÜNTER SCHÖNBERGER – Promethean Unshaming



CENTRE POMPIDOU 260



Vertigo / Infinite Screen



MONIKA ROBESCU – Pixeling Lucretius

IRCAM - CENTRE POMPIDOU 276 Infinite Light Columns / Constellations of the Future

FRANK MADLENER - Step by Step Stravinsky Square

The artist’s parcours 286



MARIE–EVE LAFONTAINE - The transgression of space

Exhibitions and work register 298 The authors’ texts in original languages 300 Impressum 304

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Introduction From Light Cells to monumental installations at Centre Pompidou

Infinite Screen connects the viewer with the idea of the Infinite beyond the visible surface of “everything we see”. It is an ongoing project, a transcendental and supra-liminal work of art in constant metamorphosis, a trajectory towards the genesis of light and enlightenment... —a work cycle that comprises various single works of art and installations created in wide ranges of formats and techniques, and presented in changing philosophical and architectural context. At the opening of Infinite Screen at Centre Pompidou in Paris, the president of the Centre Pompidou, Serge Lasvignes highlighted in his introduction speech, some of the most significant conceptual characteristics of the Infinite Screen project: its inter-disciplinary approach and realization, the connections with global art history and with the museum’s collections and visions, its spirit,

Infinite Screen opening at Centre Pompidou presentation of the installations with (from left to right) Frank Madlener, director Ircam–Centre Pompidou, Serge Lasvignes, president Centre Pompidou and AROTIN & SERGHEI, Paris, June 3, 2021

symbolism and radiance in a public space. In the midst of the profound changes in habits and techniques that mark our times, the idea is to create an open and infinite artwork that researches and shows new perspectives and an extension of space and time. Every civilization has its specific languages of signs and images. In the context​of today’s restless frequency of arising and disappearing information, and the inundation of digital imagery, Infinite Screen is intended as a counterpoint to the ubiquitous monitors and screen-based devices. The vision of the art project and its wide spectrum of manifestations is to remove the limitations and the ready-made patterns of thinking, to extend the limits of imagination, to reflect the phenomenons and the visual vocabulary of our time and finally

“this installation thrills me, not only because it is beautiful and because it is interesting, but because for me it symbolizes something very powerful, it symbolizes what the Centre Pompidou wants to be... a multi-disciplinary ensemble …it is for me the resurrection of the initial spirit of the Centre Pompidou...” Serge Lasvignes, president Centre Pompidou at the opening of Infinite Screen, 2021

to give to the work of art an essential function in our society, that makes possible immersion, resonance and reflection. Infinite Light Column 1 exhibition view from Atelier Brancusi, Centre Pompidou Georges Pompidou Square, Paris, 2021

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Through the hypnotic observation of the fluctuating Light Cells, the smallest particles of digital imagery, Infinite Screen questions and explores the codes, the aspects and meaning of the prevailing language of our time. The project leads us through the macrocosm and microcosm, the mythology and the mystery of the infinite, through transfiguration and metamorphosis, towards the pulses of information, the origins and the genesis of light. Infinite Screen connects us with the idea of the Infinite in many different forms: the “infinite universe and worlds” as Giordano Bruno had described it, the infinite space of thoughts, and the innumerable realities or Truth Possibilities in Wittgenstein’s sense, it enables to transcend​the limits of our perception recalling the symbol of The Tower of Babel with its countless steps and cycles of construction and deconstruction. The visual development combines the sectors of visual arts, contemporary architecture, sculpture, new media, technology and music and these expanded multi-disciplinary inter-connections allow to show each sign, each idea, each single work of art in different states of materiality and in a continuous process of transformation. In each creation inside the Infinite Screen cycle, a new point of reference was developed, and with this, new emblematic places of the collective memory, a new and specific context for each creation. The focus of this publication is set on the presentation of the artistic creations from 2012–22. Introduced by Gerfried Stocker, director of the Ars Electronica and commented by art experts and directors of the particpating museums and art institutions, this book reveals an overview of the Infinite Screen project, from the Light Cells and intermedial paintings cycles, to the monumental installations at Ars Electronica, at Venice Biennale, at Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, at Fondation Beyeler Basel, in Giverny and at Centre Pompidou Paris. Alexander von Arotin & Serghei Victor Dubin, AROTIN & SERGHEI Contemporary Art, artists duo / founders Infinite Screen project

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Life Cell cycle 2017 unique digital composition, drawing, animation, screen, 112 x 65 cm

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Infinite Light Columns / Constellations of the Future 1-4 exhibition view at Ircam–Centre Pompidou Stravinsky Square, Paris 2021

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3 Life Cells 2017 unique digital composition cycle, drawing, animation, screen, 112 x 65 cm

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Introduction to the artworks

Pictures of the other end of the light— Contemplations on AROTIN & SERGHEI’s works In its barely conceivable duality between matter and energy, as between particles and waves, light is the true medium of all

Gerfried Stocker

artistic director Ars Electronica

images. It stays at the beginning of an extremely complex physical, optical, biochemical and electrical chain, at the end of which, in the deepest darkness of the skull, a constellation of synaptic possibilities forms the vision of a world. For thousands of years, throughout the entire history of art, the relationship between image and light has been a causal one: an image appears because of the reflection of the light falling on it. Nowadays, however, light seems to have reached the limits of its potential in the depiction of our world. The icons of our time are no longer the images produced by reflection of light beams, selectively picked out in frequency and wavelengths around us, bounced back and focused within our eyes. They are no longer the images of the “pencil of nature”, as Henry Fox Talbot described photography in it’s early years.1 Photography, films and videos “depict” and freeze a moment of this reflection, the optical impression of an image, but have nothing to do with the source, which is the underlying causal components of the image.

The icons of our time The icons of our time are images, created through ­measurements, computerizations and interpretations of mathematical results. Appearing on digital monitors they auto-generate their light. 1. In 1844 Henry Fox Talbot published his ground breaking book about “The Pencil of Nature”. He was the first to consider the possible effect of photography on the art and self-understanding of artists. He even asked whether artists were becoming superfluous, since with the photography of nature there was now a tool to create an objective picture of reality: “The plates shown here were created only through the action of light and without any help from the pencil of an artist. They are the sun-images, and not imitations by coper engravings, as some have suspected.” In fact, it was more probable that photography finally liberated art from the constraint to reproduce the nature.

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Digital images are technically created visualizations of vast amounts of data – individual statements about our world – available in digital form and transformed by digital chips into points of light. Passing through our retina into the brain, information itself becomes light.

The essence of modern imagery That is the nature of the images that we receive from the deepness of the universe through the giant telescopes on the Chilean Altiplano, or from a neuroscientist’s computer, from a magnetic resonance in tomography, the nano­scientist’s electronscan, nuclear microscope or from the proton collisions of CERN’s 27 km large Hadron collider. These devices are the cameras, or more precisely the image generators, which make our world visible far beyond the limits of the perceivable light spectrum. One cannot only see the world as it appears but also “as it is”—at least to the extent of our understanding. There are images of structures that are so microscopically small that the wavelength of visible light is simply too long to capture them—it would be like trying to pick up a grain of sand with a boxing glove. Images of structures lying deeply within a body, where no rays of light can penetrate, images that are produced when hydrogen atoms are excited by magnetic fields and their reaction measured, images of galaxies billions of light years away that are so weak that no eye could ever see them and that we can visualize only through compilation and computing processes. Initially, electronic images were created by small particles of chemical substances on the inside of a cathode ray tube that were stimulated to emit photons through controlled bombardments of electrons. Nowadays digital circuits, TFTs, (­ light-emitting ­semiconductors) are concentrated so closely together that the eye can no longer see the space between them, and these millions of points are combined to form an image. Since the early days of color monitors, the principle remained unchanged: in order to form a certain color, very small red, green and blue light-dots are mixed.

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Light Cells 5, 8 2012 preparation drawing and intermedial paintings, drawing , pigment, prisms, wooden light frame, each 130 x 80 cm

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AROTIN & SERGHEI call these basic elements of all technological images and micro-elements of visual communication Light Cells. These are the topic of their visual creations. In a highly artistic gesture, they isolate individual Light Cells from the screen, liberating them from their informative obligations, “portraying” them and showing us the essence of modern digital imagery. Their artworks question, even attack the hegemonic so-called truth of modern imagery. Imperfections and irregularities within the great picture matrix are being highlighted and exaggerated. All of a sudden, one no longer sees similar arrangements of m ­ illions of pixels.

From a medium to its content Through its anomaly, each single cell becomes an entity of its own right and stands out. For the Light Cell works—AROTIN & SERGHEI’s main protagonists—one might think it makes a difference what is produced by them—text, photo, video, mathematical function or a vain comment. They do not simply radiate their light but are sovereign units in their own dimension. Transformed from an imaging medium into its content, they have an individual story to tell. The artists create a mesmerizing impression of a radiant moving picture that makes observers doubt whether they are not after all standing in front of a monitor. It is through the sophisticated use of refraction of light and of play with stratas of images and optical prisms, that the artists compose these artificial images of Light Cells.

Flying Screen 1-3 2013, Free Cell 3 2013 exhibition AROTIN & SERGHEI Free Cells, Gallery Bildraum 07, Vienna, 2013

How do the roles and effects of images change in the digital era, the relation between image and picture, between content and form? How does our worldview change with these new images of our world? These basic questions are an intrinsic component of the work of AROTIN & SERGHEI and place it in close and contemporary relationship with science. The main subject of AROTIN & SERGHEI’s work is the research the essence of images, the limits of visibility, a questioning about the nature of our displays and the basic element behind the screen – the light.

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Symbolic and socio-political dimensions The phenomenon that light itself becomes active through chemical processes of exposure in the technology of photography is what we are experiencing now through the code, through the software, through the computer language. For their Infinite Screen installation at Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, AROTIN & SERGHEI recalled the mythos of the Tower of Babel as a reference. This choice has a wide and symbolic dimension: We are living in the moment one of the most exciting revolutions in creating something like artificial intelligence and adaptive systems that are capable of learning. I believe that none of us are really aware of the processes that are actually taking place and how this will of course be reflected in a form of confusion of languages that can have at least the same effects than those one can get from the mythical story told about the Tower of Babel. In a time when the work of art is no longer technically reproduced, but also technically produced, when software and code as the languages ​​of our time also generate the work of art itself, we need the visionary, the leading and the reflective function of artists more than ever. The fact that the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna dedicated with its main façade, 1200 square meters of the most prominent area of the city and perhaps in all of Europe to a contemporary work of art, emphasizes the socio-political dimension of AROTIN & SERGHEI‘s project. In the Infinite Screen art creation, the stringent contextual and methodological Infinite Screen / The Tower of Babel 2016 installation views at Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna inauguration of the installation with (from left to right) Gerfried Stocker, director Ars Electronica, AROTIN & SERGHEI and Sabine Haag, director KHM 125 years Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna in 2016

link between art and technology produces a fascinating visual state of suspense. It highlights the hybrid simultaneity of digital virtual realities that we all take for granted today. In the artists´ work, the recognition process is both artistic and scientific, while t­he methods of examination and presentation are strictly artistic. This is what makes the work of AROTIN & SERGHEI so ­interesting.

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Infinite Light Column 01 exhibition view Ars Electronica Center Festival 40 years Ars Electronica, 2019

Infinite Screen 2023 space study for the supra–liminal installation at Kraftwerk Berlin

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Interview with AROTIN & SERGHEI with space studies, work details and exhibition views excerpt of a talk led by Gerfried Stocker

GERFRIED STOCKER

A screen consists of millions of Light Cells: each point, each color is produced by complex constellations of red, blue and green small lightdots, so tiny that manufacturers now claim that the image has the resolution of a retina. What is your approach to the phenomenon of the screen? AROTIN & SERGHEI

All visible signs in the digital age and all the visual information on screens are generated by light pulses. Opposed to the “eternal” black letters on white paper, all digital visualization systems show light signs on black screens through an uninterrupted emerging and disappearing light flow, always in the same physical place of a monitor. It is an alphabet of light that allows all visualization on our screens, through infinite degrees of color and intensity, through radiance of red, green and blue components. We transform this technical disposition that surrounds us in life, into a series of metaphorical images and of works of art.

The heart of our Infinite Screen As a main symbol we developed the motive of a pulsating square formed by Light Cells: it is a sort of “heart” of our Infinite Screen that recalls the repetitive cycles of existence and life. We called this symbolic image White Point, it is a fluctuating counter-image to Malevich’s Black Square, which develops on the paradoxe and opposite terms of “infinite” and “screen”.

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Our symbolic image White Point1 is a condensation of our artistic concept. It appears in an obsessive way in various materials, techniques, sizes and versions, from the intermedial paintings, through media compositions on screens, video installations, up to the subliminal installation at Ars Electronica Deep Space 8K and Vertigo/ Infinite Screen at Centre Pompidou.

The vanishing point: an infinite far trace of existence In a completely dark space, one can imagine a vanishing point as an almost invisible tiny white point. We examine the phenomenon of such a “white point” in dark Universe and create from this basic image our artworks in endless zoom or splitting processes. In absolute terms, the vanishing point is the smallest possible visible image, a“trace of existence” in infinite far distance. In our installation at Deep Space, this corresponds to one single shining white light pixel of the matrix of millions. This particle is shown pulsing in the rhythm of a heartbeat. It moves gradually to the viewer and immerses the whole space. In the following extreme enlargement one can discover the structure of a white light point, a cube made of red, blue and green light cells dissolved by the brightness contrast of pulsation into visible and invisible phases. During the visible phases the colors melt up into a dazzling white. In the shadow phases, during the process of extinction, memories of color cells seems to be etched in the retina of our eyes. A monitor surface is usually not really an image, but just the receptor of images. Each signal appears on a screen as a transient White Point / 2 White Points 2018 digital animation, unique monitor 3 views

flash. The pulses that generate these images seem to have their origins outside of the physical object of the screen itself. 1. White Point appears between 2012–21 in following creations: - 2012: White Point 1–4, intermedial paintings cycle - 2013: Infinite Screen, tribute to Mantegna, digital composition 12 x12m - 2015: White Point, subliminal installation for wall, floor and sound, 16 x 18m - 2016: White Point, digital animation, edition for digital canvases - 2016: Light Impulse–Radical Atoms, installation version for 5 screens, 72m - 2016: Prometheus / White Point, installation version on 3 walls, 48m - 2018: White Point / 2 White Points, digital animation, unique monitor - 2021: Vertigo / Infinite Screen, digital installation for 18 monitors

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White Point / 2 White Points 2018 digital animation, unique monitor

White Point 2018 digital animation, edition for digital canvas

White Point 2015 installation view Deep Space 8K, Ars Electronica Centre 2015

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Around this visible moment, there is the “Infinite”, the unconceivable existence of time and space and the infinite other possibilities of reality and truth.3 In video technology the term “infinite screen” means an endless repetition of an image inside an image, which is created when the camera films its own image. For us the opposite terms of “infinite” and “screen” have wide ranges of meanings. It could mean: the infinite possibilities of content (which can be displayed on a monitor), the infinite large surface (of which only a small part is visible), the infinite small knowledge (as opposed to the infinity of unknown matter in universe), the infinite possibilities of virtual reality and substitution of reality, and the infinite numbers of cycles of creation and extinction of visual information... All this is interacting ourdays in such a high frequency and density, that one may be tempted to believe that we are perceiving real, existing contents and stable pictures on our devices... However, as explained before, everything we see is generated by vibrations and these pulsating cells of light, therefore, everything we believe and recognize on our monitors is an infinite illusion. Based on the observation of this phenomena, our project deals with the space of imagination, and the origins of space and time.

Where are we? What do we see? Where are we going?

White Point 2015 installation view Deep Space 8K, Ars Electronica Centre 2015

Of course, these eternal philosophical questions, as well as their wide practical applications have occupied researchers, thinkers, artists and entire think tanks since ever. Each epoch and generation reflects and approches them in a own and new way. One of the first to describe a bridge from a naturalistic worldview to a metaphysical one in modern time has been Wassily Kandinsky, who laid the theoretical foundation of a liberated abstract art.4 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) 4.3: “The truthpossibilities of the elementary propositions mean the possibilities of the existence and non-existence of the atomic facts.” 4. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, 1926: “The point is the primary element, a fertilization of the empty surface”.

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Long Rain Box 2001 installation project for Ruhrtriennale with music by Olga Neuwirth sound and visual development, cycle of sketches, drawings on paper

Prometheus 2016 composition for 5 projections on 3 walls for the exhibition Kandinsky, Marc—The Blue Rider Fondation Beyeler 2016 photo: AROTIN & SERGHEI showing their installation to pianist Mikhail Rudy

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GERFRIED STOCKER

How do you transmit these questionings into the digital age through your work? AROTIN & SERGHEI

Kandinsky’s vision influenced the entirety of our artistic research. We created a first installation around his emblematic Composition VII at Fondazione Mazzotta in Milan as far as in 2001, and

The extension of Kandinsky’s space concept

presented in 2016 our Infinite Screen at Fondation Beyeler as a part of the exhibition Kandinsky, Marc—The Blue Rider. The analysis of abstract forms and the desire of an “absolute painting” have been for us a major inspiration. The screen is for us just an allergory. Extending Kandinsky’s observations, and in continuity with his attempt to transmit pure sense and spirituality in art5, we use the surfaces and techniques of our time for our exploration of philosophical, geometrical, musical and architectonical dimensions. The concept of the “White Cube” abstract exhibition space was invented by Wiener Sezession around 1900 and gets generalized much later for contemporary art presentations at museums and galleries. Looking through photos of the very first abstract art exhibition views in 1910’s we have remembered, that in those times inner walls were all colored and fully decorated – a significant fact for the emergence of the first monochrome and color field painting, and the artistic desire of wide and empty spaces. Through our installation at the Milan exhibition,6 where Kandinsky’s Composition VII (1913) has been presented for the first time in

Composition VII 2001 sketches and exhibiton view of the space modules for Kandinsky’s Composition VII, installation for the exhibition Kandinsky – Tradizione e astrazione in Russia 1896-1921, Fondazione Mazzotta, Milan, 2001

Italy, we created a transcendent blue resonance space with space modules and accentuated the overwhelming bright effect of the white color fields in the center of the painting, letting it appear as a culmination, an over-exposure, a simultaneity of all imaginable colors, a liberated expansion of light... In a way this installation could be seen as our “Proto – Infinite Screen”. GERFRIED STOCKER 5. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911). 6. Kandinsky – Tradizione e astrazione in Russia 1896-1921, exhibition at Fondazione Mazzotta, Milan 2001.

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In your work the energy of color seems often to break through the surface of the picture ... AROTIN & SERGHEI

Liberated colors and blazing white

The potential and the dynamics of “liberated” colors are creating an energy that brakes through everything..., through all logical systems,...through all schemes of thinking... The energy of our color system, recalls Plato’s description of a color scale 7. It ranges from the invisible, the dark and the amorphous to the extreme stimulation of the senses, the red at its maximal intensity, and shifts forward up to glaring colors, an overwhelming radiant shine, and finally an over-exposure, melting into dazzling white. We use this eruptive palette for all of our “portraits of light”, from the White Screen intermedial paintings up to the modules of the Infinite Light Column. Today the peaceful, silent and protective white walls of the “white cube” exhibition spaces are undergoing a fundamental change. Our brain is continuously flooded with high-frequency information. Digital white is not a quiet background. It appears as an oscillating sum of all potential inputs: the innumerable light cells that form each individual light pixel on our displays vibrate and radiate with maximum intensity to produce “white color”. The media and devices of our time are constantly accelerating our

White Point 2012 intermedial painting, pigments, prisms, wooden light frame, 135 x 130 cm

perception, our impression of time and space gets modified. Our work involves a continuous hypnotic slowdown process and so generates space and time. GERFRIED STOCKER

What is for you the main role of an artwork ? AROTIN & SERGHEI

A work of art is before all an object of reflection. It creates an infinite space of free thought. Art can help us to extend the limits of the intellect. Through an artwork we can cross the threshold of the infinite.

7. Plato, Timaios, ca. 360 BC, 30th chapter: Explanation of Colours...

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Infinite Screen 2012 construction scheme, guoache on handemade paper, wooden frame, 80 x 80 cm

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Impressions, Dialogue avec Monet 2019 visual composition / orchestration for four monitors exhibition view at Mairie de Vernon, Festival des Arts, Vernon–Giverny 2019

Every system of thought is destinated to be revoked at some point. Artworks are like permeable walls. All possible information from the infinite space around us can reach the viewer through the artwork. It enables unlimited possibilities of imagination. We develop signs that escape logic. We create immersive situations where one can lose, ...or find themselves. We love to work with contradictions, (for example contradictions between surface and depth). Through contradictions the real is brought closer to a virtual and dreamlike level. We research the infinite in

non-lieu 2003 visual composition, tribute to Samuel Beckett digital artwork

all its forms, ...in matter, in sound, in time, in the past, in present and in the future... Our artworks are infinite in their variation and format, in dimension and size, in the development and metamorphosis, in materialization and dematerialisation... They never unveil just one single dimension. Our art lets the viewers inside and participate in the research process.

The DNA of contemporary visuality and the membrane of consciousness All realities can be thought. The shadows of ideas are the resonances

Bing! 2006 visual composition tribute to Samuel Beckett, construction scheme

of thoughts. Working with the light cells and the appearance of readable pictures, we are showing simultanously the surface of illusion and its dissolution, the microcosmos of the inner life of digital imagery: the DNA of the contemporary visual world. Our pictures dilate and expand the vibration and the size of the light cell matrix. The viewer can project himself inside the pattern. We are creating an imaginary space of “reflection” through a zoom into the reflecting screen surface. This “surface of reflection” of our Infinite Screen can also be compared with the mirroring surface of the water in Monet’s Impressionism: they are a translucent extension of space and time, a prolongation of a unique moment, a surface of introspection. White Screen 2008

study for visual installation at Kraftwerk Berlin

The Light Cells of our screens, also similarly to Monet’s light points are the signs or traces of our existence, appearing, disappearing, melting together, ...always manifesting in different ways, depending on the view point. Our revaluation of the unique moment is a counter-movement to the mainstream of our time, to the infinite “shares” of images, and preprogrammed answers and directives to everything. Almost one century after Walter Benjamin,8 the problematic is not only the total reproducibility, but also the complete emptiness of ideas of entire societies and generations through the permanent overflow of multimedia trash. Like Turner, who used dense fog and industrial smog to catch the light, we use the light cell smog of our devices to create a space of reflection.

Listening to the space around us Our continuous research of an infinite space was inspired by free thinkers, philosophers, architects and composers..., from Giordano Bruno to Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Palladio’s floating theatre project in Venice up to Kandinsky’s theory of floating forms, from Homer’s Golden Chain to Brancusi’s Column of the Infinite, from Alberti’s perspective constructions in Renaissance and Mantegna’s three-dimensional bodies to Cern’s scientific research of invisible particles, from Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, to Nikola Tesla’s eternal wireless energy wave concept... We also draw inspiration from sounds, especially sounds of nature, waves, wind, or single tones..., echoes, resonating, vibrating White Point 20015

studies for the visual installation at Deep Space, Ars Electronica Center

tones, growing or disappearing voices, spectral sounds..., but of course also extremely refined sounds like the unique sound of a Stradivarius, and sophisticated musical constructions, organisms and compositions. The elementary observation of the construction schemes of electronic and contemporary music, is for us as fascinating as the observation of the concepts in musical history..., as Scriabin’s “cosmic” musical concept, Schönberg’s concept free tones and the spatialization concepts of Ligeti, Xenakis, Nono, Boulez... 8. Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, 1936

Everything We See Could Aso Be Otherwise 2014 scheme of the visual installation, Brucknerhaus LInz, Festival Ars Electronica

White Point 20015

scheme of the sound spatialization installation for Deep Space, Ars Electronica Center

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Mute Space 1 2011 intermedial painting, prism, wood, 125 x 120 cm 38

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Mute Space 2018 intermedial painting, prism, piano strings, wood, frame 250 x 250 cm, exhibition view Palais Rasumofsky Vienna

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GERFRIED STOCKER

What were the main impulses from contemporary music to your work? AROTIN

Indeed, during my studies of composition and conducting in Vienna, as well as later in Paris and Berlin, I had the chance to meet Pierre Boulez and to appreciate his art of transmission of sounds and knowledge. Boulez was not only a composer and a conductor, but he also pursued his artworks in society, in creating “real” resonance spaces and creating institutions, such as Ircam, the research institute and laboratory of electronic music inside Centre Pompidou in Paris. Our Mute Space has been inspired by our work with Ircam, while the intermedial painting Truth Possibilties, a spatialization of cryptical

un mètre carré jamais vu peut être par là une issue traces fouillis signes sans sens hop fixe ailleurs une seconde bing silence excerpts from Samuel Beckett, Bing, 1966

signs floating in space, was a realized as a homage to Boulez. In the context of our exhibition Metamorphosis in Vienna we presented a performance of Boulez’ integral piano work in front of those two artworks, ...an “olympic” concert played by the conductor, pianist and Boulez-specialist Michael Wendeberg (he was also the conductor of our Infinite Screen in Vienna), a superposition of visual and musical signs and spaces of resonance.

To make an analog sound infinite Luigi Nono gave incredible attention to the art of listening to the space around us, especially in his late pieces with live-electronics. The encounter with Nono in Vienna and at his masterclass at Centre Acanthes in Avignon in 1989, when I was a young composition student, were special impulses for my reflection. He spoke about Giordano Bruno, about the imagination of an endless space, about textures and techniques that make an analog sound infinite.

AROTIN & SERGHEI at the anechoic space, Ircam-Centre Pompidou, Paris

The electronic manipulation of analogue resonance spaces was a key experience and main inspiration for our exploration and construction of infinite structures in music and visual arts.

Infinite Screen 2013 installation view with Klangforum Wien / Aureliano Cattaneo at Konzerthaus Vienna 41

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GERFRIED STOCKER

In music the connection between the trigger of a sound and its resonance is of central importance. How do you shape the relationship between sound and image in your installations? AROTIN

Since my childhood I was obsessed with the piano as a concept, as a machine that creates vibration, as a system of knowledge. I saw every composition as a completely open structure. I made many transcriptions and was especially interested in moments that exceed the piano’s technical possibilities..., in unplayable, unwritable and unimaginable compositions... Precisely through the process of dissolution and alteration of the external form of a work, I had understood that, a released tone is always unbreakable and unpredictable in its development. Any single tone has the potential to become “everything”. I had the impression that most of the existing compositions create too much “action”. That’s why we try to apply this fascinating state of suspense and metamorphosis on our own musical and visual compositions. GERFRIED STOCKER

You observe the vibration of each cell and build a space out of it? AROTIN & SERGHEI

Exactly! We show each single “cell of thoughts” (light cell or Mute space 2 2013 intermedial painting drawing , pigment, prisms, wood, 135 x 130 cm

musical tone) together with its association chains (resonances), and we manipulate them through electronics. The real gets combined with the fiction, the echo of the infinity of the empty space. Working with Nono ’s Prometheus, brought us to Scriabin’s Prometheus and the idea of u ​​ sing light as sound and sound as light. About a hundred years ago, the composer Alexander Scriabin developed a vision of “Light-Music”. For his Prometheus (1910) he developed a notation system for an imaginary light piano with 2 voices, located in his orchestral score above the highest instrument, the piccolo. The deeper voice crosses the dodecaphonic space in whole tones symbolizing various elements such as chaos, metal, flesh, fire, light, air and again chaos. The upper voice breaks through the geometrical system in infinite extension, forming vibrating waves and cells.

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Space study 2005 drawing on paper, 29 x 21 cm

Prometheus 2016 intermedial installation, tribute to Scriabin, exhibition view at Fondation Beyeler

Color concept 1994 sound space study, tribute to Scriabin, drawing on paper

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Scriabin starts his “Light-Music” with a synthetic chord, which, like

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Scriabin’s Light Piano

the antique idea of Chaos, precedes the creation of the universe and contains already all the elements of existence, in this case, we can imagine that it contains all possible music and light. It is a hexachord, built from tritones and fourths. The tritone as the essence of dissonant intervals (therefore it was forbidden in the Middle Ages music) symbolizes the opposites of matters and pierces through and the entire sound sphere like the rotation axis of a planet (C–F sharp). a permanent “nuclear splitting of the sound spaces that breaks through all known idea of space. In the installation White Point / Vers La Flamme the sounds are “thrown” into certain high frequencies, turn into light and, as if “falling down”, become sound again: “Atomized Sounds“, which, viewed from the outside, split into pyramidal spaces that are constantly exposed to changes, and which, viewed from within, are set in vibration, a sort of vibration in extension. Each one of these “flying” light tones not only has a certain color in this way, but also contains, a “genetic tonal memory of radicalized musical atoms”. Our White Point is in a way the spatialization of this origin of all possible sounds and images, the smallest possible digital image. When we met the pianist and avant-gardes specialist Mikhail Rudy, he just had presented in Gstaad his fantastic work on Kandinsky 9. We started immediately exchanging our visions about synesthesia and the interconnections between the concepts of Infinite Screen and White Point regarding Kandinsky and Scriabin. The sound- and light installations that we realized later at Fondation Beyeler for

Light Piano 1994 spatial study, tribute to Scriabin, installation 120 x 80 x 80 cm

the Blue Rider exhibition, allowed to create an imaginary score with an “expanded light matrix”, signs and colors in superposition, simultaneity and even contradiction. 9. Mikhail Rudy, Pictures of an Exhibition (Centre Pompidou Paris, 2010), animated film based on Kandinsky’s 1928 original sketches and indications for a theatrical version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition at Bauhaus Dessau. Mikhail Rudy performed Mussorgsky’s masterpiece together with his film in many museums (Guggenheim Museum New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, Guggenheim Bilbao, as well as in Hong-Kong, Mexico, Sao Paolo , a.o.)

Light Piano 1994 spatial study, tribute to Scriabin, installation 120 x 80 x 80 cm central scene

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Sound space study / Prometheus 1994 Two pages of the visual score for tribute to Scriabin, drawing on paper, each 40 x 30 cm

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Light Piano 1994 spatial study, tribute to Scriabin, installation 120 x 80 x 80 cm

Beckett’s spaces in the midst of nothingness Another major source of inspriration was Samuel Beckett and the emblematic endless places he describes, that let us create a space in infinite transformation, one of the first video mappings ever, permitting a human being to physically penetrate a virtual space: non lieu - manipulated space and Bing!10 , predecessor of the idea of sound, space and visuality of Infinite Screen. GERFRIED STOCKER

Which moment was the concrete trigger for your work? AROTIN & SERGHEI

The trigger was in effect a very concrete one: on my birthday in 2005 my laptop fell down and its screen was broken. The only thing my screen would show were chains and lines of Light Cells. The remaining information had to be divined. We transformed this broken Light Cell image into our research and art project Infinite Screen. In Art History there are many examples of works about pixelation and unsharp images. With Infinite Screen, we go beyond the visible surface and we are questioning the degree of reality of all the content we perceive. The echo of signs, sounds and images and the shadows of ideas18 are part of our artwork: “the picture after the picture” – the resonance – with its blurring, reflective, shine, shadow, reverberation, reflection and superposition. 10. Bing!, art project by AROTIN & SERGHEI, cooperation with Ircam Paris, work-in-progress 2006-10, inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Bing (1966). The project uses superimposed anlogue and digital spaces, a development of the Non-lieu installation, that the artists had created in homage to Beckett (2003-04), and realized in 6 x 6 m with their performance of Waiting for Godot, with music by Olga Neuwirth, Klagenfurt Theatre, 2005. AROTIN & SERGHEI’s innovative and simultanously anlogue and digital installation was the subject of two thesis: Stefania Rossa: Visualità e spazio nel teatro di Alexander Arotin (Visuality and space in the theatre of Alexander Arotin), Università Ca Foscari (Venice, 2006), and in Grazia D’Arienzo’s doctorate, L’eridità beckettiana nel teatro digitale (Beckett’s Legacy in Digital Theater), (Salerno, 2017).

Non Lieu / Godot 2003/2004 intermedial installation, projection on module construction, installation views with performances of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Stadttheater Klagenfurt 2005 left: 3 video stills from the begin; right: video still from the end

Manipulated Space / Waiting for Godot 2003/2004 space studies, drawings on paper

Manipulated Space / Waiting for Godot 2003/2004 intermedial installation, stage and light view of the performances at Stadttheater Klagenfurt 2004

The tower of Babel 2016 partition, sound layers (extract)

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SERGHEI

The transformation of abstract mental vibrations into visual media is similar to the analogical principle of magic:19 “As above, so below, as inside, so outside; as the spirit, so the body”. The relationships in the universe (macrocosm) echo to those in the individual (microcosm) “Everything flows - out and in; everything rises and falls”, like holographic reflective grids. The perception is nowadays often dependent on the “another I”: the data produced by our computers and devices. The universe is, of course, independent of this data, and so most of our devices are rather hindering than useful in an exploration of the universe, because they show only what they show, no more, and in doing so only refer to the unknown. An essential aspect of our Infinite Screen is therefore the exploration of the unlimited possibilities of truth and unknown infinite matter.

Infinite Light Column 2018 installation view at Kunsthalle Vienna, presentation with performance by Yury Revich and his Stradivarus

The dissolution of data ... That is the reason why the dissolution of this rational data is for us such an important reflection process that we directly and “materially” integrate into our artistic production process. Fonts dissolve in cell strands, gold dissolves in red and green light cells, points in motion and thus in lines and spatial structures. The basic matrix of our images is covered by a black barcode of texts, which leads to the transformation of colors. In the black area one can also see the “non-luminous” cells. Thus we show (e.g. Scratched Screen) simultaneously the visible, the invisible as well as the potentially visible. Light is a shining matter. Even through a microscope, one cannot really see, understand and determine when and where the form of a shining matter really starts or end. Thus our Light Cell images deepen this complex phenomenon – they are fantasy portraits, freely interpretable and transcendental symbols. We have always been interested in the polysemy of all signs and interpretations. We integrate different meanings into our work. 19. Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum, around 300 CE

Broken monitor 2005 1-3 from photographic cycle , 60 x 60 cm

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Techniques, realization and spatialisation GERFRIED STOCKER

How do you build up your “intermedial paintings”? In what consits your “mixed technique”? AROTIN & SERGHEI

There are usually four main steps in making our work: 1. the creation of the idea and the concept, the analysis of the context, the determination of our position (the position in universe, in society, in the art history and in the specific context of a project) and then the development of dialogues with the collective memory. 2. the graphical work, is mainly the construction of the form of an artwork through drawing, painting, colorization processes, technical and architectural sketches, studies and plans until the work comes alive. 3. the spatialization is for us the creation and modulation of the space between the impulse of a sign and the viewers surrounding space. It involves the development of the proportions of the artwork, creating three-dimensionality through layers. Another specific moment is painting of light and shadow surfaces, the creation of resonances and dialogues with the real space. The specific work on the sound and its relation to the visual, is also the artists in their studio in Berlin, 2020

part of this step of creation and spatial composition. 4. the technical realization of these ideas and shapes manifests in different ways: - analogue artworks with combinations of pigments, wood, glass, metal, acryl, prisms, paper, a.o. - unique digital artworks, animations of the drawings, compositions realized on monitors or monitor groups (orchestrations), led panels, or as projections on space modules and in real architecture.

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Space study 2021 for Infinite Light Columns, 30 x 40 cm

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For the analogue artworks we use solvent-free, UV-resistant, water-soluble, translucent natural pigments, which are applied with a mix of manual and technical processes on foils (Amorphus Polyethylene Therephtalate). The surface of these images are equipped with “Optical Selectors” that, similar to prisms, have the property to “select” the aspects that one can see on the surface, and to enhance the multidimesional impression of the plane. In some of the series, we stretch layers of tuned piano strings over the image surface. The luminosity extends through to the viewer from the background of the picture, to all the system of layers.

The shapes of the Infinite One main graphical element of our Light Cells are drawings of parallel lines curved at their upper and lower ends. For us this form symbolizes Infinity. Out of this basic drawing we built our matrix and grid systems. Another pictorial language of our artworks are the shapes and the colors. We often combine basic colors with elements of other spectral “color sounds” – this creates “color vibration” and “amplified light”. We assemble these elements on several strata and in different degrees of sharpness, transparency creating motion and the depth of space. In the cyle Flying Cells the intermedial paintings are superimposed by stripes developed from encodings, barcodes, braille and other forms of dissolved notations. The pictural elements of these “intermedial paintings”, are handdrawn light and color gradients, composed of superimposed lights and shadows. These image layers are mounted on custom made wooden or metallic frames. Depending on the cycle, we like to use light frames with white light emitting diodes. In some series, we use reflective backgrounds, such as white lithograph color, or even 24K gold leaf, platinum and white gold coating to amplify the energy the viewer can get though. All our artworks are original creations and irreproductible single pieces.

Space study 2013 for Light Cells, drawing on paper, 80 x 60 cm

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Digital compositions Our digital artworks are before all interpretations and developments of our drawings and analogue intermedial paintings, animations with micro– and macro–motion sequences. We often combine these digital sequences creating synchronized compositions of animated images, that we call orchestrations, visible on groups of monitors. We are experimenting with prototypes using them to create unique digital canvases authentic digital signature that ensures uniqueness and traceability. (e.g. Life Cells, Infinite Time Machine, Metamorphis).

Large-scale creations and live compositions With these minimalistic movements we are building some long and dense compositions and large-scale creations (e.g. The Tower of Babel, Impressions—Dialogue avec Monet, Vertigo.) In other cases we exaggerated the slowed down processes, making movements of the digital compositions almost imperceivable (e.g. Metamorphosis, Infinite Light Columns). These developments and experimentations are then generating new visual and spatial situations, leading us to new signs and meanings.

Infnite Light Column 01 2018 intermedial sculpture eith 6 synchronized screen– modules, approx 680 x 60 x 60 cm exibition view Kunsthalle Wien, 2018

It is a cyclical way of working, with evolving phases of observation, reflection and moments in which we catch and fix the moving particles. We love to integrate the viewer in this thrilling process of experimentation, that is the reason we often realize live animated situations and collaborations with composers and orchestras. It is a question of opening our creative dialogue to others, to work with inventors and to explore techniques and “materials of the future”, that are still in the process of development.

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Space study 2021 for Life Cells 50 x 30 cm

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Blue Pulse 2015 intermedial painting, drawing, pigments, wood, 170 x 120 cm

Bing! 2006-10 rendering of the installation and space study 60 x 40 cm

Partition scénique / Bartok 2001 drawing on paper 16 x 24 cm

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Absolute light that contains all colours Our research concerns both light as material and materials that can catch light. GERFRIED STOCKER

At which point did you first start working with these light cell components? AROTIN & SERGHEI

Our work about the components of light started with the consciousness that In Universe, there is a sort of absolute darkness and absolute light that contains all colors. One usually perceives only a small section of the visible spectrum, one split, one ray. Instead of one unit, we often perceive only different points and the illusion of a multi-dimensional image. The idea of dimension exists only in our heads, just like mathematics. It is a concept, a structure of thinking, not a natural phenomenon. We can only see what we see with our eyes, or with different instruments that help us in seeing a bit more. But the largest part of reality remains hidden and unknown. With the help of machines, mathematically, our range of perception can include billions of possibilities, from the smallest point to the largest one. All the images provided by these machines (be it of the microcosmic world or the macro-cosmic one) are only made out of light pixels, nothing else. We will eventually be able to extend our mechanical limits

Sound Space / Space Study 2016 intermedial painting, drawing, pigments, wood, 90 x 90 cm

but this won’t change the fact that there will always be a limit. It is precisely this restriction that we want to pierce and transcend through the making of our artworks, stimulating the imagination. If we want to visualize extremely small particles, we use a scanning electron microscope, and in order to get an image, we have to vaporize the surface of the object with real gold. The image then shows the shape and size but not the color of the object, and a golden shape rendered by a digital image is again reduced to light pixels, in this case a combination of red and green cells.

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The painting Golden Crazy, part of our cycle Crazy Cells shows exactly this mystery – the preposterous phenomenon of Light Cells in mutation. Scientists mostly believe in something and create images in order to prove that initial idea. On the other hand, as artists, we create our “experiments” as “miracles” or “incidents”, breaking through the logical structure of expectation in order to find new ways to understand the world. We use spatialitation techniques that allow to each viewer to Golden Crazy 2012

intermedial painting cycle, drawing, pigments, prisms, 90 x 90 cm

perceive his own individual image. We leave an infinite range of expansive possibilities for each image and we want to give the viewer the impression that one can penetrate the images, as walking through a door towards an infinite dimension. Entering a light space is like crossing boundaries, schemes and habits. We are painting what we desire, not what exists. Everything is possible. It depends on what you observe, fix and manipulate. Art is the invention of one’s own reality. Art has a key role as a membrane of consciousness. Our “portraits” of light pulses are image-ideas as archetypes – “Idea” (in Plato’s sense), as the visible appearance, as the original form, but also “Idea” (in Democritus’sense) as the atoms that forms everything.

Collaboration and pluridisciplinary extenstions GERFRIED STOCKER

How do you both work and collaborate together? AROTIN & SERGHEI

We are aiming to surpass the subjective introverted individualistic artistic point of view, through a continuous dialogue, exchange and modification of perspectives. As the process of transmission and perception is for us as important as are the signs we develop, 3 Space Studies 2012 drawings, print, 40 x 60 cm

in working together we can better test out the whole trajectory from an impulse to the viewer. We are working like musicians or architects, always between composition, experiment and analyze.

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White Point 2017 space study, intermedial painting drawing, print, 40 x 60 cm

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Space Study 2001 drawing, print, 40 x 60 cm

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We are realizing all the working steps by ourselves, up to the architectural planning drawings, the programing of sound and visual development, as well as the real time animation and mounting of the installations. In phases of complicated constructions and for specific techniques, we work of course with specialists, engineers and inventors. The organization of the exhibition spaces, the specific set, curatorial work and communication with the viewer are also part of our work. We are building a unique context and parcours for each artwork inside the real architecture

Infinite Screen 2013, La Biennale di Venezia (2015), the artists with composer Aureliano Cattaneo, investigeting the spaces of their future installation, Teatro delle Tese, Arsenale, 2012

of the exhibition space. In many projects we further incorporate pluri-disciplinary collaborations with scientists, with exceptional musicians and with composers. We have had the occasion to cooperate for example with the inventors of new time measuring systems,10 of unique digital canvases,11 of artificial brains,12 of continuous propulsion,13 and have continuous cooperations with research the institutions Ircam–Centre Pompidou, Klangforum Wien and Ars Electronica. Through this uninterrupted dialogue we creative spirits around we get to global questionings. It is like Exampaeos17—an enlighted journey of life.

The artwork of the future GERFRIED STOCKER

What would be for you the “artwork of the future”? AROTIN & SERGHEI

The “artwork of the future”20 is for us a “composition of images, signs and ideas” 21, that involves the viewer in the parcours of artistic research and creation. We situate ourselves on the other side of Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk 22, that add all artistic disciplines in order to get a supreme effect that overwhelms the viewer with a finished work. We want to deliberate the fascination of the unknown space beyond the known matrix of visual and acoustical signs, expressions and languages.

Infinite Screen 2013, installation view at Konzerthaus Vienna, rehearsal with Klangforum Wien and Donatienne Michel-Dansac

20. Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, (The artwork of the future), essay about the ideal artwork, (Leipzig, 1849). 21. Giordano Bruno: De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione (On the composi-tion of images, signs and ideas), 1591, english translation annotated by Dick Higgins, co-founder of “Fluxus” mouvement, inventor of the term “Intermedia” (1960s) 22. Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”, “synthesis of the arts”or “total artwork”), term used by Richard Wagner in Art and Revolution, and Artwork of the Future, (Leipzig, 1849). 69

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In our view the “artwork of the future” is a reference point that allows the viewer to particpate in an infinite parcours. That is why it is so interesting to create exhibition contexts with crossconnections, that integrate the viewer in the process reflection and splitting. The idea of l​​ etting the viewer particpate and “walk through” the entire process of creation goes back to Giorgio Vasari and his invention of the modern museum as a place of reflection—a socio-political vision of experience and knowledge through comparative viewing of works of art that are presented outside their original context and functions. In this new free way of presentation and perception, the focus is set on the relationships to the universe, and that is exactly what is perceived as a new ideal of beauty and freedom. Since the Renaissance, it has been possible to perceive every sign of existence in its individual power and with its interactions with the space around. Each generation must determine and build its own vanishing points and perspectives. We want encourage people to think beyond today’s limitations, screens and information flow, and to bring to people through the overwhelming power of beauty the experience of free imagination. André Malraux extended Giorgio Vasari’s museum’s concept to his “Musée imaginaire” and called the phenomenon of changement “metamorphosis”. Thanks to photographic reproductions, since then, in theory all existing works can be juxtaposed, regardless of their geolocation. With “L’univers des formes”, Malraux initiated Genesis 3 2021 intermedial painting drawing, pigments, prisms, wood, 90 x 90 cm

1960-97 a 42-volume edition with over 23,000 reproductions of works of art from different civilizations—an overview and confrontation of the main impulses of artistic creation. In a way the white cube style museums still recall these white paper pages that create a neutral space from which the past and the present seems excluded, and in which any sign and image can be perceived, compared and understood in a detached way, and also in ever changing and new context.

footote Vasari footote Malraux

With the world wide web in the begining of our century and its

footote univers des formes

extreme quantity and variety of information, a selection and synthesis is more and more necessary. Through conferences, exhibitions and documentations the “Ars Electronica” is displaying annually some of the most innovative questionings and visions of the Future in the fields of interaction of art, technolgy and society.

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Partition scénique / Bartok 2001 drawing on paper 20 x 30 cm

Everything in universe consists of vibration and transformation of waves and particles. Our art explores this metamorphosis

and connects us with the mystery of the Infinite. AROTIN & SERGHEI

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With Infinite Screen we have developed a specific approach to these questionings by“flooding” with color and light the flood of information to which we are continuously exposed. Our Portraits of Light could be seen as a giant encyclopedic cycle on the genesis, metamorphosis, mutation, extinction and memory of existence. For us, a work of art should be an object of completely free reflection, inspiration and interpretation, within the sight and the reach of all. We want to create a dialogue between the present, different eras and collective memory towards higher states of vibration, consciousness, enlightment and transcendence— a total supra-liminal experience.

Vertigo 2021 digital composition space study for the exhibition at Kraftwerk Berlin 2023

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Infinite Screen INTERMEDIAL PAINTINGS main artwork cycles with exhibition views at Palais Rasumofsky, Vienna Gallery Hervé van der Straeten, Paris and Gallery Espace Muraille, Geneva followed by views of the large–scale installations and exhibitions at La Biennale di Venezia, Ars Electronica, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gallery W& K / Palais Schönborn–Batthyany, Guerlain / Fiac Paris, Giverny and Centre Pompidou Paris

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Free Cell 6 2013 intermedial painting, drawing, pigments, prisms, wood 180 x 122 cm

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Puls 1 2016 intermedial painting, drawing, pigments, prisms, wood 180 x 122 cm

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Pink Vibration 2013 Puls 7 2017 exhibition view Palais Rasumofsky, Vienna, 2018

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Pink Excite 2017 intermedial painting, drawing, pigments, prisms, wood 180 x 122 cm

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Space Study 2013 drawing on paper , 40 x 30 cm

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Golden Crazy 2013, cycle Crazy Cells intermedial painting, drawing, pigments prisms, wood, 92 x 92 cm

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Excited Pink 2012, cycle Crazy Cells intermedial painting, drawing, pigments prisms, wood, 92 x 92 cm

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inter-medial means for us independent from the media, free of a fixed attachment to a particular medium or technique, a continuous transformation and splitting AROTIN & SERGHEI

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Pink Vibration 2012, cycle Crazy Cells intermedial painting, drawing, pigments prisms, wood, 92 x 92 cm

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Pink XL 2018 cycle Crazy Cells intermedial painting, drawing, pigments prisms, wood, 220 x 116 cm

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Blue Neva 2018 cycle Free Cells, intermedial painting, drawing, pigments prisms, wood, 180 x 120 cm left: exhibition view Galerie Espace Muraille Geneva, 2016

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PINK DESIRE 2012 intermedial painting from cycle crazy cells 92 x 92 cm 101

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SOUND COLOUR 3, 2016 mixed technique, 94 x 94 cm page 156: SOUND COLOUR 5, 2016 mixed technique, 94 x 94 cm 107

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exhibition view Palais Rasumofsky Vienna, 2018 110

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Metamorphosis 03 2018

intermedial painting, pigments, prism, piano strings, artists frame, 185 x 128 cm

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TONES intermedial painting cycles

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GOLDEN POINT, 2013 mixed technique, 141 x 136 cm

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Everything in universe consists of vibration and transformation of waves and particles. Our art explores this metamorphosis and connects us with the mystery of the Infinite. AROTIN & SERGHEI

Carré Blanc 2018 intermedial painting, pigments, prisms, piano strings, wood 250 x 250 cm exhibition view , Palais Rasumofsky Vienna 2018 124

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PYRAMIDES intermedial painting cycles

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Codes and encoding The intermedial painting cycles Truth possibilities, Logical Structure of Color, Everything we see could also be otherwise and the ten-meter-artwork Flying Cells, are using and superimposing various forms of encodings of reality The top layers of these artworky are formed by a barcode of works titles—quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The black vertical lines of this barcode are covering a regular matrix of drawn red, green and blue light cells creating hidden, dark parts in the picture and partly covered parts that appear as different colors, if one look at it from a certain distance. Above this readable surface there is a layer that tranforms the same sentence into Braille code. The remaining visible cell strands are arranged three-dimensionally on a total of twelve planes with the help of prisma elements and optical selectors. The combination of these coding and spatialisation processes is going beyond the code concept and creates an individual image from every position and a unique code for each viewer in space. The sentences of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus are seeking truths beyond the infinity of tautology and nonsense in our syntaxe. Our translation and interpretation show us a space of thought, a view into the unknown. One can also read the mysterious sign language, and read it from the left to the right as an idea of​​ Genesis, which becomes an increasingly complex construct of thought. Another possible interpretation is to see this artwork as a score of an imaginary symphony of light, with an initial golden keynote split into red and green light cells, vertically extended as chords, upwards and downwards infinitely and increasingly compressed to the right. There are unlimited, infinite interpretation possibilities. As if a thread pulled out of a tissue, at the viewers horizont level a ‘line of consciousness’ appears in counterpoint to the instrumentation of cosmic resonance.” AROTIN & SERGHEI explaining their intermedial artwork cycle

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For two colors, to be at one place in the visual field, is impossible, logically impossible,

it is excluded by the logical structure of color. The propositions of logic are tautologies.

The propositions of logic therefore say nothing.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, extract

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scratched screen / écran écrasé 1, 2011 mixed technique, light frame, 100 x 140 cm

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I I I I I I I

am am am am am am am

the light freedom life a dream the longing a wish a burning desire extract from Alexander Scriabin, Promethean Phantasies 40, (1904-05 ) text appears in Metamorphosis and Gateway to Eysium (2018)

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Entering a light space is like crossing boundaries. We are painting what we desire, not what exists. Everything is possible. AROTIN & SERGHEI

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Infinite Screen 2013 digital composition 4K, 70 min, still image

Infinite Screen 2013

digital composition, 4K, 70 min, installation with projections on space moduls, 12 x 12 m, installation view with performance by Klangforum Wien, Aureliano Cattaneo, Konzerthaus Wien 2013 / La Biennale di Venezia 2015

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Infinite Screen at BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

... AROTIN & SERGHEI bring the fundamental humanistic idea of the Renaissance, the expansion of space and thought, into our time. Abstract shapes (...) are projected in a perspective structure

Ivan Fedele

director La Biennale di Venezia / Musica excerpt from the inauguration speech

onto the wall. The vanishing point becomes a place at which the screen opens up. The wall crumbles through the illusion of infinity. The circluar inner courtyard of Mantegna’s house in Mantua becomes a synonym for a place of memory: a square surrounded by a circle from which all pictorial worlds emerge and transform themselves. And this, as reminded me Arotin in the rehearsal, in a world where we believed, that our attitude had changed, disposed to destroy the walls, and then suddenly awaking, finding ourselves erecting them again... It means for me... living contemporaneity, not only in a musical way, and as an artist, but also as aware citizens of the world...

Infinite Screen was created for the Venice Biennale / Festival Musica as an extraordinary intermedial and pluridisciplinary project, crossing the different sectors of art. For this context the artists developed an installation in form of a 12 x 12 meter square digital projection on space modules focused on the concept of the vanishing point as a place for imagination. The artwork was dedicated to the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), who consistently applied Leon Battista Alberti’s laws of perspective (1453) on drawings of the human body, enabling new extensions of space in visual art. Showing ubiquitous digital picture elements in the context of the development of perspective in painting, as a giant field of illusion, the work of AROTIN & SERGHEI recalls, in a time of visual oversaturation, the endless empty wallspace on which the vanishing point of a forward looking perspective was projected. Electronically animated by the artists, the installation was further developed in collaboration with the ensemble Klangforum Wien, who performed a musical composition by Aureliano Cattaneo with texts by Edoardo Sanguineti about pictural elements in Mantegna’s Œuvre—a transcendent reflection about birth, death and re-birth in a superposition of artistic languages.

Infinite Screen 2013, tribute to Mantegna

intermedial composition & installation by AROTIN & SERGHEI presented with the performance Parole di Settembre, with music by Aureliano Cattaneo and poems by Edoardo Sanguineti; ensmeble Klangforum Wien, conducted by Michael Wendeberg (Vienna) and Michael Kalitzke (Venice) Konzerthaus Vienna 2013 / La Biennale di Venezia 2015 coproduction: La Biennale di Venezia / Musica / Klangforum Wien / AROTIN & SERGHEI Contemporary Art image:

Infinite Screen 2013, tribute to Mantegna Space Study for the installation, 2012 digital composition, 120 x 80 cm

excerpt from programme and project presentation

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Infinite Screen 2013

digital composition, installation with projections on space modules, 12 x 12 m installation view with performance by Klangforum Wien / Michael Wendeberg, Konzerthaus Wien 2013

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Scratched Screen / Écran Écrasé 2011

intermedial painting in light frame, 100 x 140 cm let side: detail of the artwork

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Infinite Screen 2013

digital composition, installation with projections on space modules, 12 x 12 m installation view with performance by Klangforum Wien, Michael Wendeberg, Konzerthaus Wien 2013

Infinite Screen 2013

digital composition, 4K, 70 min, installation with projections on space moduls, 12 x 12 m, installation view performance by Klangforum Wien, Johannes Klaitzke, La Biennale di Venezia 2015

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ARS ELECTRONICA | BRUCKNERHAUS Everything We See Could Also Be Otherwise

AROTIN & SERGHEI, through their practice, investigate the philosophy of the luminous and transcendental. The

Marie-Claudine Llamas curator

works are visual symphonies, which describe, englobe and represent both the macrocosm and microcosm of societal ephemerality. The pieces are intermediaries to the past and the present, the screens are both black mirrors and shine light of the beauty and chaos that is found within the space around us. The artists reference operatic compositions and iconic filmography, interpreting the myths of the humane. AROTIN & SERGHEI draw inspiration from that infinite and parallel universe, often described by philosopher Giordano Bruno or more recently by Ludwig Wittgenstein. At Ars Electronica Festival 2014 AROTIN & SERGHEI presented Infinite Screen in form of a solo exhibition in several parts investigating the whole building of Brucknerhaus Linz around Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sentence “Everything We See Could Also Be Otherwise” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.634). The different artworks and media installations were inspired by Wittgenstein’s Philosophy and questions of perception. Main part of the solo exhibition was the 12m long intermedial painting in nine parts Everything We See Could Also Be Otherwise, a 80m long text installation visible from the other bank of the Danube river with Wittgenstein’s words, three Light Cell intermedial paintings, the cycle Black Light and an all surrounding infinite sound installation with the appearence of particles of Bruckners 4th Symphony.

Everything We See Could Also Be Otherwise

solo exhibition with intermedial paintings, installations and real time animation, Festival Ars Electronica, Change, 2014, Brucknerhaus Linz, hall and main stage exhibition curated and realized by AROTIN & SERGHEI tribute to Ludwig Wittgenstein presented artworks: - Flying Cells / Everything We See Could Also Be Otherwise, intermedial painting 2014, 9 parts, 180 x 1200 cm - Free Cells / White Screen – intermedial painting cycle 2013 parts 1-3, each 180 x 122 cm - Blacklight – intermedial paintings, ink on handmade paper, cycle 2012 parts 1-5, each 156 x 96 cm - Everything We See Could Also Be Otherwise, site specific installation with Wittgenstein’s words, 2014, 40 x 7200 cm - Everything We See Could Also Be Otherwise, installation 2014, digital animation, projection, space modules, real time animation 20 min sound 1 (hall): - Sound of Wittgenstein, sound-installation 2014 with sound of Saturn, four natural elements, electronic and human voices, and the apparition of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, 2 ch. sound, 18 min., loop, sound 2 (entrance): - Delia Derbishire, Falling, 1964 sound 3 (main stage): - Marco Lemke, Chimères, 2014 performed by Brucknerorchester Linz, dir.Dennis Russel Davis a commission by Ars Electronica

In the Great Hall of Brucknerhaus, the artist duo created a special digital installation with projections and space modules, based on the observation of the viewers eye with obsessive interactive frames and iris scans, elements appearing mirrored on the shiny surface of the eyeball, images from AEC BioLab, from CERN collider and grotesque faces of the Chimeres of Notre-Dame de Paris. The vibrating light cell structure of Infinite Screen seems to open itself to the endlessness of the inner hole of the viewers eye. Inside this installation took place a performance comissioned by Ars Electronica Festival with visual live animation of the installation by AROTIN & SERGHEI, with Brucknerorchester Linz and Marco Lemke’s Chimères, a composition written for this occasion. excerpt from project presentation and programme 165

EVERYTHING WE SEE COULD ALSO BE OTHERWISE / Infinite Screen 2014 digital projection on space modules , exhibition view , Festival Ars Electronica

“There is no order of things a priori. Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.” Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

TitleSeries, 0000, tecnique tecnique tecnique, 000x000cm, exhibition

view zzzzz, Gallery xxxx

TitleSeries, 0000, tecnique tecnique tecnique, 000x000cm, exhibition vie zzzzz, Gallery xxxx

TitleSeries, 0000, tecnique tecnique tecnique, 000x000cm, exhibition view zzzzz, Gallery xxxx

EVERYTHING WE SEE COULD ALSO BE OTHERWISE / Infinite Screen 2014 digital projection on space modules , exhibition views , Festival Ars Electronica

ew

EVERYTHING WE SEE COULD ALSO BE OTHERWISE / Infinite Screen 2014 digital projection on space modules , exhibition views , Festival Ars Electronica

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ARS ELECTRONICA | DEEP SPACE White Point The starting point of the “subliminal art installation” White Point is the smallest possible visible image: a single shining white light pixel of the matrix of 64 million of the 18m x 16m projection space is shown pulsing in the rhythm of a heartbeat. It moves gradually to the viewer and takes in the whole space of the building. In the radical enlargement one can discover the structure of this white light point, a cube made of red, blue and green light cells dissolved by the bright contrast of pulsation into visible and invisible phases, the colors melt into dazzling white. In the shadow phases, memories of color cells are “engraved” in the retina of our eyes blur and seem to change. The sequences of mutation of subliminal retinal images are realized as a 8K single-picture animation of six layers, projected onto the wall and floor and combined with the sound of Scriabin’s synthetic hexachord, the origin of all sound.

White Point

subliminal installation, 2015-16 digital animation for wall and floor, 8K, 18 x 16m, sound: Alexander Arotin, Electronic prelude for Scriabin’s Prometheus, 2015, Deep Space 8K, Media Collection Ars Electronica Centre, Linz, Austria realized with the support by Bildrecht Vienna, as a commission for the Festival Ars Electronica 2015 “Post City—Habitats of 21st Century” and 2016 “Radical Atoms—The Alchemists Of Our Time”

The vanishing point is an imaginary point – or one in a perspective drawing – where parallel lines recede from the observer whilst seeming to converge and vanish. The closer the observer gets to the vanishing point, the further it seems to recede. In the Ars Electronica Center’s Deep Space featuring projections with 8 x 4K resolution and composed of more than 66 million pixels, the dimensions of the smallest possible vanishing point – assuming it were illuminated to make it visible – would be approximately 1 mm and thus the size of a single pixel. White Point is based on the premise that the observer is situated in the vanishing point. Visitors thus seem to move into the center of the light inside this single pixel and are within an imaginary cube made up of six picture membranes. The initial image is reflected and rotated on three different axes. The resulting impression on the part of visitors is to be amidst a perspective that extends in all six directions. In their corresponding sound installation “Electronic Prelude for Scriabin’s Prometheus” the artists combine the famous synthetic hexachord by Alexander Scriabin with the beat of the heart. The white point is continuously blinking and in the shadow phases, retinal memory and subliminal images are emerging. AROTIN & SERGHEI are showing the visual impulses and transmutation of radiant atomized sounds and light particles in the subliminal cell structures of Infinite Screen. text excerpts from catalogue Radical Atoms —The Alchemists of our time Festival Ars Electronica 2016

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White Point, 2015, installation views, Deep Space 8K, Ars Electronica Festival

TitleSeries, 0000, tecnique tecnique tecnique, 000x000cm, exhibition view zzzzz, Gallery xxxx

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Infinite Screen at ARS ELECTRONICA | POST CITY Vers La Flamme

“Vers la Flamme is based on a sound which has no usual melodic development, but rather an alchemical extension in space.” AROTIN & SERGHEI

Vers la Flamme / Radical Atoms is a real-time sound and video animation with a performance of late piano works by Alexander Scriabin. It is based on the radical innovative concept of the ­ composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), creator of a light notation system for a fictitious “Light Piano” and inventor of a synthetic mystic hexachord. Together with the pianist Mikhail Rudy, a specialist in ­Scriabin’s oeuvre and Russian avant-gardes, AROTIN & SERGHEI brought the composer’s vision to the future, showing the visual ­impulses and transmutations of radiant atomized sounds and light particles in the subliminal cell structures of Infinite Screen. extract from catalogue Ars Electronica 2016

Vers La Flamme – Radical Atoms subliminal installation, 2016 digital animation and live animation, 6 screens 6K, 5 x 72m

music: Alexander Arotin: Five Electronic preludes for Scriabin’s Preludes (2016) Alexander Scriabin: Guirlandes, Flammes Sombres op 73, Five preludes op 74, Prometheus op 60 (Introduction) Vers La Flamme op 72 (1914) First performed by AROTIN & SERGHEI with Mikhail Rudy, piano Festival Ars Electronica 2016 “Radical Atoms—The Alchemists of our Time” Big Concert Night 2016, Postcity Linz, Austria a commision by Ars Electronica

TitleSeries, 0000, tecnique

tecnique tecnique, 000x000cm, exhibition view zzzzz, Gallery xxxx

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FONDATION BEYELER Prometheus

Prometheus gave fire and wisdom to humankind and in so doing braved

the

wrath

of

Zeus. This legend

Ulf Küster

curator Fondation Beyeler

of courage, and of fire as creative energy, inspired the composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) to write his symphonic poem Prométhée. Le Poème du feu (Prometheus; The Poem of Fire). An enthusiastic discussion of the composition was included in the Blaue Reiter Almanac, which embraced the concept of an art that combined multiple disciplines and sensory impressions. The Fondation Beyeler presented the composition in the version for two pianos transcribed at the start of 20th century. At the keys: Scriabin specialist Mikhail Rudy and Ian Pace. The artist duo AROTIN & SERGHEI accompain the performance with their light installation Prometheus / White Point. Wholly in the spirit of Der Blaue Reiter, music, color and light thereby fuse into a unique, 25-minute sensory e­ xperience.

The name of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) stands for a key aspect of the development of modern art. Prior to the First World War, from 1908 to 1914, an international group of artists active in liberal Munich set out to radically reform art. Their aim was to liberate color from the compulsion to represent things. Rather than depicting visible reality, art was to lend a visual presence to intellectual or spiritual content. This represented a change in the definition of Western art that would influence artists down to the present day. The leading figures were Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, who met in early 1911.  In searching for a language that would express their unique approach to abstract visual form, the artists of Der Blaue Reiter drew parallels between painting and music. Often naming their works Compositions, Improvisations, (among other things), they explored music as the abstract art par excellence. 

PROMETHEUS / WHITE POINT installation, digital composition, five projections on three walls, 4 x 48m, 2016 sound: Alexander Arotin, Electronic prelude for Scriabin’s Prometheus (2016) real time animation and performance: music: Alexander Scriabin, Prometheus. Le Poème du Feu, for piano, orchestra, choir, organ and light piano, op. 60 (1910), transcription for 2 pianos by Leonid Sabaneyev (1911), musical direction and solo piano: Mikhail Rudy orchestra part: Ian Pace visual concept, realization, digital mapping and light piano: AROTIN & SERGHEI; transcription of the light piano voices / visual score by Alexander Arotin (1994) Installation, performances and video documentation part of the exhibition Kandinsky, Marc, Der Blaue Reiter, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, direction: Sam Keller, curator: Ulf Küster, production: Angelika Bühler, September 2016 – January 2017 a commission by Fondation Beyeler 2016

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An onereic space of free thinking The focus of the relationship between music and visual arts in

Karine Tissot

the work of ­AROTIN & SERGHEI has its roots in the Romantic

art historian & curator

concept of Gesamtkunstwerk — a total work of art awakening

Text first published under the title: AROTIN & SERGHEI — Un espace onirique de la libre pensée in Artpassion — revue Suisse d’Art et de Culture, art magazine, N°48, (Geneva, 2016) in occasion of the artist’s installation at Fondation Beyeler, Basel 2016

all the senses. Music, from an art historical perspective, was a major influence on the development of abstract art from the 1910s. Many artists have since sought to convert images into sound and vice versa, using sometimes complex methods, including writing directly onto a soundtrack, photographing electric waves produced by cathode ray oscilloscopes (as seen in Ben Laposky’s work in the 1950s) and interactive video environments. “Why do I understand the musician better than the painter? Why do I see the principle for his abstractions more clearly?” wrote Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo in 1888. ­Perhaps because, in the words of the philosopher Étienne Souriau, “art is that which makes painting and poetry, architecture and dance mutually comparable”. AROTIN & SERGHEI aim to perpetuate this vision of a total work of art initiated by the composer Richard Wagner, who rejected the arbitrary separation of the arts in favor of a fundamental unity of all artistic forms, an integrated art form involving all the senses. One of AROTIN & SERGHEI’s creations, White Point refers to the theory of absolute white color as obtained by dazzling the eye. It pays tribute to Kasimir Malevitch’s Black Square on White Ground, who asserted: “Our studios no longer paint pictures, they build life forms; they are no longer pictures but projects that become living beings”. Traditional materials are set aside in the favour of new ones constantly being developed by society. Painting is abandoned, in pursuit of the unexpected, to discover other matter, other spaces, bringing the elements of art and life closer together.

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Prometheus / White Point, 2016, installation view, Fondation Beyeler

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In an unknown ­dynamic in the twentieth century, light, in contrast to sound, has become the main purpose of many works of art. Its movement creates sharp reliefs, exquisit graphics on a dark background, drawn with grace and precision. Moholy-Nagy, one of the leaders of the Bauhaus movement in Germany, said that “in the future painters will have to embrace light as an essential ingredient of visual works of art. […] T ­ he painter will have the scientific knowledge of a physicist and the technological skill of an e­ ngineer, combined with imagination, creative intuition and intensity of ­feeling”. At Fondation Beyeler the artist duo, AROTIN & SERGHEI, presented an art installation and performance with the pianists Mikhail Rudy and Ian Pace, developing with Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus, one of the most significant pieces of modern art, fusing all the senses. A dispositif of 5 projectors, two pianos and two computer screens was installed in the basement of the Fondation. Starting in darkness, the power of Scriabin’s music r­ esonated for some twenty minutes with an imposing visual display projected onto three adjacent walls. Performed live by AROTIN & SERGHEI, the projection responded to the pianos’ frenetic rhythms and was supported by Scriabin’s distinctive score. The Russian pianist and composer had, in fact, devised “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire” between 1908 and 1910 for a full orchestra, piano, organ, mixed chorus and a “clavier à lumières” (keyboard with lights). His score had the distinctive feature of possessing a stave – above all the other parts – called “Luce”, for the clavier à lumières. Furthermore, the score specifies that an accompaniment of colored projections be synchronized with the music. This would have been the first “son et lumière” performance in history. Inspired by the visible light spectrum, Scriabin had drawn up a schema of relationships between sounds and colors using his own experience of synesthesia and based on a system of “color harmony” equivalence. A century later, AROTIN & SERGHEI have produced an intensely colorful transcription of the “Poem of Fire”.

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The artists created a kinetic work of art by using the grid of a target as a point of departure involving an acidic and brightly colored game with geometry and symmetry. The silhouette of a flattened monochrome piano is suspended in the middle of color fields and sequences of ­geometrical images. The eye is drawn by the whim of shapes and colors which meet, converge and disperse. More impressions follow depending on the movement of the composition and the rhythm suggested by the music. Stationary, standing, walking around or seated, the audience must let go to the continual luminous vibrations. Openly approaching the experience, the viewer is then in a total state of immersion, and loses their points of reference, becoming completely led by their senses. The duo is renowned for their monumental endeavors, and visitors are always guaranteed unique experiences. “We aim to create a sustained development that surpasses all limits of time and space. (...) we create symbols, objects of reflection, that accumulate and densify the impression of time.”

AROTIN & SERGHEI evoke a strong emotional response among those observing their art and underline the “energy” that is exchanged between their work and the public and the meditative dimension that characterizes their installations, creating “an oneiric space of free thinking”. As Arnold Schönberg explained: “(...) that must be simply observed, felt. Definitely not pondered. Colors, noises, lights, sounds, movements, looks, gestures – in short, the elements that constitute the scene’s material – must be linked to one another in a variety of ways. Nothing more than that. If the sounds, no matter in which order they present themselves, can elicit feelings, then colors, gestures and movements must also be capable of doing so. Even if they are free of significance at all for overall comprehension. Because music is too !!”

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Prometheus / White Point, 2016, installation view, Fondation Beyeler

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GUJRAL FOUNDATION | PALAZZO BENZON VENICE Faces of an Infinite Screen

...Through a cross disciplinary approach, that involves geometry, architecture, music and philosophy, AROTIN & SERGHEI combine

Martina Mazzotta curator excerpt of the presentation

in this installation images from East and West in a two circle space that questions the idea of point of view and center. The installation shows aspects and “faces” of Infinite Screen, presented at the Venice Biennale / Musica 2015 with Klangforum Wien, and it shows a preliminary stage of the following installation The Tower of Babel at Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna... The digital installation Faces of an Infinite Screen / Exampaeos develops an endless trajectory. With its two circular parts or faces that join in the middle, the geometry of the space recalls ancient navigation maps. Space and time of this installation are organized around the “infinite” number 1080: Each square measures exactly 1080 x 1080 pixel, the duration of each cycle is exactly 1080 seconds / 18 minutes, and in the sound track are appearing 1080 particles of J.S. Bach’s “The Art of the Fugue” BWV 1080, together with elements of water, metal, fire, earth, aether, as well as electronic and human voices. Two radars are constantly moving in opposite directions and join 18 times per cycle in the middle of the image like moments of conscienceness. the installation is Comparable to an initiative travel through life, a way from on side of the earth to the opposite side, from east to the west, and from the west to the east, from the centre to the borders, and finally towards light. The installation was first presented at the exhibition My East is Your West by Gujral Foundation at Palazzo Benzon in Venice, and curated by Martina Mazzotta / Fondatione Antonio Mazzotta, an official collateral exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2015.

Faces of an Infinite Screen / Exampaeos 2015 digital composition and sound, 1080 sec. installation version, projection on space modules 250 x 500 cm, curated by Martina Mazzotta / Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta part of exhibition My East Is Your West by Gujral Foundation Palazzo Benzon, Venice, official collateral event La Biennale di Venezia 2015

203

That moves, that does not move; that is far off, that is very near; that is inside of this, and that is also outside of this.

Isha Upanishad, Mantra

Pages 74–77: FACES of an Infinite Screen / MY WEST IS YOUR EAST, 2015, installation views, Palazzo Benzon, Venice

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KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM VIENNA Infinite Screen – The Tower of Babel As part of our program on modern and contemporary art, we regularly invite internationally renowned artists to curate exhibitions and projects that interact with our museum and

Sabine Haag

general director Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna extract of the opening presentation

the objects in our diverse collections (...) The artist duo AROTIN & SERGHEI present during one month their moving large scale installation Infinite Screen as a projection on the main façade of the Kunsthistorisches Museum under the title Infinite Screen— The Tower of Babel. This art project is taking place as part of the 125th ­anniversary of the construction of the museum on MariaTheresia Square in 2016. The i­ nspiration for AROTIN & SERGHEI’s ­art installation comes from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The ­Tower of Babel (1563). In the Middle Ages, the biblical myth of a gigantic structure in Babylon, unfinished because of the confusion of languages, served as a symbol of ­divine punishment for mankind’s hybris. The installation Infinite Screen—The Tower of Babel features a constant metamorphosis of images, sounds and texts. Unexpected aspects of Breughel’s Tower of Babel and of other chosen objects from the Museum’s collections are included in the composition and the pattern of moving light cells. The accompanying sound installation is composed and recorded by AROTIN & SERGHEI and based on philosphical citations from different cultures and languages as well as on deconstructed circular motives of Schubert’s late works including the Unfinished Announcement poster 2016 with a space study for Infinite Screen / The Tower of Babel Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, 2016

Symphony...

The repetitive circling ray of a radar screen beams in a giant labyrinth of light cells. It reveals and dissolves emerging images and sounds, and gives the rhythm to an endless journey. In a constant process of metamorphosis, the composition plays with collective memory and lets appear associative chains of philosophical and poetical excerpts, myths of the origins of humanity as Mahabarata, Isha Upanishad, texts by Homer and Vergil, texts about the End Times by Dante, Karl Kraus, Beckett and Wittgenstein, noises of water and fire, barking dogs, jangling coins, heart beat, instructions by Sat Nav, the bells of St. Marco in Venice and sounds from Saturn (Kronos). The cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction are framed by a circular element from Cern Collider. The viewer is lead through a never ending labyrinth, darkness, fire and apocalypse towards Light. extract from programme / project presentation 211

altro schema sviluppo

Ia

EARTH

[image] [sound] [voice]

Ib

WINDS

[image] Radar 2 // “Pro Signis Borealis”, astrological instruments KHM collection [sound] Space Breath // Fire // Steel // Coins // later: Bruckner’s 4th, barking dogs and comuter games [voice] Wittgenstein Tractatus 1: “Everything we see could also be otherwise. There is no order of things a priori. Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.”

II ORIGINS

III

WAY labyrinth I

IV VISION ascension through the clouds V VANITAS

VI DREAM

VII INFINITE postapocalypse Light Impulse

Radar 1 // splitting colours Atma, Space Breath // Scanner 1 // Sound of Saturn // Schubert, Unfinished, Rythm 1, later: Quintett II GPS 1: “to the right, to the left, down, to west, to east, to north, to the south.”translation machine: “vers la gauche vers la droite, vers le haut, vers le bas, à l’ouest après est, après nord vers le sud ...” Indian accent: “turn right! ok? don’t worry...” Beckett, Bing: “un mêtre carré jamais vu...blanc sur blanc presque blanc”

[image] Infinite Screen I // Flying Cells // circular map of Vienna before the destruction of the city walls [sound] Space Breath // Bach, Art of the Fugue, Theme 1 // Squeaking metal // Bells of San Marco Arotin, Electronic prelude for Scriabin’s Prometheus 2 [voice] Mahabharata: “Mixing the three colours, ye have produced all the objects of sight! It is from these objects that the universe has sprung.” Homer, Odyssee, begin: “Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη...” [image] Infinite Screen II // Flying Cells // Caravaggio, David // Tizian, Bravo [sound] metal // breath // Schubert Quintett, single voices // Wagner, Tristan prelude III [voice] Isha Upanishad, Mantra: “That moves, that does not move; that is far off, that is very near; that is inside all this, and that is also outside all this. “ Beckett, Godot, end: “Gehen wir? – wir gehen”, “let’s go” // Birth cry Beckett, Happy Days “It will have been another happy day after all...” Dante, Inferno, 3: “Per me si va ne la città dolente, per me si va ne l’etterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente. Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore: fecemi la divina potestate, la somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore; dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’entrate. ” [image] Infinite Screen I // Flying Cells // Bruegel, The Tower of Babel, later: Children’s Games [sound] Breath // Schubert, Uninfished, development // fire [voice] GPS: “prendrere la rotonda, e poi dritto, e poi, dopo prendrere la rotonda a sinistra, e poi, dopo prendrere la rotonda, e poi a destra, e poi, dopo prendrere la rotonda ovest verso est, e poi, dopo..., prendere la rotonda nord e sud... “ // language mixing labyrinth [image] Bruegel, The Fight between Carnival and Lent [sound] brass // Bach, Bach, Art of the Fugue, Theme quadrupled // Schubert, Sonata B [voice] Karl Kraus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: “Ein Zeitungsausrufer: Extraausgabee! – Ermordung des Thronfolgers! Da Täta vahaftet!” Rimbaud, Les chercheuses de poux: “Quand le front de l’enfant, plein de rouges tourmentes ... ... Sourdre et mourir sans cesse un désir de pleurer.” [image] Radar II // Bruegel, Landscape // Coins // Tizian, Danae, Golden Shower [sound] Wagner, Tristan, Liebestod // last piece // later: middle chord of Scribin’s Prometheus [voice] Birth cry II [image] Infinite Screen II // Flying blue // Arcimboldo, Fire // Bruegel, The Hunters in the Snow [sound] Schubert, Sonata B, II, end [voice] Virgil: “Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem; matri longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses. Incipe, parve puer: qui non risere parentes, nec deus hunc mensa dea nec dignata cubili est.”

The Babel Tower, 2016

transcript of the digital composition, cycles 1–4

“We created a radar-like installation, a fictive plan of the Tower of Babel. The museum appears not just as a place of antiquity, art history and old masters, but show the old masters looking toward us and into the future.” extract from an interview with AROTIN & SERGHEI “Zeit im Bild” Daily News, ORF TV, opening Infinite Screen / The Tower of Babel Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, September 19, 2016

Chaos, Confusion of Languages, Distortion of Perspectives The monumental projection onto the Kunsthistorisches Museum is as beautiful as it is troubling. The artists bring Breughel’s original from the museum’s collection to life and to new contemporary interpretation. Sabine Seifert “Zeit Im Bild” Daily News, ORF TV, opening Infinite Screen / The Tower of Babel Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, September 19, 2016

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The Babel Tower, 2016

digital composition, exhibition version displayed on 2 synchrone digital canvases, 110 x 120 cm left page:

The Babel Tower, 2016

digital composition, installation view Kunsthistorisches Museum 224 Vienna 2016 4 x 4K projections, 36 x 36 m

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The Babel Tower, 2016, digital artwork collectors edition on 2 synchrone digital canvases 110 x 120 cm below: installation view Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna 2016 4 x 4K projections, 36 x 36 m

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Infinite Screen Disc 01, 2016, cycle of 12 unique Sound-Pictures, Gold leafs 24-carat, drawing, pigments, vinyl, diam. 30 cm, in artists frame sound: “Infinite Screen / The Babel Tower” 9 min.

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W&K Gallery | PALAIS SCHÖNBORN-BATTHANY Metamorphosis

The negation of the wall It is a special moment for me to speak in this beautiful baroque palace Schönborn-Batthyany, the representative seat of gallery

Bertrand du Vignaud

historian, art and hertitage expert / Christies

Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, about the negation of the walls in the fresco painting and the intermedial frescoes by AROTIN & SERGHEI. It is one of the few opportunities for me to speak in an environment that is connected to contemporary art. My name is mostly related to monuments, cultural heritage and the past and I have devoted much of my life to the restoration of masterpieces around the world and have the privilege of continuing to do so. Nevertheless, I accepted the challenge with enthusiasm. When I last met the artists in Gstaad, I had the great pleasure of seeing their extraordinary work on Scriabin in a live animated visual installation and live performance together with the pianist Mikhail Rudy. It is a world that is completely new for me. Not Scriabin, but this interpretation of the idea of Scriabin, ​​ and the way AROTIN & SERGHEI create their art in this world, was and is for me a mystery, a challenge and a source of admiration. What does an artist do when he has a wall in front of him? He denies the limitation. It is a fundamental desire of humanity and especially of artists such as AROTIIN & SERGHEI to negate walls. A short journey through masterpieces of European Art reveals that the artists, in their respective time and in terms of space, are dealing, exactly, or more or less, with the same parameters of research and techniques of transgressing limitations. By definition, a wall, viewed from the outside, is an accomplished object.

AROTIN & SERGHEI Metamorphosis

solo exhibition at W&K Gallery Vienna-New York, Palais Schönborn-Batthyany Vienna, 2018 (February–May) Art and Innovation, cycle curated by the artists with special presentations and performances (part of the exhibition):

Metamorphosis, site-specific installation live-performance by AROTIN & SERGHEI with Kira Marina von Bismarck and Jean van der Stegen texts by Scriabin and Ovid Notation / Sound Sculptures, performance with pianist Michael Wendeberg with Pierre Boulez’ integral piano work and talk with art expert Martin Guesnet Infinite Time Machine, presentation of the digital composition, talk with Dominique Renaud inventor of the watch DR01 Free Space/Synesthetic Art, presentation with Henning Lohner, inventor of unique digitals Architecture of Sound / Intermedial Frescoes, presentation by art expert Bertrand du Vignaud and performance by violonist Yury Revich and his Stradivarius Light Impulse, performance by avantguarde specialist and pianist Mikhail Rudy with Liszt and Scriabin’s Vers la flamme

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It can be beautiful, and decorated with different elements. Being perceived from the inside, it demands more from the beginning, it asks for opening to shaping. I am thinking about the Roman period and the wonderful interiors from the time of Pompeii. But of course also about the incredible “Casa di Augustus” in the Palatine in Rome, which we have restored, and in which the magnificent Roman paintings can now be experienced in a new freshness. The painters of antiquity were very skilled with superimposing different perspectives and different levels and playing with glaring colors just as AROTIN & SERGHEI play with different levels, colors, structures and metamorphosis. If one considers the different frescoes of the Roman period and these intermedial pictures, one can recognize similar techniques, especially in the sense of construction principles, underlaying the idea of ​​Infinite Screen. Another example of the sublimation of walls, which, if you look at the Art History altogether, impossible not to mention, are of course the stained-glass windows used in northern Europe (in the south, as in Ravenna it was Alabaster). The idea of d ​​ issolving the wall into light that goes through colored glass, with colors that should be as intense as possible, is another area, concept and technique that AROTIN & SERGHEI interpret in a contemporary way. I would like to mention another world famous fresco, the Caracci Gallery in Rome. The brothers Caracci managed to create Michael Wendeberg performing Pierre Boulez’ integral piano work in front of AROTIN & SERGHEI’s Mute Space, exhibition Metamorphosis, cycle Art & Innovation, Gallery W&K, Palais Schönborn-Batthany, Vienna 2018

six interpretive and reading levels. The complexity of the grand vault adds another link to ​​Infinite Screen, with different schemes of fictive and virtual architecture, as well as with the theme of metamorphosis. In fact, AROTIN & SERGHEI put to the viewer the same state of excitement and admiration as the Carracci did. Of course, at that time they only had brushes and paint, but with today’s complex techniques, I can not even quote and understand them, they play, as before, with paintbrushes and paints. This similarity is so interesting, their use and handling of spatiality, signs, color and light.

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PALAIS RASUMOFSKY VIENNA v Gateways To Elysium

The installation was created in the majestic column hall of Palais Rasumofsky in Vienna in the context of a monumental monograhic retrospective exhibition. The impressive palace, that once hosted Tsar Alexander I and the Vienna Congress, was built by Prince Andrey Razoumofsky, famous patron of Ludwig van Beethoven. It was precisely this hall, in which Beethovens Quartetts and probably also his 5th, and 6th Symphony have been first performed. In reference to this emblematic place, Gateways to Elysium takes up one of the most visionary moments in Beethovens music: The inception tones of Beethovens 3rd Leonore Ouverture and creates with these particles a hypnoctic labyrinth of variations, longing for freedom and light.

Gateways to Elysium / Infinite Screen 2018 4K digital animation and 2 channel sound, endless development

installation / projection on ceiling , 6 x 24m, sound and digital composition: AROTIN & SERGHEI with motives of Beethoven’s Leonore Ouverture Nr 3 op. 72a, voices by Kira Marina von Bismarck and Jean van der Stegen, and words by Scriabin and Ovid. AROTIN & SERGHEI retrospective exhibition, curated by the artists, on occasion of Vienna Contemporary Art Fair, cooperation with Gallery W&K – Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Vienna-New York, extension of the exhibition AROTIN & SERGHEI – Metamorphosis, Palais Schönborn-Batthyany Vienna, part of the Vienna Contemporary VIP program. Sammlung Sanziany Collection, Palais Rasumofsky Vienna, Sept 20 2018 – Jan 15 2019

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in nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora di, coeptis ... adspirate meis

Ovid, Metamorphosis, begin

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GUERLAIN PARIS | ESPACE MURAILLE GENEVA Infinite Time Machine

Memory and temporallity... On the occasion of Guerlain’s 190th anniversary, the exhibition Futurs Antérieurs, integral part of the private parcours of the FIAC Paris art fair, raises these very relevant subjects of the contemporary society, and which our experience

Caroline Messensee

art expert, director ARTCURIAL Vienna, curator GUERLAIN / Parcours Privé de la FIAC, Paris text excerpts from catalogue “Futurs Antérieurs – 190 ans de créations Guerlain”, FIAC Paris, 2016

of the every day cannot answer to. Our era has been marked by an acceleration of the undestanding of technology. This was partly due to a hightend sense of communication marked by a transitionning from the analogue to the digital age or in other words, from the tangible to the virtual. Many artists are studying the similarity between loss of memory and loss of identity or the way in which individual memory is created through collective memory. Thus our personal memory would allow us to write the narrative of our past and to paint our own portrait, articulating both the imaginary and the real. How about tranmission, traces, inheritance? Lived or imagined? Memory or tale? Philosophy has always been interested in these subjects, as are the visual artists of our time.... AROTIN & SERGHEI question the traces that we leave, which are as much memory that qualify and quantify us as beings, but also as source of information. Infinite Time Machine is an allegorical work on time, which gives the impression that it is self-generated and infinite. The viewer is invited to travel through the memory from a unique moment that is constantly stretched. Unlike watches, which indicate time with repetitive patterns and figures, this “perpetual generator” is a zoom in the perception of time. It is in constant movement, and therefore shows new constellations every given time. The composition of the work is orchestrated on six independent

exhibition views: The Watch Odyssee, Espace Muraille, Geneva, 2017, AROTIN & SERGHEI Metamorphosis, W&K Gallery - Palais Schönborn-Bàtthyany, Vienna, 2018, AROTIN & SERGHEI, Sammlung Sanziany Collection - Palais Rasumofsky / Vienna Contemporaray 2018, Futur antérieurs, Maison Guerlain Paris / Parcours Privé de la FIAC Paris 2018

screens with sequences of 24,000 images in infinite combinations.

Infinite Time Machine 01 2017 exhibition view at The Watch Odyssee Gallery Espace Muraille Geneva 2017

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Infinite Time Machine 01 2017 exhibition view at Maison Guerlain Champs-Élyséesparcours privé de la FIAC 2018

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GIVERNY Impressions – Dialogues avec Monet

Promthean Unshaming Aristotle believed that wonder –

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– was the root of

every Philosophy1. Whoever was fortunate enough to experience

Günter Schönberger

CEO Bildrecht, curator, founder Bildraum Galleries, Vienna

the giant projected images of Infinite Screen on the facade of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, at the Venice Biennial, the Wiener Konzerthaus, at the Foundation Beyeler in Basel or at Giverny will certainly have experienced such a wonderment, the impressions of which remain long after the presentation has finished. This is due not only to the giant dimensions of the installation which are made possible by the use of digital technology, but also above all to the knowledge of the artists, who managed in the same moment an impressive range of artistically conscious actions as well as a completely free and creative manipulation of every type of hardware necessary. Like two technodervishes, AROTIN & SERGHEI spin a hyperreal whirr of images that exert a magnetic and lasting attraction on the viewer. In terms of art history and media technology, the comprehensive description of these striking contemporary works and their integration in the wider context of modern art and modern technical and scientific aspects of digital imagery is particularly interesting.

synergetic symbiosis

IMPRESSIONS – DIALOGUES AVEC MONET Infinite Screen 2019

Truth Possibilities 1-3, intermedial art cycle 2019, Infinite Light Column 1-3, installation 2019, sound installation, digital composition 2019, installation / projection on church façade, digital real time animation, 4 channel sound, endless development world premiere: Impressions, Festival des Arts de Vernon-Giverny, art direction: Mikhail Rudy, exhibition at Vernon Town Hall, projection on façade La Collegiale, Notre Dame de Vernon digital animation of intermedial paintings by AROTIN & SERGHEI editing, mapping, realtime composition: AROTIN & SERGHEI sound composition by AROTIN & SERGHEI with motives by Debussy, Scriabin, Bruckner, Bach, Schubert, Szymanowski a.o., Mikhail Rudy, piano. production: AROTIN & SERGHEI Contemporary Art with support by Mairie de Vernon, Jean Philippe Julia, Espace Muraille Geneva, Belfry, Gallery W&K – Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Vienna – New-York, commission: Impressions – Festival des Arts de Vernon – Giverny

In the context of many contemporary attempts, the synergistic symbiosis of sound and visuals by AROTIN & SERGHEI stands out as a shining example of an effort to create a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, as the composer Richard Wagner originally conceived it.

1 Aristoteles, Metaphysik A 2, 982 b

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This success finds its roots not only to the detailed preparations of the artists, but also in the inspiring partners whom the duo selects for cooperation in their artistic projects. In the case of the latter, it is not just contemporaries who guarentee the highest quality, but also many references to creators and re-interpretations of motives of the past, which, as the example of Alexander Scriabin illustrates, are not intended for elitist squabbling, but are built in an obvious artistic and thematic stringency. It is this combination of the style and thinking of classical modernism with sophisticated digital technology that makes the works of AROTIN & SERGHEI so exceptional and avant-garde. Their work, in this extent, writes itself not only in the history of art but also in the history of modern culture and encompasses two things: the unobtrusive appropriation and new interpretation of historical works of art and their creators, and the obsessive occupation with the physical and scientific parameters which modern technology is capable of providing.Correspondingly, AROTIN & SERGHEI‘s exuberant and skillfully produced art and installations can be considered culminations of European high culture. However, in their creations the Past never acts as a prime quotation or cipher. The artists bring the ideas and concepts of the “old masters” into the present and make visible the links between thoughts, sounds and images of different ages in a contemporary context. In this way the Tower of Babel in Infinite Screen becomes a new and innovative artistic construction.

Illuminating spirit What AROTIN & SERGHEI create is not a post-cultural style mix, or a type of recycling, but is rather an original approach to important and timeless themes. If the spirit of the past appears here, it does so in a vivid and realistic fashion. The spirit of Russian Constructivism is revitalized in the artists formal imagery; the spirit of Scriabin‘s hexachords envies the artists’ impressive reduction of the light alphabet to a mere three “letters” or light cells; the spirit of Malevich feels itself deeply understood and moved in the animation White Point; and encompassing everything is the great and powerful

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spirit of the demigod Prometheus, who dances the Sama, the whirling dervish dance, together with AROTIN & SERGHEI. The project of the same name is devoted to a philanthropic illuminating spirit who gave humanity the knowledge of fire, liberating them from the blinding fear of the gods. Prometheus sacrificed himself in the process and descended into the abyss – a fate shared in JudeoChristian mysticism by another “light bringer”, Lucifer. Similarly, in the story of the Babylonian tower, the walls of Babel crumble to the ground, crushing those who aimed too high for the liking of a punitive Old Testament god. This confusion of languages, engineered to prevent creative cooperation, remains one of the most intriguing metaphors in the history of mankind.

... a post-Babel visual alphabet The unbelievable gift of art is that it aids rebuilding after every crash or stumble. Art, in its best moments, is uplifting. With their light cells, AROTIN & SERGHEI have created a post-Babel visual alphabet with which is possible to comprehensively untangle linguistic confusions and in doing so they demonstrate that the artistic mimicry of such highly complex and complicated modern technologies is still necessary today. Their art projects are a counterweight to cultural entropy, whose psychological and mental result has been significantly dubbed “Promethean shame” by the philosopher Günther Anders - we are exposed as biologically vulnerable and frail beings to the Promethean rift in the face of limitless and hence shameless technical progress. Within the never-ending perfectionism of science and its products - digital imaging included - it is good in the simplest of senses to be invited through art to overcome this shame by means of the visual arts.

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Infinite Screen at CENTRE POMPIDOU Vertigo

In 2021 AROTIN & SERGHEI present Infinite Screen at the Center Pompidou in Paris through two complementary installations, like a zoom towards infinity in two directions. Infinite Light Columns / Constellations of the Future in front of the emblematic Center Pompidou along the facade of the Ircam tower, is a sign that connects our world and our time with the macrocosm. Vertigo / Infinite Screen, in the great hall of the Center Pompidou, is an intermedial composition on 18 screens, inspired by the colors, and the extreme points of view of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. This immersive work is a journey into the microcosm of the psyche. The installation is presented with an extraordinary performance, animated live by AROTIN & SERGHEI and with music by Brice Pauset, interpreted by Klangforum Wien and the electronics by Ircam–Centre Pompidou. excerpt from programme / project presentation

“... Vertigo / Infinite Screen is a reflection on the vertiginous metamorphosis and of the perception of signs in the context of the ‘infinite screens’ of our time. The installation takes the viewer on a journey of twelve subliminal spatializations on 18 simultaneous and orchestrated screens. The format of the ’triple triptych’ recalls the iconography of the ‘last judgment’, the cycles of life and the afterlife, a suspension in the middle of the universe...”

Vertigo / Infinite Screen intermedial composition, installation for 18 synchronized screens tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, 2021 installation at Centre Pompidou, great hall, 450 x 1200 cm live animated by the artists on 2021, mai 3, streaming version until november 3 idea, realization of the visual composition and installation: AROTIN & SERGHEI music for 6 ensemble groupes and electronics: Brice Pauset musical ensemble Klangforum Wien, conductor: Titus Engel electronical realiszation Benjamin Lévy, Ircam-Centre Pompidou production: Ircam / Les Spectacles vivants - Centre Pompidou, AROTIN & SERGHEI Contemporary Art, Klangforum Wien commission: Ircam Centre Pompidou / WDR / Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik 2021 support by Ernst von Siemens Stiftung

AROTIN & SERGHEI

ci-contre et pages suivantes: vues de l‘installation et schémas

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Pixeling Lucretius

Monika Robescu

Starting from four Infinite Light Columns mounted on the façade

art specialist

of Renzo Piano’s IRCAM building in Paris, the artists AROTIN &

translated form german

SERGHEI open up a creative systemic field of perception into which they have integrated the Centre Pompidou as a place of current, possible, future and also imagined and past events. As a reference to the Land Art of sacral character by the Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), a functionally optional field is laid out in a site-specific manner. This connection of Infinite Light Columns—Vertigo/Infinite Screen positions and connects heterotopias, functioning as a chain of a possible sequence of creative imagination, of which the content component recedes behind the infinitely empty space of the possible artistic potential of artists and viewers.

a changing world of imagination Constantin Brancusi’s influence, emphasised by the artists, draws attention to an economy of positioned and mobile elements and their relationship to the supposed stasis inherent in them. The meaning-giving strategy of positioning constitutes its ephemeral appearance in the explicit relationship of configuration— perceptibility—deconstruction—reconfiguration. Significantly, such a permanent cycle captivates through its inherent systemic nature. The artist duo AROTIN & SERGHEI stage a constantly changing world of imagination whose associative syntax actively involves the viewer in their artistic world. The processes of creative imagination are in fact the meta-event space that connects the artists with the audience. In the micro-macrocosmic universe, modes of visual pixelation act as “movens” of physical and psychic aggregate states, whose threshold-crossing all-encompassing mobility appears as the actual driving force of a constantly renewing scenario.

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Compared to the immense number of acting light cells - the artists speak about 24,883,200 image-bearing elements—overdrawn as a neo-baroque hyperbole—their mathematical convergence is disillusioning, even when comparing the extent with a supposedly doubled surface of the earth. But surfaces do not interest the viewer. Instead of this the idea of a chain of reactions that encompasses more than the earth is fascinating and thus evokes a space of perception and experience that is connoted as infinite. This is how ideal substance develops, tangible in its creative movement. The supposedly rigid digital building blocks come to life as a turbulent world of their own. One is literally dizzy and Vertigo/Infinite Screen becomes a fulminant option of empirical powerlessness, whose infinite limits are lost far into entropic depths. The viewer’s acute, almost emphatic attention is devoted to dancing establishing and syntactically constituting apprearances, whose dynamic swirling, possible othering, paralysis and revival invite to invent also some neo-baroque linguistic creations to describe such a narrative.

brain waves and overlapping synchronicities Just as sensitively reacting active brain waves can close reflexive synapses, the viewer admires the visual thought processes whose partly overlapping synchronicities get under the skin in a striking immersive way. In experiencing such an imaginary matrix, the viewer feels confronted with his own imaginary worlds; his own inner space of experience widens or narrows. Pixelated artefacts of extremely lively brain waves reframe one’s own ideal constructs and relativise them in possible other-dimensional, crystalline perceptual worlds of peripheral attentional activity. Those, not exclusively cerebral galaxies, produce sensitively reacting incidences of affects. They evoke amazement, perplexity, sometimes the striking, but also—Vertigo—the startling horrific. Abysmal aesthetic paralyses in pink tones—dreams with freeze effects—swirled again and again in a virtual free fall.

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Just as the artist duo AROTIN & SERGHEI primarily enter unstable liminal spaces and in-between worlds, they offer to the viewer perceptual options of variable relationships with no static determinants. In such a mode, however, referential orientation paradigms change fundamentally and, in the search for somewhat firmer ground, yearn for less dizzying theoretical terrain.

never-settling tireless choreography As a work of artists, motion appears in a never-settling tireless choreography. But motion also happens and positions itself, To Take Place1; it organises itself in ephemeral postulate as Crossing and Dwelling2 to relative statement. Following Brancusi’s work of sacral character, the religious theoretical writings of Jonathan Z. Smith and Thomas A. Tweed would offer orientation. In the pixelated narrative—Infinite Screen—the viewer’s inner world of imagination in its synthetic perception of variable moments of movement becomes a possible inner map, but, warns Jonathan Z. Smith: Map is not Territory3. In Vertigo/Infinite Screen, the eye falls into its own emptiness and ultimately leads to the marginalisation of a geometric or symbolic vocabulary of meaning, so that the depicted elements abysmally elude their originally intended hermeneutic assignment. In such a continuum of elaborated multiplicity, confluences, junctions and conjunctions occur, circulation and knots form in centripetal and centrifugal motion. In my opinion, Thomas Nail’s philosophical works open a secret door to the work of the artist duo AROTIN & SERGHEI. As Thomas Nail writes in his 2019 book Being and Motion: Jonathan Z. Smith, To take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987) 2 Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 3 Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago and London: TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1978). 1

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“Here is the crux of the ontological problem of movement: Either we begin with it, or we never get it. This is a fundamental question for onthology. Either we begin with discrete and static being and have to say that real motion is an illusion, or we begin with flow and are able to explain stasis as relative or folded forms of movement. All the discrete objects in the world will never give birth to a single motion. They are nothing more than the ‘dead and artificial reorganization of movement by the mind”.4

At the centre of Thomas Nail’s philosophical work is his extensive examination of De rerum natura, the philosophical poem by Titus Lucretius Carus. Following concluding quotation can be associated with the works of the artist duo AROTIN & SERGHEI and reflects in a backward-looking version those Light Cells, the “modules immatériels” of the Infinite Light Columns which have their own life, and which form the “véritable ADN du langage visuel d’aujourd’hui“5 “Many things we see all around us send out particles, (…) not only from deep inside, but frequently as well from their surfaces, including colour (…) It then follows there are certain outlines of shapes, endowed with subtle textures, which fly all around, but which cannot be perceived on their own as individual objects. (…) Although no one can see them individually, they still are thrown back in constant, successive waves.”6

Pixeling Lucretius ultimately leads to the dissolution of forms and identities. Artist and viewer are actively involved in an ongoing, living process for the recurring constitution of further possible options. The subject and object are brought to life solely through never-ending motion, which ultimately brings them together.

Thomas Nail, Being and Motion, 70-71. Referenz des Zitats: Bergson, Matter and Memory, 189. 5 from the programme booklet of the exhibition AROTIN & SERGHEI, Infinite Light Colums—Constellations of The Future 1-4; Vertigo / Infinite Screen at Ircam-Centre Pompidou Paris, 2021. 6 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book 4. 75-130, translated by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, British Columbia, 2010.

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CENTRE POMPIDOU Infinite Light Columns / Constellations of The Future tribute to Brancusi

The Centre Pompidou presents AROTIN & SERGHEI’s Infinite Screen as part of Manifeste festival and on the occasion of the reopening of its main square, with two complementary installations, which link the piazza of the Centre Pompidou, the different sectors of the Art Center, works from its collection, its architecture, as well as the sound universe of Ircam. Four intermedial sculptures are installed in front of the Centre Pompidou. They are composed by modules, which represent flashes of light slowed down and enlarged to the scale human body. These flashes are programmed infinitely, they arise in ever new constellations. The work is a symbol of our digital age, installed on the emblematic Centre Pompidou square in the heart of Paris along Renzo Piano’s Ircam tower, exactly opposite to Brancusi’s Studio and his Endless Columns, to which this work pays homage. The installation symbolizes, “what the Centre Pompidou wants to be, and what it will be more and more”—as it has been highlighted by the

Infinite Light Columns / Constellations of The Future 2021 building up of the installation at Ircam–Centre Pompidou

president of Centre Pompidou, Serge Lasvignes in his inauguration speech—“a pluri-disciplinary ensemble, in direct contact with living creation... it is a way to manifest, that there is light here, ...very much light!” With its 23m high this installation is the tallest, and with its duration of almost 6 months, one of the longest exhibitions ever realized at the Center Pompidou—a sign accessible to all, which connects our world to the idea of t​​ he macrocosm and the mystery of infinity.

Infinite Light Columns / Constellations of The Future 1-4, tribute to Brancusi, 2021 intermedial sculpture, digital animation, Light Cell drawings, 4 LED panel stelas on metallic structure, with 3, 5, 8 and 12 modules corresponding to musical intervals, 9, 12, 20 and 23 m high 31 mai - 8 novembre 2021 installation at Ircam-Centre Pompidou Stravinsky square and Georges Pompidou square idea, production and realization: AROTIN & SERGHEI Contemporary Art in collaboration with Ircam - Centre Pompidou direction: Frank Madlener technical direction: Alain Nicolas, Maxime Jourdil partnership: Gallery Espace Muraille, Geneva architects: Alexandra Villegas-Sanne, Polycarpe Anani / Studios Architecture Paris LED technics: Gael Becourt / Pixelight metallic structure: Christophe Manzolini, David Cesson / Ateliercplusm, Sylvain Wacrenier / Mediavision

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An immaterial sculpture for an immaterial time

view into Brancusi’s Studio, Centre Pompidou Square, Paris

“Each Light Cell obtains ‘its own life’ through individually drawn and animated compositions of sequences of images. The proportions and the timeline of the composition are inspired and developed from measurment systems of astrophysics, fractal systems, Fibonacci curve algorithms and musical clusters. The elusive surfaces of the screens that surround us are comparable to Malevich’s famous black square. We observe how information “pops up” and becomes visible on these surfaces through particles of light. If we imagined realizing the whole of the 24,883,200 luminous cells which make up each 4K screen, with Light Cells of this size would correspond to a work of gigantic dimensions and unimaginable over 44.237 x 24,883 km, (double the area of the earth) ! The excess of the Infinite Screen project that the installation along the facade from Ircam-Centre Pompidou is just one beginning, a strand of cells emerging of an imaginary matrix, a composition open, a symbol radiating from a breakthrough to infinity... We combine multiple techniques: drawing, motion capture, three-dimensional animation, editing and musical composition techniques. The installation is a sign of our digital era on this emblematic place of the arts, which dialogues as much with future generations as with the spirits of the avant-gardes which characterizes the collections of the Center Pompidou and the sound research of Ircam. We want to give today’s art a vital and essential function within our society and open the creative process to everyone. Through his spiritual approach, Constantin Brancusi brought his materials and sculptures into a state of ‘flying’. Almost a hundred years after Brancusi’s Columns, we set out to overcome the limitations of our digital age, using the strands of our light cells to build columns and expand the field of view.

Infinite Light Column 2018 composition study of the modules pencil on paper 28 x 18 cm

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Since our Tower of Babel installation in 2016, we have been obsessed with ​ endless constructions and experimented with monitors mounted one on top of the other such as at the exhibitions in Giverny and at Ars Electronica Centre / Museum of The Future. Dreaming of Homer’s Golden Chain connecting the earth to the mythological world of gods and light, we intended to erect an infinite column whose building blocks should be the impulses of thought and light: An immaterial sculpture for an immaterial time.” AROTIN & SERGHEI extracts from an interview with led by Heloise Tardieu for the article “With the duo AROTIN & SERGHEI, the infinite space of digital possibilities”, Centre Pompidou Magazine, 2021

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“Simplicity is complexity resolved” Constantin Brancusi

Building in public spaces is never easy... Thanks to the conviction and motivation of the teams of Ircam and Centre Pompidou, the support of Espace Muraille, Studios Architecture Paris and our technical partners, we found the perfect constellation, the technical solutions and managed to obtain the 18 necessary authorizations to build up on Centre Pompidou square, our ‘installation temporaire de dimensions extraordinaires’, as the Parisian administration had catagorized our project, ...or in Brancusi’s words: ‘The endless column is the negation of the Labyrinth’.” AROTIN & SERGHEI 279

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Like long echoes which merge from afar. In a dark and profound unity, Vast like the night and like the light, The Perfumes, the colors and the sounds respond to each other. Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences, The Flowers of Evil

Step by Step, Stravinsky Square As you weave your way between cranes, fences, excavations and open-air works, you come to the small Place Stravinsky, eclectic

Frank Madlener

director Ircam–Centre Pompidou

in everything, protected by the southern flank of the Center Pompidou, sheltered by the north facade of the Saint Merri Church. You perceive right away the fountain by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely – the “Fountain of the Automatons”, whose water is no longer circulating at the moment, fountain whose “Firebird” is less agitated today than Stravinsky’s ballet which inspired it. On this living and Parisian site, vibrating and suspended, four columns of light are coming off. They take position at the IRCAM tower as if they emanated directly from the underground laboratory. From the factory of sonorous dreams, the cells of light are emerging like a continuous, ascending flow. Are they representing a giant potentiometer, a rhythmic game between primary colors, the conquest of verticality that only music can fully undertake? The more night falls, the more the columns stand out and invade the public space with their luminous intensity. The Stravinsky fountain, the columns by AROTIN & SERGHEI: two silent representations of what music can achieve: pure intensity, the movement of the movement, the unique ability of “showing without saying”. That’s how music differs from a contemporary art that so often says more than it shows.

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For a long time, and particularly since Baudelaire’s Correspondances, modernity has been dreamed as the place where everything echoes the other, the sounds of perfumes, the perfumes of colors, the interiority of the outside world, the material, of the spiritual. The creators of the “Infinite Light Columns“ don’t ignore anything of the mystical outbursts of Scriabin, who has imagined an organ of light for his symphonic poem Prometheus, of Kandinsky’s Improvisations and Compositions, or of Olivier Messiaen’s colorful “Modes”. And if the flâneur of the contemporary city is assailed by the “forests of symbols” (Baudelaire), the aesthete - artist or spectator, musician or music lover - surrounds himself with a living forest of historical signals which plays the unity of sensations, in a word, the phantasmagoria of synesthesia. The more life divides, the more reality fragments and the more the virtual surrounds us, the more art seems to indicate this ideality of the unified sensitive. Outside, “Infinite Light” is brought to the city. Inside, at Centre Pompidou, “Infinite Screen”, is presented in the time-lapse of a concert. AROTIN & SERGHEI have explored, with composer Brice Pauset, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Between two disciplines, always look for the third! Vertigo, the pioneer of filmography as we know it, is before all the film of simulacrum and blindness, written in before its time. In the creation of 2021, Vertigo found a new resolution or focus by composing the reverse of things through electronics and through the geometry of the figures on screen. The Vertigo effect invented by Hitchcock (zoom in and tracking back) can be practiced in visual arts, and in vintage electronics realized in 2021. Between two disciplines, always look for the third, that is the vanishing point or the outside target. Behind the sound and the image is the rhythm, the pulsation. Isn’t that the correspondence so often invoked? The “pas de deux”, a high practice of classical dance, would in reality be a “pas de trois”. Leaving the Stravinsky square and the Plateau Beaubourg with long strides to gain height, you will see from far distance, four columns of light, serene and wordless, composing with the agitated city.

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The artists parcours

The transgression of space I first met the artist duo AROTIN & SERGHEI in the spring of 2013 at an event which they held in their atelier on the occasion of Gallery Weekend in Berlin. In the expanse of a large white

Marie-Eve Lafontaine art historian and curator New York / Vienna

rooftop loft, overlooking the grey backstreets of former East, they presented a series of works which struck me being as uncommonly radical. I noticed that AROTIN & SERGHEI’s artworks seemed to exist on a level above the run-of-the-mill “new media art” and hoity-toity intellectualism which could be found in most galleries in Berlin. In contrast to this, the artworks of AROTIN & SERGHEI are vibrating, shining, and pulsating in wild colours, these monumental holographic art pieces were spun out of the tiniest of electronic components which occupy up to several hours of our day, the minimal pinpoints of light from which all pictures of digital devices are coaxed from. Although magnified to monumental dimensions, these vibrant “cells” had nothing inherently aggressive about them. However, their colors, light, and linear symbols presented visual structures under a radical process of dematerialization. Malevich, Rothko, Newman, and the contemporary master of light art, James Turrell sprang to mind. Engaging and unsettling, if these giant size individual portraits in red, blue and green could be theoretically brought together in a linear plane the size of Central Park in New York, they would create a perfectly white screen from the bird’s eye view some several hundred kilometres up in space.

White Screen 1 and the the map of Central Park New York

“Similar to New York’s Central Park as a symbol of free emty space in the middle of a dense pattern, our White Screen cycle creates free space for reflection with its individual portraits of Light Cells in the size of human bodies. An HD screen built of millions of such human size Light Cells would measure an equivalent of New York’s Central Park.” AROTIN & SERGHEI 2006

This neverending research of the Infinite, of the primary geometric structures and the exploration of the limits of spacial resistance, or in other words all the thematics that characterizes later projects by AROTIN & SERGHEI can be traced back as to early as 1994 to the artists’ first meeting. 287

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Happy Days Balance, a kinetic installation homage to Samuel Beckett was built by Alexander Arotin for the inauguration of the Stadthaus Ulm in Germany. The entire construction, a over 6m high installation, was designed to rotate 360° around its own axis in a permanent state of imbalance as two protagonists performed on the wings. However, during rehearsals, the performers who had been originally engaged for the premiere became dizzy and cancelled their participation. Undiscouraged, with an optimism which would later come to characterize actions of the duo, Arotin cast Serghei, an acquaintance, as co-performer and proceeded carried out the performance himself. A year later both artists found themselves co-ordinating hundreds of singers in the Moldvian State Opera for the premiere of “Requiem per il teatro” designed to be realized together with Verdi’s Requiem. Such ambitious projects perfectly demonstrate the flexibility and playfulness which these artists are capable of in their seamless osmosis between mediums, as one does between art and life. Their cooperation eventually led to an ongoing process of artistic collaboration and experimentation founded on the communal desire to explore both real and fictional spaces ranging from the mythological to the digital plains of the future. In 1994 the duo founded their first production platform for intermedial art projects “Arotin Art Edition” in Paris. Constantly on the move, they are the epitome of the European bohemian, travelling with their projects between Berlin, Paris, London, Geneva, Vienna, Venice, Milan, Barcelona, Brussels, Gstaad, and their atelier in the south of France. Their backgrounds in music, composition and language are direct results of their diverse upbringing:

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Blacklight 12 2011, intermedial drawing, ink, handmade paper, exhibition at Tefaf, Maastricht 2012

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Traces 2003 installation with space modules, tapes, projections of intermedial drawings site-specific installation at Macba, Barcelona 2003

In the indefiniteness of the places and directions: this line, of escapes. The space breaks up and renews itself

Julie Meyers from the annoncement of Traces Macba, Barcelona 2003

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Serghei Victor Dubin, born in the USSR on the Black Sea, studied ballet, music, theatre, fashion and design. Far from Soviet ideology, the giant library at his uncle’s house gave him the possibility to study European cultures and languages. Short stints in Moscow and Saint Petersburg were followed by studies in Journalism at Chisinau University, French at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, and Art and Archeology in Montpellier and Vienna. His home country, the region of Moldavia, is a cultural melting zone of old Thracian and Roman culture with influences from Romania, Ukraine, Poland and the Austrian–Hungarian empire. Alexander von Arotin stems from a family of the former AustrianHungarian monarchy. Beginning music studies at the age of 4, he grew up travelling between the Burgtheater Wien (in a role in Aristophanes’ “The birds” ) and the Mosfilm studios in Moscow where his father’s second wife, the Russian movie star Maja Bulgakova, regularly made appearances. Numerous concerts in the Vienna Staatsoper and Schönbrunn Palace as a member of the Vienna Boys Choir led him to the conclusion that the realm of theatre, with its endless possibilities of transformation, represented his only possible future. At the age of 16 he was admitted as a extraordinary student to the Vienna University of Music where he studied piano, composition, music theory and orchestra direction. He participated in Giorgio Strehler’s rehearsals for “Faust” at Piccolo Teatro Milano and in masterclasses at Centre Acanthes where he made electroacoustic experiments and analyzed the textures of Wagner’s music with the composer Luigi Nono. Further studies in art, theatre, film, and art history at University of Applied Arts in Vienna gave him the occasion to collaborate with artists such as Oswald Oberhuber, Axel

The Happy Days Balance 1994 work-in-progress inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days kinetic metallic sculpture, 6 x 6 x 6 m installation view Stadhaus Ulm, Germany, 1994 rehearsal / improvisation on Beckett’s Happy Days, with the artists and singer Christine Barrington, Vienna, 1994

Manthey, Klaus Zehelein, Vivienne Westwood, Werner Schwab, Hermann Beil and Robert Wilson. It was under such influences that he created his first artworks and theatrical creations at the Salzburg Festival in Hellbrunn castle, Künstlerhaus Vienna, Wiener Festwochen, and the kinetic installation “Happy Day Balance”, the starting point of his collaboration with Serghei. Their diverse abilities often manifest themselves in collaborations with contemporary composers or large scale visual installations combined with orchestral performances or sound installations. 293

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The abandonment and deconstruction of space remain a main theme of their work, as seen in the development of the installation Non Lieu for a spectacular production of Waiting for Godot. In this installation, a fictitious projected place of the protagonist can actually be entered in real terms. The sound of this installation was realized by the artists in collaboration with composer Olga Neuwirth. The famous endless street becomes here an intermediate picture composition in which the artists assemble and manipulate the visual signals and layers of sound. non-lieu 2003 intermedial installation 6 x 6 x 6 m, digital composition and projection, realized with performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, 2004

Other reference points of the duo’s visual installations play on the idea of an absolute black emptiness, such as Malevitch’s Black Square or Salvatore Sciarrino’s composition Infinito Nero and of course the concepts of the visionary composer Alexander Scriabin, whose work gives the impression of setting the surrounding endless empty space in vibration. Within the realization and production of Infinite Screen, AROTIN & SERGHEI created a impressive network of cooperation partners: Their idea inspired legendary art institutions as La Biennale di Venezia, the Centre Pompidou, the Beyeler Foundation, Ars Electronica, the Klangforum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien... Although sitting at different ends of the spectrum, the missions of these institutions have always been the same according to their own time of founding: to support contemporary art and artists in the comparison of disciplines, traditions, and visions of art. AROTIN & SERGHEI’s vision of Infinite Screen came full circle. The fruition of this fantastic symbiosis and years of research are brought together in this project and publication. It allows the “transgression of known space – the space of free thinking” to

The artists and the Infinite Light Column 01, Ars Electronica Centre / Museum of The Future, 2019

expand further into the future realms of creative endeavours.

Marie Eve Lafontaine

art historian & curator

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Infinite Light Columns / Constellations of The Future 1-4 2021 night view of the installation at Centre Pompidou Paris

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Exhibitions

2012–2023 2023

2019

Kraftwerk Berlin

Ars Electronica Centre / Museum of The Future (art direction: Gerfried

AROTIN & SERGHEI Infinite Screen, from Light Cells to monumental installations at Centre Pompidou, supra-liminal exhibition during Gallery Weekend Berlin (April 26-Mai 1)

2022

Gallery W&K Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Vienna–New York

Light Cells / Infinite Screen, exhibition at Gallery Vienna (November 15-February 18)

2021

Ircam / Centre Pompidou Paris / Festival Manifeste 2021 (direction Frank Madlener) Georges Pompidou square and Stravinsky square, AROTIN & SERGHEI Infinite Light Columns / Constellations of the Future 1–4, tribute to Constantin Brancusi, intermedial installation, solo exhibition, (Mai 3–November 8)

Ircam / Centre Pompidou Paris / Festival Manifeste 2021 (direction

Frank Madlener) Centre Pompidou, great hall, Vertigo / Infinite Screen, composition for ensemble, installation for 18 screens and electronics, tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, with music by Brice Pauset, Klangforum Wien, Titus Engel, Ircam– Centre Pompidou, (live: Mai 3, streaming Mai 3 - November 3)

Festival Wien Modern / Wiener Konzerthaus, great hall

Impressions – Festival des Arts Vernon–Giverny (art direction Mikhail Rudy), Vernon Town Hall: AROTIN & SERGHEI Impressions–Dialogues avec Monet (Infinite Screen) parcours and solo exhibition with Truth Possibilities 1-3, Infinite Light Column 1-3 (July 4-September 1)

Impressions – Festival des Arts Vernon–Giverny (art direction Mikhail

Rudy), Notre Dame La Collegiale de Vernon: AROTIN & SERGHEI Impressions– Dialogues avec Monet (Infinite Screen) sound installation and digital composition (120 min), 3K projection on Cathedral Façade (July 4-7)

Kunsthalle Wien

Infinite Light Column, intermedial sculpture, Life Cells, 6 modules, special exhibition and performance with Yury Revich’s, pluridisciplinary art cycle Friday Nights, main hall (June 21)

AROTIN & SERGHEI Contemporary Art

Infinite Light Column, intermedial sculpture (4 modules), Infinite Time Machine, digital composition on 6 screens, Art Space Berlin (AprilSeptember)

(art direction Bernhard Günther) Vertigo / Infinite Screen, composition for ensemble, installation for 18 screens and electronics, tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, with music by Brice Pauset, Klangforum Wien, Titus Engel, Ircam–Centre Pompidou (November 21)

PAD / Art Geneva (February), Frieze London (September), Infinite Light

WDR / Festival Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik (art direction:

2018

Harry Vogt) Vertigo / Infinite Screen, composition for ensemble, installation for 18 screens and electronics, tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, with music by Brice Pauset, Klangforum Wien, Titus Engel, Ircam–Centre Pompidou (streaming version April 24 - November 3)

2020

Galerie Hervé van der Straeten

Paris, Shadows of Ideas, tribute to Giordano Bruno; Impressions, Portrait of Light and other intermedial paintings, duo exhibition Fun Ride (January 18-April 30) 296

Stocker), main hall: Infinite Light Column (Infinite Screen), intermedial sculpture, Life Cells, 10 modules, special exhibition 40 years Ars Electronica, Festival 2019 Out of the Box (September 5-October 8)

Column (3 modules), Logical Structure Of Color, Blue Pulse, intermedial paintings exhibition with Gallery Hervé Van der Straeten, Paris

Maison Guerlain / FIAC, Paris,

(curator Caroline Messen­see), Infinite Time Machine, digital composition on 6 screens, in occasion of 190 years of creation Maison Guerlain /Parcours Privé de la FIAC Paris, exhibition Futurs Antérieurs (October–November)

Gallery W&K Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Vienna–New York

25 years W&K, group exhibition with works of the classical avant garde (June– August)

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Sammlung Sanziany Colection / Palais Rasumofsky Vienna

Gateways To Elysium, (Infinite Screen), Infinite Light Column a.o., special solo exhibition for Vienna Contemporary Art Fair, (September 2018–February 2019)

Hofburg / Imperial Palace Vienna

Metamorphosis 01, soundinstallation with voices by Alexander Scriabin and Ovid, 2 ch sound, in cooperation with Yury Revich’s, pluridisciplinary art cycle Friday Nights (June)

Berlin Friedrichstrasse

(public space), Metamorphosis 01, soundinstallation with voices by Alexander Scriabin and Ovid, 2 ch sound, Idealight (curator Kira Marina von Bismarck) group exhibition (June 21)

Gallery W&K Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Vienna–New York

Metamorphosis, cycle Art & Innovation, (curator: AROTIN & SERGHEI), part 6: Light Impulse, installation & performance with avantguarde specialist Mikhail Rudy, piano, Palais Schönborn-Batthyany, Vienna (Mai)

Gallery W&K Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Vienna–New York

Metamorphosis, cycle Art & Innovation, (curator: AROTIN & SERGHEI), part 5: Architecture of Sound/Intermedial Frescoes, with Yury Revich (Stradivarius) and Bertrand du Vignaud (art and heritage expert, Christies), Palais SchönbornBatthyany, Vienna (April)

Gallery W&K Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Vienna–New York

Metamorphosis, cycle Art & Innovation, (curator: AROTIN & SERGHEI), part 4: Free Space/Synesthetic Art, with inventor Henning Lohner / Unique Dgitals, Palais Schönborn-Batthyany, Vienna (April)

Gallery W&K Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Vienna–New York

Metamorphosis, cycle Art & Innovation, (curator: AROTIN & SERGHEI), part 3: Infinite Time Machine/DR01, presentation and talk with inventor Dominique Renaud and Luiggino Torrigiani, co-founder DR01, Palais Schönborn-Batthyany, Vienna (March)

Gallery W&K Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Vienna–New York

Metamorphosis, cycle Art & Innovation, (curator: AROTIN & SERGHEI), part 2: Notation/Sound Sculptures, with art expert Martin Guesnet and recital of Pierre Boulez’ integral piano work by conductor and pianist Michael Wendeberg in dialogue with the exhibition, Palais Schönborn-Batthyany, Vienna (March)

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Gallery W&K Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Vienna–New York

Metamorphosis, cycle Art & Innovation, (curator: AROTIN & SERGHEI), part 1, voices Kira Marina von Bismarck, Jean van der Stegen, texts by Alexander Scriabin and Ovid, Palais Schönborn-Batthyany, Vienna (Feb - Mai)

2017

Gallery Espace Muraille Geneva Infinite Time Machine, (Infinite Screen) installation for 6 screens, exhibition DR01 the Watch Odyssee, Espace Muraille (November) Festival Ars Electronica, Gallery Spaces, (direction Gerfried Stocker) Logical Structure of Color, Life Cells, Infinite Screen – The Babel Tower, cycle edition, AROTIN & SERGHEI Contemporary Art in cooperation with W&K Vienna–New York (September) Gstaad / Art & Musique,

Vers La Flamme, installation, live animation with Mikhail Rudy (piano) and solo exhibition, Chalet Farb (February)

2016

Fondation Beyeler, Basel

(curator Ulf Küster) Prometheus / White Point (Infinite Screen), video composition, light piano; Electronic Prelude for Scriabin’s last preludes, 2 ch. sound. Installation, live animation and performance of Scriabin’s Prometheus, with Mikhail Rudy, piano commission for the exhibition Kandinsky, Marc, Der Blaue Reiter (2016 November–2017 January)

Kunsthistorisches Museum,Vienna (director Sabine Haag) main façade, AROTIN & SERGHEI - Infinite Screen / The Tower of Babel, video & sound composition in four parts, digital animation, 125 years Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, AROTIN & SERGHEI in cooperation with KHM Wien, Ars Electronica, Artcurial (October–November) Artcurial Vienna (director Caroline

Messensee) AROTIN & SERGHEI - Light Cells, (Infinite Screen) solo exhibition, counterpart to Infinite Screen/The Tower of Babel, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, AROTIN & SERGHEI in cooperation with Artcurial, KHM Wien, Ars Electronica (October–November)

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Festival Ars Electronica, Post City, (direction Gerfried Stocker): Vers La Flamme, 5K video composition, installation and live animation on 5 screens 72m; Five Electronic Preludes for Scriabin’s Last Preludes, 2 ch. sound; performance with Scriabin’s piano pieces op.72–74, Mikhail Rudy, piano, commission Festival Ars Electronica 2016, Radical Atoms – The Alchemists of Our Time (September) Gallery Espace Muraille Geneva Light Impulse, video art, homage to Scriabin (Mikhail Rudy, piano), Life Cells, Sound Paintings and other intermedial paintings, Infinite Screen, collectors edition, Faces/Exampaeos, White Point, digital artwork 4K, 2 ch. sound, screen version, solo exhibition, AROTIN & SERGHEI - Light Impulse (April)

2015

La Biennale di Venezia / Musica,

Teatro Alle Tese/Arsenale: Infinite Screen-homage to Andrea Mantegna, video installation; live animation and performance, commission by Klangforum Wien /Biennale di Venezia, Musica, Klangforum Wien, J.Kalitzke, music: Parole di Settembre by A.Cattaneo, poems by E.Sanguineti (October)

Gujral Foundation in cooperation

with Fondazione Mazzotta, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Ars Electronica, a.o. curator: Martina Mazzotta, special installation, Faces / Exampaeos (Infinite Screen) intermedia art, installation for 2 simultanous square projections, 2 ch. sound, My East Is Your West, official collateral exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Palazzo Benzon Venice (October)

Festival Ars Electronica, Deep

Space 8K (direction Gerfried Stocker) White Point (Infinite Screen), subliminal installation, video art for wall and floor 8K, 2 channel sound commission: Ars Electronica Media Collection, Festival Ars Electronica (September)

2014

Festival Ars Electronica,

Brucknerhaus Linz, (direction Gerfried Stocker), Everything We See Could Also Be Otherwise / Infinite Screen homage to Ludwig Wittgenstein,

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exhibition parcours in 5 parts: A: intermedial painting cycle (12m) B: soundinstallation; C: Free Cells, White Screen, Black Light, intermedial paintings solo-exhibition; D: site specific installation with Wittgenstein’s words (72m); E: videocomposition/projection on modules (sound Delia Derbishire Falling); F: real time animation and performance on stage (music: M.Lemke Chimères, Brucknerorchester, Dennis Russel Davies commission: Ars Electronica, production Ars Electronica / AROTIN & SERGHEI in cooperation with Brucknerfest Linz, a.o.: (September-October)

2013

Bildraum 07, Vienna, (diretor Günter Schönberger, presentation Gerfried Stocker), solo exhibition: AROTIN & SERGHEI - Free Cells (November-January) Tausend Berlin, (curator Kira Marina von Bismarck): Flying Cells, intermedial painting cycle, homage to Wittgenstein special art exhibition (2013-2023)

Konzerthaus Vienna, main hall,

Infinite Screen homage to Mantegna, installation, projection on modules, real time animation, with ensemble Klangforum Wien, dir. Michael Wendeberg, music Parole di Settembre by Aureliano Cattaneo, poems by Edoardo Sanguineti, commission by Klangforum Wien / Biennale di Venezia (October)

White Loft Berlin, Infinite Screen, Fusion Paintings, Mute Spce 01, Blacklight, White Screen, intermedial paintings, exhibition (February-June)

2012

Galerie Guegan Paris, Pink Sound, exhibition in occasion of FIAC Paris (October)

Galerie Flore Bruxelles, Crazy Cells, exhibition in occasion of Brussel Art Week: (September)

Galerie Flore Bruxelles, White Screen (Infinite Screen), intermedial paintings, duo exhibition with Nancy Coste in occasion of Art Brussels (April-Mai) Tefaf Maastricht, Art Fair /Galerie Flore, Mute Space/Blacklight/White Screen (Infinite Screen), intermedial paintings (February)

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Work register The Infinite Screen art creations:

1. INTERMEDIAL PAINTINGS

analogue artwork cycles in thematic and chronological order Light Cells -

White Screen composition 1-12, 2011, 12 intermedial paintings, pigments, prism, mixed technique, light frame, 156 x 96 cm Portraits of Light intermedial paintings cycle, pigments, prism, wood, frame,

–Pink Cell, 2012, 186 x 128 cm –Blue Love, 2012, 186 x 128 cm –Blue Ray, 2013, light frame, 170 x 110 cm –Free Cell 1-6, 2014, 186 x 128 cm –Pink Obsession, 2014, 176 x 128 cm –Pink Excite, 2014, 186 x 128 cm –Pink Way 1, 2014, 186 x 128 cm –Blue Pulse, 2015, 186 x 128 cm –Pulse 1-3, 2016, 186 x 128 cm –Pulse 4-7, 2017, 186 x 128 cm –Flying Blue, 2014, 176 x 128 cm

Black Light, composition n° 1, 2, 7-12, 14, 15, 2011-12, cycle of 10 intermeial paintings, sensor drawing, ink on handmade paper, mixed technique, in artists frame, 156 x 96 cm

Crazy Cells 1-7, 2012, cycle, mixed

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White Point 1-4, intermedial paintinng cycle 2011-12, mixed technique, 136 x 126 cm FUSION PAINTING REFECTION PYRAMIDS SOUND COLORS Cycle III – spatialization and encoding of light MUTE SPACE BLACK LIGHT GOLDEN POINT / ECLIPSE

Flying Screen 1-3 2013 SCRATCHED SCREEN FLYING CELLS EVERYTHING WE SEE COULD ALSO BE OTHERWISEINSTALLATIONS LIGHT sculptures DIGITAL ARTWORKS METAMORPHOSIS INFINITE LIGHT COLUMN 298

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Infinite Time Machine

syncronized screens, approx. 130 x 110 cm

2. DIGITAL ARTWORKS

-Square version, video loop, 65 x 65 cm __ 06

INTERMEDIAL INSTALLATIONS / ANIMATIONS

Life Cells cycle 01, 2017 Life Cell 1-12, 2016/18, cycle of 12 unique digital compositions, drawing, animation, screen, 112 x 65 cm

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Life Cell 3 (Red), 2016-18, cycle of 12 digital composition, drawing, animation, screen, 110 x 63 cm Life Cells

Infinite Screen - homage to Mantegna, 2013 Infinite Screen - homage to Mantegna, 2015 Everything We See Could Also Be Otherwise / Infinite Screen - homage to Wittgenstein, installation with modules 2014 Exampaeos / Faces Of An Infinite Screen 2015

Infinite Screen / The Tower of Babel, 2016, –digital composition, 2100 x 2100 px, 2 ch. sound cycle 1 (1-18), 18 min cycle 2 (19-36), 18 min cycle 3 (37-54), 18 min cycle 4 (55-72), 18 min –Installation 36 x 36 m, 2016, projection with 4 x 4K projectors (5h / 30 days) on Main Façade, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna –Diptych edition 1-3, 2016, digital composition, loop 9 min, 2 synchronized vertical screens, 110 x 120 cm –Disk drawing 1-14, 2016 / 1-6, 2017 composition, 9 min. sound of Infinite Screen - The Tower of Babel on Vinyl Disc, drawings, 24K gold leaves, artists frame, collectors edition

Infinite Time Machine 01 2017

intermedial composition for 6 digital canvases, 220 x 200 cm,

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White Point, version 2015 White Point, version 2016 4 Electronic Preludes for Scriabin’s Last Piano Compositions 2016

Metamorphosis 1, 2018, artwork on 6 digital canvases, cycle edition 1-4, approx 210 x 200cm

Prelude for Scriabin’s Prometheus 2016

Metamorphosis 2-4, 2018, cycle, mixed technique, with piano strings in artists frame, 184 x 126 cm

Metamorphosis, 2018

Life Cell 2 (Blue), 2016-18, cycle of 12 digital composition, drawing, animation, screen, 110 x 63 cm

technique, in artists frame, 92 x 92 cm Sound Space 1-6, 2015-16, cycle, mixed technique, in artists frame, 92 x 92 cm

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Infinite Time Machine 2017

Gateways To Elysium, 2018

Gateways To Elysium - composition, digital artwork, on ceiling 2018

Impressions , 2019 digital composition, 2 channel sound and video Impressions version 2 2019

Gateways To Elysium - composition, digital artwork, on ceiling, 2018

Infinite Light Column / Sound Sculptures 2019-20

Impressions Dialogue Avec Monet composition, digital artwork 3 projectors on cathedral , 2019

4 ART CREATIONS – PRECURSORS OF INFINITE SCREEN

Impressions Dialogue Avec Monet composition, digital artwork, 3 projectors on staircase Maison Thelusson, Espace Muraille Geneva 2019 INFINITE LIGHT COLUMNS Infinite Light Column 01, 2018, 4 digital canvases, modules 1-4, unique pieces, on wall, 440 x 60 cm first exhibition: Palais Rasumofsky Vienna Infinite Light Column 01, 2018, 3 digital canvases, modules 1-3, unique pieces, on wall, 330 x 60 cm first exhibition: Galerie Hervé Van Der Straeten Paris

Infinite Light Column 01, composition 01, 2019, 6 digital canvases, modules 5-10, unique pieces, alumium traverse, 660 x 60 x 60 cm, first exhibition: Kunsthalle Vienna Infinite Light Column 01, composition 02, 2019, 10 digital canvases, modules 14-23, unique pieces, alumium traverse, 1100 x 60 x 60 cm, first exhibition: Museum of The Future, Ars Electronica Center, Linz Infinite Light Column, composition 01, 2019, 9 digital canvases, modules 5-13, unique pieces, on wall, 810 x 55 x 10 cm, instllallation at Maison Thelusson / Espace Muraille Art Center Geneva 3 SOUND INSTALLATIONS Sound of Wittgenstein, 2014 Faces, 2015

Free Space, cross-disciplinary research project and seminary, Luxembourg University 2010-2011 Sound Spaces, 6 Guaches, 60 x 40 cm Paris 20 XX Bing! concept, sketches and space studies for intermedial installation and performance project (not performed), homage to Beckett, work in progress, in cooperation with Ircam–Centre Pompidou, Paris 2006–2010

Double, concept, sketches and space studies for an installation with performance (not performed), texts by Dostoievsky, music: Aureliano Cattaneo, Berlin 2007 Infinito Nero, concept, sketches and space studies an installation with performance (not performed), music by Salvatore Sciarrino, Berlin 2006 Mirlitonnades (M), concept, sketches, space studies, photo cycle, video with datda projection on speaker. with actor Martin Heesch, text: Samuel Beckett, translation: Alexander Arotin, Berlin 2006 Speaking Head, concept, sketches, space studies, photo cycle, video, inspired by Beckett’s Happy Days, actors: Veronika Nowag-Jones and Sirone, Berlin 20 XX Non Lieu / Manipulated Space, intermedia research and art project, installation, inspired by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Barcelona / Berlin, 2003/4

Infinite Screen - The Babel Tower, 2016 –Diptych edition for 2 horizontal

Warten auf Godot, intermedia installation

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800 x 600 x 300 cm, and performance (text: Samuel Beckett, concept, visual direction and intermedia installation: Alexander Arotin, Serghei Dubin, music: Olga Neuwirth, multimedia programmation: Mariapaz Montecinos, with Frank Asmus, Hans Christian Rudolph, Karl Merkatz a.o), Klagenfurt, Austria 2005

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a.o., curator Elmar Zorn, Stadthaus Ulm Art Centre, Germany 1994

Light piano, 1994, installation, iron construction, piano keys, electric circuits, 120 x 80 x 80 cm Prometheus - Le poeme du feu, installation project, 1994, portfolio of drawings, schemes, and photos XX pages, 30 x 40 cm

Traces, site specific intermedial subliminal installation for 5 walls and ground, 2003, video & projected drawings, multimedia programmation: Prometheus - Le poeme du feu, visual Mariapaz Montecinos, cooperation withscore , 1994, spatialization of Scriabin’s “Ojodepez 01”, MACBA - Museu d’Art score) XXpages, 40 x 30 cm Contemporany Barcelona, ground floor, app. 60 x 20 x 8 m Underground, site specific installation in public space, approx. 60 x 5 m, curator: Elmar Zorn, with sculptures by Rudi Wach, museum compound inauguration ceremony, Museumsquartier Vienna, 2001 Microcosmos, visual scores 1-4, 30 x 20 cm, exhibition & performance (music: Bela Bartok, live painting: Gabriele Amadori) Galleria Contemporanea, Milan, 2001 Long Rain Box, concept, drawings, visual score, installation project (not performed), music: The Long Rain/ Construction In Space by Olga Neuwirth, curator: Gerard Mortier, commission Ruhrtriennale, Germany 2001 Composition VII, site specific installation, modules, approx. 600 x 400 x 200 cm cooperation with Gabriele Amadori, commission for the exhibition Wassily Kandinsky – Tradizione e astrazione in Russia 1896–1921, curator: Gabriele Mazzotta, Fondazione Mazzotta, Milan, 2001 Requiem Per Il Teatro, interdisciplinary art project, 1996, concept, drawings, visual score, installation and performance, music: Giuseppe Verdi, Requiem; production in cooperation with State Opera Chisinau, Moldavia Happy Days, 1994, composition, performance project, video art, approx. 50 min., texts extracts: Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, composition , direction and manipulated piano: Alexander Arotin, dancer/performer: Serghei Dubin, voice/ performer : Christine Barrington The Happy Day Balance, 1994, kinetic installation, 600 x 600 x 600 cm exhibition, curators: Axel Manthey, Oswald Oberhuber, exhibition at MAK Vienna Happy Days, kinetic installation 600 x 600 x 600 cm with performance, text: Samuel Beckett Happy Days, with Frank Asmus 299

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The authors’ texts in original languages in order of the book

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Gerfried Stocker Bilder vom anderen Ende des Lichts Gedanken beim Betrachten der Bilder von Arotin und Serghei Licht in seiner schwer fassbaren Dualität von Materie und Energie, Teilchen und Welle ist das eigentliche Medium jeden Bildes. Es steht am Anfang einer komplexen physikalischen, optischen, biochemisch und -elektrischen Kette, an deren Ende eine Konstellation von synaptischen Potentialen tief im Dunkel unseres Schädels, eine Vorstellung von Welt entstehen lässt. Seit Jahrtausenden, über die gesamte Kunstgeschichte hin war das Verhältnis von Bild und Licht unverändert kausal: ein Bild entsteht durch das Licht das darauf fällt und davon reflektiert wird. Doch in unseren Tagen, so könnte man sagen, ist das Licht ans Ende seiner Möglichkeiten gekommen unserer Welt abzubilden. Die Ikonen unserer Zeit sind Bilder, die nicht mehr durch Reflektion von Lichtstrahlen entstehen, die von den Oberflächen der uns umgebenden Welt selektiv in Frequenzbändern/Wellenlängen zerlegt, zurückgeworfen und in unseren Augen gebündelt werden. Es sind auch nicht mehr die Bilder des “Pencil of Nature”, wie Henry Fox Talbot die Fotografie in ihren Geburtsjahren nannte (1) - die Fotografie (aber auch später Film und Video) “bildet ab”, sie friert einen Moment dieser Reflektion, den optischen Eindruck eines Bildes ein, ist aber in keiner Weise mit der Quelle, den Ursachen die zu einem Bild führen, befasst. Die Ikonen unserer Zeit sind Bilder, die durch Messungen und darauf aufbauender Berechnung bzw. Interpretation der ermittelten Messwerte entstehen und in ihrer Darstellung auf digitalen Monitoren, ihr Licht auch gleich selbst erzeugen. Jedes digitale Bild ist die technisch generierte oder reproduzierende Visualisierung riesiger Mengen von Messwerten - also einzelnen Aussagen über unsere Welt die in digitaler Form vorliegen und von digitalen Chips zu Lichtpunkten gemacht werden. Die Information selbst wird zu Licht und strahlt so über unsere Netzhäute direkt in unser Gehirn. Das ist die Natur der Bilder, die wir von den tief ins Universum gerichteten Superteleskopen auf der chilenischen Hochebene erhalten, oder von den Computer- und Magnetressonanztomographen der Neurowissenschaft, den Elektronenraster- und Atomkraftmikroskopen der Nanowissenschaftler, oder auch von den Protonenkollissionen des 27km langen Suppercolliders in CERN. Diese Apparaturen sind die Kameras oder richtigerweise, die Bildgeneratoren unser Zeit, die unsere Welt weit über Grenzen des für uns wahrnehmbaren Lichtspektrums sichtbar machen. In ihnen sehen wir nicht nur die Welt wie sie sich darstellt, sondern wie sie ist. (zumindest soweit unser Verständnis davon dies möglich macht). Es sind Bilder von so mikroskopisch kleinen Strukturen, dass die Wellenlänge des sichtbaren Lichts einfach viel zu groß ist um sie zu erfassen, als wollte man mit Boxhandschuhen ein einzelnes Sandkorn greifen. Es sind Bilder von tief im Inneren eines Körpers liegenden Strukturen zu denen kein Lichtstrahl vordringen kann. Bilder die entstehen wenn man Wasserstoffatome durch gezielte Magnetfelder anregt und deren Reaktion darauf misst. Es sind Bilder von Mrd. Lichtjahren entfernten Galaxien, die so schwach zu uns kommen, dass kein Auge sie jemals sehen könnte und die wir nur durch Sammel- und Rechenprozesse in den Bereich des für uns Sichtbaren bringen können. Anfangs erzeugte man elektronische Bilder durch kleine Punkte von chemischen Stoffen an der Innenseite einer Kathodenstrahlröhre, die durch kontrollierten Beschuss mit Elektronen zum Emittieren von Photonen angeregt wurden. Heute sind es digitale Schaltkreise, TFTs, so eng aneinander gepackte Licht emittierende Halbleiter, dass unser Auge nicht mehr den Abstand erkennen kann und diese Millionen von einzelnen Punkten zu einem Bild verschmelzen lassen. Seit den Anfängen der Farbbildschirme hat sich nichts am Prinzip geãndert über sehr kleine und sehr eng nebeneinander platzierte Punkte in rot, grün und blau die Farben die man tatsächlich darstellen will zu mischen. Diese ganz basalen Grundelemente aller technologischen Bilder und kleinsten Elemente visueller Kommunikation, nennen AundS Lichtzellen und sie machen sie zum Gegenstand ihrer Bilder. In einer zutiefst künstlerischen Geste isolieren AundS einzelne Lichtzellen aus dem Verband des Bildschirms, befreien sie gewissermaßen von ihren informationellen Verpflichtungen, “portraitieren” sie und zeigen uns so das Grundwesen der digitalen Bildwelten unserer Zeit. In einer aber ebenso der Wissenschaft zugeneigten Weise, liefern Sie uns damit auch Angriffspunkte gegen die Bedeutungshegenomie und den Wahrheitsabspruch der immer perfekter werdenden bildgebenden Methoden. Besonders wirkungsvoll gelingt das durch gezieltes Hervorheben von Fehlstellen, einzelnen Ausfällen und Unregelmäßigkeiten

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innerhalb der großen Bildmatrix. Und plötzlich sehen wir nicht mehr das nahtlose Funktionieren von Millionen Pixeln, sondern die einzelne Zelle, die durch den Fehler zum Individuum wird und aus der Masse heraussticht. Diesen, von Arotin und Serghei zu den eigentlichen Protaganisten gemachten Lichtzellen, so ist man verführt zu meinen, ist es nicht mehr egal, was aus der Summe ihres Strahlens entsteht, nicht mehr egal ob sie Text, Fotos, Videos. mathematische Funktionen oder geistlose Facebook Kommentare darstellen. Sie strahlen nicht bloß solidär vor sich hin, sondern sind in ihrer Dimension souveräne Einheiten. Sie werden vom Medium der Abbildung zu deren Inhalt, haben ihre eigene Geschichte zu erzählen. Wie verändern sich die Rolle, die Wirkung der Bilder im digitalen Zeitalter, wie die Positionen von Bild zu Abbild, Inhalt zu Form? Welche Auswirkungen haben diese neuen Bilder von unserer Welt auf unser Weltbild? Diese fundamentalen Fragestellungen wohnen der künstlerischen Arbeit von AROTIN & SERGHEI inne und rücken sie in eine höchst zeitgemäße Nähe zur Wissenschaft In der nicht dokumentarischen Darstellung sondern künstlerisch erschaffenden Nachstellung der Lichtzellen und der raffinierten Anwendung von Lichtbrechung durch die lentikularen Prismenfolien, mit denen die Bilder beschichtet werden, entsteht ein mesmerisierender Eindruck eines aus sich strahlenden Bewegtbildes, der einen immer kurz zweifeln lässt, ob man sich nicht doch einem Monitor gegenüber findet. Diese inhaltlich wie methodisch überzeugende Verbindung von Kunst und Technologie erzeugt einen faszinierenden visuellen Schwebezustand, der in erhellender Weise auf die mittlerweile Alltag gewordene hybride Gleichzeitigkeit von real physischer und digital virtueller Lebensrealität verweist. Ein Erkenntnisprozess der künstlerisch und wissenschaftlich zugleich ist, wobei die Methoden von Untersuchung und Darstellung strikt künstlerische Natur sind und das ist es was die Arbeit von AROTIN & SERGHEI so interessant macht.

Karine Tissot Arotin & Serghei - Un espace onirique de la libre pensée Le duo d’artistes Arotin & Serghei s’est produit les 4 et 5 novembre à Riehen dans l’écrin de la Fondation Beyeler avec une performance-lumière, accompagnant les pianistes Mikhail Rudy et Ian Pace pour jouer Prométhée d’Alexandre Scriabine. Autrement dit l’une des plus grandes pièces modernes opérant la fusion des sens. L’intérêt porté aux relations entre musique et arts visuels dans les installations d’Arotin & Serghei renoue avec l’idée romantique d’un art total, éveillant tous les sens. Si la musique fut, dans l’histoire de l’art, un essor de l’abstraction dès les années 1910, de nombreux artistes ont cherché par la suite à convertir des images en sons et inversément, par des procédés plus ou moins complexes, allant de l’écriture directe des sons sur la piste sonore, la photographie des ondes électriques produites par des oscilloscopes cathodiques – pensons aux travaux de Ben Laposky dans les années 1950 – ou des environnements vidéos interactifs. « Pourquoi est-ce que je comprends mieux le musicien que le peintre ? Pourquoi vois-je mieux en lui le principe vivant d’abstraction » ? écrivait Vincent Van Gogh à son frère Théo en 1888. Peut-être parce que « l’art, c’est ce qui rend comparable entre elles la peinture ou la poésie, l’architecture ou la danse », pour reprendre les termes du philosophe Étienne Souriau. Ainsi Arotin & Serghei cherchent à prolonger le rêve d’une oeuvre d’art totale prônée par le musicien Richard Wagner qui refusait la séparation arbitraire des arts pour un retour à l’unité originelle de la création, une oeuvre intégrale appelant tous les sens. Comme l’assénait Kasimir Malevitch – auquel les deux artistes Arotin & Serghei font référence avec leur pièce White Screen, forme de blanc absolu obtenu par aveuglement, qui rend hommage à la fameuse peinture de l’Ukrainien Carré noir sur fond blanc – : « Nos ateliers ne peignent plus de tableaux, ils bâtissent les formes de la vie ; ce ne seront plus les tableaux mais les projets qui deviendront des créatures vivantes. » Les matériaux traditionnels longtemps employés dans l’art font alors place à de nouveaux matériaux constamment renouvelés par notre société. Quitter la peinture, sortir du cadre pour rejoindre d’autres matières, d’autres espaces et rapprocher ainsi l’art et la vie de ses composantes. Fixée dans un nouvel élan depuis le XXe siècle, la lumière, comparée à un son, devient l’objet principal de nombreuses oeuvres. Son

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mouvement dessine, avec grâce et précision, de précieux graphismes, détachés sur un fond sombre, ce qui valorise leur éclat. N’était-ce pas Moholy-Nagy, l’un des chefs de fil du Bauhaus en Allemagne qui avait annoncé que « la plupart des oeuvres visuelles du futur vont incomber au peintre de la lumière…Il aura le savoir scientifique du physicien et le savoir-faire technologique de l’ingénieur, couplés à son imagination, à son intuition créatrice et à l’intensité de ses émotions » ? Au sous-sol de la Fondation Beyeler, en novembre dernier, étaient disposés cinq projecteurs, deux pianos à queue et deux écrans d’ordinateurs. Le tout réuni dans la pénombre afin que la puissance de la pièce de Scriabine entre en résonance durant une vingtaine de minutes avec un imposant programme visuel projeté sur trois parois contiguës. Elaborée en direct par Arotin & Serghei, cette projection répondait aux pianos emballés dans un rythme effréné et s’appuyait sur la partition singulière de Scriabine. Pianiste et compositeur russe, ce dernier avait en effet imaginé entre 1908 et 1910 Prométhée ou le Poème du feu pour grand orchestre, piano, orgue, choeur mixte et clavier à lumières. Sa partition avait la particularité de contenir une portée – dominant tous les autres instruments – nommée Luce pour clavier à lumières. De fait, la partition exige un accompagnement de projections colorées devant être diffusé au rythme de l’évolution musicale. Il s’agirait là du premier « son et lumière » de l’Histoire. S’inspirant du spectre lumineux, Scriabine avait arrêté un schéma de rapports entre sons et couleurs obéissant à ses expériences synesthésiques et se fondant sur un système d’équivalence « harmoniecouleur ». Un siècle plus tard, Arotin & Serghei proposait ainsi une transcription hautement colorée du Poème du feu en développant une composition cinétique : une cible pour point de départ, un jeu de symétrie, des couleurs vives, parfois acides. Puis, par contamination, la progression animée d’une abstraction gigantesque faite de séquences fluides, de géométries et de la silhouette flottante d’un piano aplani en monochrome. Le regard est invité à se disperser au gré des formes et des couleurs qui se rencontrent, se superposent et s’éparpillent. Une lecture se renouvelle de cette manière, dépendant du mouvement de la composition et du rythme proposé. Immobile, debout, en marchant ou assis, le corps du visiteur doit s’abandonner aux vibrations lumineuses continues. Profitant d’une approche sensible, sensorielle pour une immersion totale, où il perd ses repères, où il se rend uniquement disponible aux sens. Face aux projections du duo austro-russe connues pour leur monumentalité, les visiteurs sont toujours conviés à vivre des expériences uniques. À titre d’exemple, l’installation Infinite Screen présentée durant un mois au Kunsthistorisches Museum de Vienne s’étirait sur quelque mille deux cents mètres carrés de la façade principale du bâtiment. Loin d’être un simple divertissement coloré tel qu’on l’observe actuellement dans de nombreuses propositions un peu partout dans le monde, l’installation vidéo s’appuyait sur les collections du musée et jouait avec les images de plusieurs tableaux et objets. La projection visuelle et sonore se déroulait cinq heures d’affilée, de nuit – dans un processus permanent de rapprochement et d’éloignement extrêmes – en s’appuyant principalement sur La Tour de Babel, le tableau le plus célèbre de l’institution, réalisé par Pieter Bruegel l’Ancien. À l’instar des virages infinis de cette tour, « nous souhaitions créer un développement continu qui dépasse toute mesure dans le temps comme dans l’espace ». Le temps est indiqué par des sonorités; chaque morceau créant une accélération dense, se situant « bien en deçà de la naissance et de la mort », pour se rapprocher de la notion de « l’infini ». Parce qu’ils se développent dans la durée, parce qu’ils échappent au regard frontal porté sur les oeuvres accrochées fermement aux cimaises des musées, leurs dispositifs donnent l’illusion que les tableaux sélectionnés évoluent de façon mélodieuse dans l’espace, comme une musique. « En créant des tableaux-objets qui perdurent dans le temps, nous créons des symboles, des objets de réflexion, qui accumulent et densifient le temps ». Arotin & Serghei souhaitent faire vivre ainsi une émotion forte au regardeur et insistent sur l’« énergie » qui s’échange entre leur travail et le public et sur la dimension méditative qui caractérise leurs pièces, pour « un espace onirique de la libre pensée ». Comme l’expliquait Arnold Schönberg : « […], cela doit être simplement regardé, ressenti. Absolument pas pensé. Couleurs, bruits, lumières, sons, mouvements, regards, gestes – en bref, les moyens qui constituent le matériau de la scène – doivent être liés les uns avec les autres de façon variée. Rien de plus. Si les tons, quel que soit l’ordre donné dans lequel ils se présentent, peuvent provoquer des sentiments, alors couleurs, gestes, mouvements, doivent aussi en être capables. Même s’ils n’ont aucune signification pour l’entendement. Car la musique n’en a pas non plus! » texte publié dans ARTPASSIONS 48, 2016

Sabine Haag Infinite Screen – Der Turm von Babel Vorwort – Im Rahmen unseres Programms zu moderner und zeitgenössischer Kunst laden wir regelmäßig international renommierte Künstler ein, sich mit unserem Museum und den Objekte aus unseren reichhaltigen Sammlungen auseinanderzusetzen. Im Oktober 2016 301

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wird diese Reihe mit dem britischen Keramikkünstler und Erfolgsautor Edmund de Waal und der von ihm kuratierten Ausstellung „During the Night“ fortgesetzt. Nahezu zur selben Zeit wird das österreichisch-russische Künstlerduo AROTIN & SERGHEI in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Kunstverein museum in progress vom 22. September bis 19. Oktober 2016 unter dem Titel Infinite Screen eine bewegte Großbildprojektion auf der Hauptfassade des Kunsthistorischen Museums präsentieren. Diese Aktion findet im Rahmen des 125-jährigen Jubiläums unseres Museumsbaus am MariaTheresien-Platz statt. Den leitmotivischen Ausgangspunkt der Projektion bildet das berühmte Gemälde von Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. Turmbau zu Babel aus dem Jahre 1563. Im Mittelalter wurde der biblische Mythos vom gigantischen Bau in Babylon, der aufgrund der Sprachenverwirrung unvollendet blieb, bilddidaktisch als Symbol der göttlichen Strafe für die Hybris des Menschen eingesetzt. AROTIN & SERGHEIs multimediale Projektion wird zur stetigen Transformation von Bild und Klang. Weitere Objekte aus den Sammlungen unseres Museums wurden neben Bruegels Turmbau zu Babel in diese Lichtzellenbilder einbezogen. Die begleitende Klanginstallation basiert auf Franz Schuberts Unvollendeter und wurde unter Mitwirkung des Starpianisten Mikhail Rudy gestaltet. Ich bedanke mich an erster Stelle bei den beiden Künstlern AROTIN & SERGHEI, dass sie nach ihren Installationen im Wiener Konzerthaus (2013) und bei der Ars Electronica im Linzer Brucknerhaus (2014) nun das Kunsthistorische Museum für ihre intermediale Arbeit gewählt haben.(...)

Günter Schönberger Prometheische Entschämung Die synergetischen Bild- und Klangsymbiosen von AROTIN & SERGHEI Das Staunen markiert laut Aristoteles, den Beginn jeder Philosophie. Wer immer die großen Projektionssequenzen von Infinite Screen am Kunsthistorischen Museum Wien, bei der Biennale von Venedig, im Wiener Konzerthaus, bei der Ars Electronica oder in der Fondation Beyeler in Basel sehen konnte, kam in dieses philosophische Staunen – und blieb darin auch über den Zeitraum der Präsentation hinaus. Das liegt nicht nur an der beeindruckenden Dimension, zu der digitale Bildschöpfungen fähig sind, sondern vor allem auch am spürbaren Wissen der Künstler, der Meisterschaft eines gleichzeitig künstlerisch Bewussten Handeln und einer völlig freien und kreativen Handhabe von jederlei Soft- und Hardware, mit der AROTIN & SERGHEI wie zwei Techno-Derwische eine hyperreale Bildwelt aufwirbeln, die auf das Auge des Betrachters eine magnetische Sogwirkung ausübt, deren Reiz lange nachhält. ...Im Kontext der vielen Versuche, in der durch Richard Wagner initiierten Ideengeschichte des Gesamtkunstwerks zu reüssieren, stechen die synergetischen Bild- und Klangsymbiosen von AROTIN & SERGHEI als leuchtende, schlüssige Beispiele hervor. Dieser Erfolg findet hier durchaus seine Wurzeln in der akribischen Vorarbeit der Künstler, aber auch in den kongenialen Partnerschaften, die das Duo zur künstlerischen Komplettierung für seine Projekte auswählt. Bei letzteren wiederum sind es nicht nur Zeitgenossen, die für höchste Qualität bürgen, sondern auch zahlreiche Wahlverwandtschaften der Vergangenheit, die – wie es das Beispiel Alexander Skrjabins verdeutlicht – nicht zur elitären Verbrämung dienen, sondern jeweils aus einer kunstimmanenten, thematisch nachvollziehbaren Stringenz geschlossen werden. Es ist dieser Schulterschluss zur Gedanken- und Stilbildung der klassischen Moderne und jener zur digitalen Technikspitze, der die Werke von AROTIN & SERGHEI so außergewöhnlich macht und zu einer aktuellen Avantgarde avancieren lässt. Ihre Kunst schreibt sich damit gewissermaßen nicht nur in die Kunstgeschichte ein, sondern auch in die Kulturgeschichte der Jetztzeit. Dazu gehört eben zweierlei: die unaufdringliche Aneignung und Neuinterpretation vergangener Kunstwerke und ihrer Schöpfer sowie die obsessive Beschäftigung mit physikalisch-wissenschaftlichen Parametern, die die heutige Technik bereitstellt. Die überbordenden, meisterhaft in Szene gesetzten Kunstwerke und Installationen von AROTIN & SERGHEI bilden entsprechend geradezu Ballungszentren europäischer Hochkultur. Dennoch wirkt das Vergangene nie wie ein Zitat, sondern wie ein Jetziges, weil die Künstler nicht nur eine Chiffre in die Gegenwart bringen, sondern die „alte“ Kunst in die Gegenwärtigkeit. Auf diese Weise wird der Turm von Babel in Infinite Screen zum künstlerischen Neubau. Es ist kein postkultureller Stilmix oder eine Art Kunstrecycling, was AROTIN & SERGHEI hier bemühen, sondern eine originäre Annäherung an große – und damit zeitunabhängige – Themen. Wenn der Geist der Vergangenheit dabei auftaucht, dann tut er es als Quicklebendiger. Der Geist des russischen Konstruktivismus erfrischt sich an der formalen Bildgebung des Künstlerduos; der Geist des Skrjabinschen Hexachords beneidet die beiden um die geniale Simplifizierung auf ein Lichtalphabet aus nur 3 „Buchstaben“, die Light Cells; der Geist Malewitschs fühlt sich tief verstanden und wörtlich bewegt in der Animation White Point; und hinter 302

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und vor allem ist es der große, machtvolle Geist eines Halbgotts, der mit AROTIN & SERGHEI vergnügt den Sama (Drehtanz der Derwische) tanzt: Prometheus. Mit dem namensgleichen Projekt des Künstlerduos wird ein philanthropischer Licht-Geist beschworen, der den Menschen das Wissen vom Feuer schenkte und sie damit von der hellsten Furcht vor den Göttern befreite. Prometheus tat es um den Preis seines Sturzes, - ein geteiltes Schicksal. Denn auch im jüdisch-christlichen Mysterien Kanon musste ein weiterer „Lichtbringer“ tief in die Hölle stürzen: Luzifer. Und in der Geschichte des babylonischen Turmbaus fallen letztendlich auch die Mauerteile in die Tiefe, um jene zu erschlagen, die für den strengen Geschmack eines strafenden, alttestamentarischen Gottes zu hoch hinauswollten. Die Sprachverwirrung zur Verhinderung gemeinsamen Bauens bildet eine der rätselhaftesten Metaphern in der Menschheitsgeschichte. Das unglaubliche Geschenk der Kunst ist, dass sie zur Wiederaufrichtung nach allem Stürzen und Straucheln verhilft. Kunst ist in ihren besten Momenten emporhebend. AROTIN & SERGHEI träumen uns mit ihren Lichtzellen ein postbabylonisches, visuelles Alphabet vor, mit dem das Projekt der ubiquitären Sprachentwirrung beginnen darf. Und sie führen uns vor Augen, dass eine künstlerische Mimikry der hochkomplexen und hochkomplizierten Technik in der Gegenwart not tut. Denn ihre Kunstprojekte sind die Gegenkraft zu jener kulturellen Entropie, deren psychologisches und mentales Resultat der Philosoph Günther Anders bezeichnenderweise als „prometheische Scham“ benannt hat, weil wir innerhalb eines grenzen- und damit auch schamlosen Technikfortschritts als biologisch an- und hinfällige Wesen dem „prometheischen Gefälle“ unterworfen sind. Innerhalb einer nicht enden wollenden Perfektionierung der Wissenschaft und ihrer Produkte – auch der digitalen Bildtechnik – tut es im einfachsten aller Sinne nur zu gut, sehenden Auges zur Überwindung dieser Scham durch die Kunst angestiftet zu werden.

Monika Robescu Infinite screen – pixeling Lucretius Ausgehend von vier Infinite Light Columns, angebracht an der von Renzo Piano gestalteten Fassade des Ircam in Paris, öffnen die Künstler Arotin&Serghei ein kreatives systemisches Wahrnehmungsfeld in welches sie das Centre Pompidou als Ort aktueller, möglicher, zukünftiger und angedachter auch vergangener Ereignisse mit einbeziehen. Als Referenz an die Land Art Kunst sakralen Charakters des rumänischen Künstlers Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) erfolgt hierbei das ortsspezifische Auslegen eines funktional optionalen Feldes. Diese Verbindung von Infinite Light Columns – mobiler Betrachter*in – Vertigo/ Infinite Screen positioniert und verbindet Heterotopien, fungierend als Kette einer möglichen Sequenz kreativer Imagination, deren inhaltliche Komponente vor dem unendlich leeren Raum des möglichen künstlerischen Potentials von Künstlern und Betrachter*in zurücktritt. Der von den Künstlern hervorgehobene Einfluss Constantin Brancusis lenkt das Augenmerk auf eine Ökonomie positionierter und beweglicher Element und deren Verhältnis zur vermeintlichen, ihnen eignenden Stasis. Die sinngebende Strategie des Verortens konstituiert ihr ephemeres Erscheinungsbild im expliziten Verhältnis von Konfiguration – Wahrnehmbarkeit – Dekonstruktion – Neukonfiguration. Bezeichnenderweise besticht ein solch permanenter Kreislauf durch seine inhärente Systemik. Das Künstlerduo AROTIN & SERGHEI inszeniert eine sich ständig im Wandel befindliche Vorstellungswelt, deren assoziative Syntax die Betrachter*in aktiv in ihre künstlerische Welt mit einbezieht. Prozesse kreativer Imagination erweisen sich als eigentlicher Meta-Ereignisraum, welcher die Künstler mit dem anwesenden Publikum verbindet. Im mikro-makrokosmischen Universum agieren Modi visueller Verpixelungen als Movens physischer und psychischer Aggregatzustände, deren schwellenüberschreitende allumfassende Beweglichkeit als eigentlich treibende Kraft eines sich ständig erneuernden Szenarios auftritt. Verglichen zu jener, wie als neobarocke Hyperbole überzeichneten immensen Anzahl agierender Lichtzellen, die Künstler sprechen von 24.883.200 bildtragenden Elementen, desillusioniert deren rechnerische Konvergenz, selbst im Abgleich der Ausdehnung mit einer vermeintlich verdoppelten Erdoberfläche. Doch, Flächen interessieren die Betrachter*in nicht. Vielmehr fasziniert die Idee einer mehr als erdumfassenden Reaktionskette und evoziert damit einen als unendlich konnotierten Wahrnehmungs- und Erfahrungsraum. So entwickelt sich ideelle Substanz, erfahrbar in ihrer kreativen Bewegung. Die hierbei vermeintlich starren digitalen Grundbausteine verlebendigen sich zur turbulenten Eigenwelt. Es schwindelt einen im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes und Vertigo/Infinite Screen gerät zur fulminanten Option empirischer Ohnmacht, deren infinite Grenzen sich weit in entropische Tiefen verlieren. Die akute, fast emphatische Aufmerksamkeit der Betrachter*in widmet sich tanzenden, sich etablierenden und syntaktisch

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konstituierenden Erscheinungsformen, deren dynamische Verwirbelung, mögliche anderweitige Konjunktion, Lähmung und Wiederbelebung bei Beschreibung eines solchen Narrativs ebenfalls zu kreativen, neobarocken Sprachschöpfungen einladen. Wie sensibel reagierende aktive Hirnströme fast reflexartige Synapsen schließen, so bestaunt die Betrachter*in visuelle Denkvorgänge, deren teilweise übergreifende Synchronizitäten frappierend immersiv unter die Haut gehen. Im Erleben solch imaginärer Matrix fühlt die Betrachter*in sich konfrontiert mit eigenen Vorstellungswelten; eigener inner Erlebnisraum weitet oder verengt sich. Pixelige Artefakte äußerst lebendiger Hirnströme umtakeln eigene ideelle Konstrukte und relativieren diese in möglichen anders dimensionalen, kristallinen Wahrnehmungswelten peripherer Aufmerksamkeitsaktivität. Jene, nicht ausschließlich zerebralen Galaxien, zeitigen sensibel reagierende Affektinzidenzen. Sie evozieren Erstauen, Perplexität, mitunter Plakatives, doch auch – vertigo – bestürzend Grauenvolles. Abgründig ästhetische Paralysen mit Rosatönen – Träume mit Freeze Effekten – wieder und wieder zerwirbelt im virtuellen freien Fall. Wie das Künstlerduo AROTIN & SERGHEI vornehmlich instabile vermittelnde Räume und Zwischenwelten betritt, so bieten sie der Betrachter*in Wahrnehmungsoptionen variabler Verhältnisse nicht statischer Determinanten. In einem solchen Modus aber ändern sich referentielle Orientierungsparadigmen grundlegend und ersehnen, bei der Suche nach etwas festerem Boden unter den Füssen, weniger schwindelerregendes theoretisches Terrain. Als Werk der Künstler erscheint Motion in einer sich niemals festlegenden unermüdlichen Choreographie. Doch auch Motion ereignet sich und positioniert sich, To Take Place;1 sie organisiert sich in ephemerem Postulat als Crossing and Dwelling2 zur relativen Aussage. In Anlehnung an Brancusis Werk sakralen Charakters, böten die religionstheoretischen Schriften von Jonathan Z. Smith und Thomas A. Tweed Orientierung. Im pixeligen Narrativ – Infinite Screen – gerät die innere Vorstellungswelt der Betrachter*in in ihrer synthetischen Wahrnehmung variabler Bewegungsmomente zur möglichen inneren Landkarte, doch, so warnt Jonathan Z: Smith: Map is not Territory.3 In Vertigo/Infinite Screen fällt der Blick in seine eigene Leere und führt letztlich zur Marginalisierung eines geometrischen oder symbolischen Bedeutungsvokabulars, so dass dargestellte Elemente sich abgrundtief ihrer ursprünglich intendierten hermeneutischen Zuweisung entziehen. In einem solchem Continuum elaborierter Multiplicity ereignen sich Confluences, erfolgt Junction und Conjunction, bilden sich Circulation und Knot(s) in Centripetal und Centrifugal Motion. Die philosophischen Arbeiten Thomas Nails eröffnen, meines Erachtens, eine Geheimtüre zur Arbeit des Künstlerduos AROTIN & SERGHEI. So schreibt Thomas Nail in seinem 2019 erschienenen Buch Being and Motion: “Here is the crux of the ontological problem of movement: Either we begin with it, or we never get it. This is a fundamental question for ontology. Either we begin with discrete and static being and have to say that real motion is an illusion, or we begin with flow and are able to explain stasis as relative or folded forms of movement. All the discrete objects in the world will never give birth to a single motion. They are nothing more than the ‚dead and artificial reorganization of movement by the mind”4 Im Mittelpunkt der philosophischen Arbeit von Thomas Nail steht seine umfangreiche Auseinandersetzung mit De rerum natura, dem philosophischen Poem des Titus Lucretius Carus. In der Übersetzung von Klaus Binder erfolgt ein abschließendes Zitat, welches sich mit den Arbeiten des Künstlerduos AROTIN & SERGHEI assoziativ verbinden lässt und jene Light Cells, die Infinite Light Columns „construites avec les modules immatériels“ und deren Eigenleben, welche die „véritable ADN du langage visuel d’aujourd’hui“5 bilden, in rückgewandter Version widerspiegelt: “Wir können ja sehen, dass viele Dinge reichlich kleinste Partikel aussenden, nicht nur solche von denen wir zuvor sprachen, die tief aus deren Innerem stammen, sondern häufig auch solche, die ganz außen auf den Dingen sitzen, Partikel ihrer Farbe etwa. Beobachten lässt sich das an den Sonnensegeln, die gelb, kräftig rot und dunkel purpurn an Masten und Rahen ausgespannt über großen Theatern flattern und flappen. In flutende Farben tauchen sie die unten im Rund Versammelten; (…) Wenn aber Leinensegel von ihrer Oberfläche Farbe aussenden, dann können gewiß auch alle anderen Dinge hauchdünne Bildchen aussenden, in beiden Fällen direkt von der äußersten Fläche. Darum sind jene Bildchen genaue Spuren dinglicher Formen, und überall fliegen sie umher, von so feiner Textur, dass einzeln keines zu sehen ist.6 Pixeling Lucretius führt letztlich zur Auflösung von Formen und Identitäten. Künstler und Betrachter*in sind aktiv zur wiederkehrenden Konstitution weiterer möglicher Optionen in einen fortwährenden, lebendigen Prozess eingebunden. Verlebendigung dabei erfahren Subjekt und Objekt dabei einzig und allein durch nie endende Motion, welche sie schlussendlich auch zusammenführt.

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1. Jonathan Z. Smith, To take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). 2. Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 3. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1978). 4.Thomas Nail, Being and Motion, 70-71. Referenz des Zitats: Bergson, Matter and Memory, 189. 5. Zitate aus dem Programmheft zur Ausstellung im Ircam-Centre Pompidou vom 31. Mai bis 27.September 2021 in Paris: Arotin&Serghei, Infinite Light Colums: Constellations of The Future 1-4 – Vertigo/ Infinite Screen. 6. Lukrez, Über die Natur der Dinge – Neu übersetzt von Klaus Binder (München: DTV, 2017), 137.

Frank Madlener Pas à pas, Place Stravinsky Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. Charles Baudelaire, Correspondances, Les Fleurs du Mal En vous faufilant entre les grues, les palissades, les déblais et les travaux à ciel ouvert, vous débouchez sur la petite Place Stravinsky, éclectique en tout, protégée par le flanc sud du Centre Pompidou, abritée par le façade nord de l’église Saint Merri. Elle se distingue aussitôt par la fontaine de Niki Saint Phale et Jean Tinguely. Fontaine aux automates, mais dont l’eau ne circule plus en ce moment, fontaine dont l’Oiseau de feu est aujourd’hui moins mouvementé que le ballet de Stravinsky qui l’a inspirée. Sur ce chantier vivant et parisien, vibrionnant et suspendu, quatre colonnes de lumières se détachent. Elles enserrent la tour de l’Ircam comme si elles émanaient directement du laboratoire sous-terrain. De la Fabrique de rêves sonores s’élancent des cellules de lumière, comme une coulée continue et ascendante. Figurent-elles un potentiomètre géant, le jeu rythmique entre des couleurs primaires, la conquête de la verticalité que seule la musique peut intégralement entreprendre ? Plus la nuit tombe, plus les colonnes vont se détacher et envahir l’espace public par leur intensité lumineuse. La fontaine Stravinsky, les colonnes de Serghei et Arotin : deux représentations muettes de ce que la musique peut atteindre : la pure intensité, le mouvement du mouvement, la capacité unique à « montrer sans dire ». En quoi la musique se distingue d’un art contemporain qui dirait plus qu’il ne montre. Depuis longtemps, et particulièrement depuis les Correspondances de Baudelaire, la modernité s’est rêvée comme le lieu où chacun se fait l’écho de l’autre, les sons des parfums, les parfums des couleur, l’intériorité, du monde extérieur, le matériel, du spirituel. Les concepteurs des Infinite light Columns n’ignorent rien des élans mystiques de Scriabine, ainsi l’orgue de lumière pour le poème symphonique Prométhée, rien des Improvisations et Compositions de Kandinsky ou des modes colorés d’Olivier Messiaen. Et si le flâneur de la ville contemporaine est assailli par les « forêts de symboles » ( Baudelaire), l’esthète, qu’il soit artiste ou spectateur, musicien ou mélomane, s’entoure d’une forêt vivante de signaux historiques où se joue l’unité des sensations, en un mot, la fantasmagorie de la synesthésie. Plus la vie divise, plus le Réel fragmente, plus le virtuel nous entoure, plus l’art semble indiquer cette idéalité et ce non-partage du sensible. A l’extérieur, Infinite Light livré à la ville. A l’intérieur, dans la salle de concert, Infinite Screen livré au temps du concert. Serghei et Arotin ont scruté avec le compositeur Brice Pauset, Vertigo d’Alfred Hitchcock. Entre deux disciplines, cherchez toujours la troisième ! Vertigo, le film des films, est le film du simulacre et de l’aveuglement, écrit au futur antérieur. Vertigo a trouvé une nouvelle résolution, une nouvelle mise au point, dans la création de 2021 : on peut composer l’envers des choses par l’électronique et par la géométrie des figures à l’écran. Entre deux disciplines, cherchez la troisième. L’effet Vertigo inventé par Hitchcock ( zoom avant et travelling arrière) peut se pratiquer dans l’art visuel et dans l’électronique vintage et décidée de 2021. Entre deux disciplines, cherchez toujours la troisième, c’est-à-dire le point de fuite ou de visée extérieure. Derrière le son et l’image, le rythme, la pulsation. N’est-ce pas cela la correspondance si souvent invoquée ? Le pas de deux, haute pratique de la danse classique, serait, en réalité, un pas de trois. En quittant à grandes enjambées la Place Stravinsky et le Plateau Beaubourg pour prendre de la hauteur, vous verrez du plus loin, quatre colonnes de lumière, impassibles et muettes, composant avec la ville agitée.

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AROTIN & SERGHEI Infinite Screen From Light Cells to monumental installations at Centre Pompidou Texts: Introduction and interview with the artists led by Gerfried Stocker, text contributions / testemonies by Ivan Fedele, Sabine Haag, Ulf Küster, Marie-Eve Lafontaine, Serge Lasvignes, Frank Madlener, Caroline Messensee, Monika Robescu, Günter Schönberger, Karine Tissot, Bertrand du Vignaud Images: p. 86, 119, 128, 130: Luca Fascini p. 76, 81,102,105 136: Günter Ebenauer, p 230, 232, 233: Michael Seirer p 226, 229, 290: Lena Kern p 237 (middle): Stefan Olah all other images: Archive AROTIN & SERGHEI Contemporary Art Cover image: Infinite Screen / Vertigo composition for 18 screens, frame from installation view at Centre Pompidou (2021) Backside cover: Infinite Light Column, tribute to Brancusi, sktech for the installation at Ircam–Centre Pompidou (2021) Graphic: AROTIN & SERGHEI Contemporary Art Editor: Alexander Arotin, Serghei Victor Dubin Editorial coordination: Marie-Eve Lafontaine Editing and translations: Alexander Arotin, Marie-Claudine Llamas, Marie-Eve Lafontaine The orginal language authors’ texts are displayed at the end of the book Book production: Project management: Sophie Pechhacker, Hatje Cantz Production: Heidrun Zimmerman, Hatje Cantz Typesetting: main font: Klavika; titels: Avenir Printing:   Paper:    Binding:       © 2021 Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin, and authors © 2021, for the reproduced works: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, the artists, and their legal successor Published by Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH Mommsenstraße 27 – 10629 Berlin - www.hatjecantz.de A Ganske Publishing Group Company

media & video documentation:

Hatje Cantz books are available internationally at selected bookstores. For more information about our distribution partners, please visit our website at www.hatjecantz.com. ISBN 978-3-7757-4545-1 Printed in Germany

www.infinitescreen.art AROTIN & SERGHEI Contemporary Art www.arotinserghei.com office: Alte Schönhauser St. 32B, 10119 Berlin art space: Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 7, 10178 Berlin Infinite Screen Paris: 40 rue Alexandre Dumas, 75011 Paris Infinite Screen Art Creation: 104 Oxford Street, W1D 1LP London

AROTIN & SERGHEI investigate the philosophy of the luminous and transcendental. The works are visual symphonies, which describe, englobe and represent both the macrocosm and microcosm of societal ephemerality. The pieces are intermediaries to the past and the present, the screens are both black mirrors and shine light of the beauty and chaos that is found within the space around us.This book retraces the artists duo‘s supra-liminal opus magnum Infinite Screen, commented by art experts and with views of the monumental installations at Ars Electronica, Venice Biennale, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Giverny, Fondation Beyeler Basel and at the Centre Pompidou Paris.