Manifesto

IMPORTANT NOTE:

THIS MANIFESTO IS UNDER RECONSIDERATION DUE TO RECENT DRAMATIC CHANGES IN MY PERSONAL AND OUR STUDIO MEMBERS' LIFE, INFLICTED BY RUSSIAN OCCUPATION AND WAR IN UKRAINE.

THIS MANIFESTO DOESN'T FULLY REFLECT MY PERSONAL CREATIVE VISION AND APPROACH ANYMORE.

WIP.

Since childhood, I have had bad eyesight. When I was around ten I could have completely lost it. Since then, I still have a phobia of losing it and it's not going away. I think because of that I started to think about what it means to be able to see and why we see what we see. Nowadays, abrupt ironic pictures on the Internet and glossy filtered faces on social media are those images by which our descendants are going to judge us.

I believe that the key to understanding of our fractured and disturbing reality could be found in our vision and how things around us look like. Therefore, I deconstruct and analyse not only anything visual but also the tools behind it and people like me who use them.

I have a big experience working in the visual design industries, including computer-generated imagery and visual effects (CG/VFX).

I believe storytellers and mythmakers of the past who used to sit by the fire in the night and tell stories to their offsprings have recently turned into faceless, inanimate corporate entities whether it is a major cinema studio with its spectacular pictures or an internet company with myriads of masks and lenses that affect our perception of reality and our physical environment.

The accelerating visual blizzard subsumes our day to day perceptions. Hailstones of images come to us from our smartphones and notebooks. They do not just move about randomly, but are rather driven by the logic of perpetually reproduced digital network that consists of all our gadgets and includes all our comments and likes as well as billions of optic fibres laying on the bottom of the world ocean. It is a magic unattainable land ruled by dispassionate Snow Queen of digital production and pieces of data are her wilful creatures.

It sounds like a weird and eerie fairy tale, isn't it?

I am interested exactly in these obscure, subversive and sketchy phenomena. What used to be a grand story of cinema, TV and newspapers have become a series of abrupt, remixed and bizarre images fractured into short stories in our phones or forty-minutes-per-episode endless Netflix shows. While some critics, thinkers or philosophers try to deconstruct the internal meaning of all these things, I try to go behind their technical curtains and bring some sense from back there.

I believe that most interesting processes are going on there. Like, why does the entire visual culture of the mass media revolve around superheroes movies, where at the end there is always a big explosion or a mass battle? Was there any other way to tell the story without putting hundreds of people on one year crunch to make the audience believe that something drawn on computers is real? Or how do technical restrictions of face filter making and its approving apply to some 14 y.o. kid?

Or maybe why does 50%-80% of digital art look very familiar to each other?

Is it because of the lack of ideas or maybe they all use the same techniques? To put it even shortly, the whole point of visual / CG making is to deceive someone. The more deceptive image is, the better it is in name of 'realism'. I try to investigate the tools and techniques behind that deceit.