The artwork's form was inspired by the 60 double-sided light
billboards in Vladivostok. The lighting on each side of the billboards
burned out gradually and formed 120 unique patterns. These
patterns can be considered as visually encrypted text messages
from an unknown sender to an unknown addressee. The focus of
the object was not on the message decryption, but to carry message
meaning further and generate new ones in case the sender never
received them. The artwork has messages of a non-human actor as
the seaside humidity bypasses anthropocentric perception. In this
case, the advertising lightboxes become not just found objects
themself, but they become the readymade artistic image extracted
from the contingency of everyday reality.
The artwork replicates the
form and the lighting structure of existing billboards. Each pattern
was transformed into a text string with a length of 88 characters,
where 1 represents a lit segment and 0 is an unlit one. A new
message generates via the Markov chains algorithm every 10
seconds based on a text dataset of the existing 120 patterns. The
algorithm extracts the structure of the encrypted language and
produces new messages bypassing decryption. The audio part is
based on field recordings near the billboard surroundings. The
object finds aesthetics in outdoor advertising decaying.
The object
was first exhibited in Vladivostok at the location of the former
headquarters of the Kunst & Albers trading company, on the roof of
which illuminated advertising first appeared in Siberia and the Far
East. The work enters a dialogue with the saying of Marshall
McLuhan: "[Electric light] becomes a conduit of information, but it
never carries it". Thus, light patterns have ceased to be a mere
medium of information and become the message themselves
through the contingent impact of the environment.
Andrey Chugunov works at the turn of digital and analogue media.
He combines sound art, light installation, generative graphics,
technological sculpture, media performances and readymade in his
practice. He researches topics of mortality, temporality, autonomy,
and memory decay in his artworks from the perspective of
meditative media.
Andrey won the “New Faces” award in the Art
division at the 22nd Japan Media Arts Festival in 2018. He is a
nominee for the Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award in the
category "Science Art" in 2020. He got a master's degree in Digital
art at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia in
2018-2020. He participated in the “Laboratory of a young artist” at
the Ural branch of the State Center for Contemporary Art in
Yekaterinburg, Russia in 2018. He received an engineering degree in
the field of alternative and renewable energy sources at the Ural
Federal University in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 2008-2013. Andrey
was born in Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1991. Now he bases in Glasgow,
Scotland.
