2016 PASTORAL project

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Ludmila Belova’s digital pastoral Ludmila Belova, who began working with digital art in the 1990s, creates video installations and interactive objects combining digital and analogue methods of sound and vision. In the artist’s well-known project “Archive”, the voyeuristic pleasure from looking through peep holes on to stairwells is accompanied by ambient sound. And the object “Time Capsule” is a Tower of Babel assembled from sounds from the surrounding environment, which you can play like a keyboard instrument. The exhibition “Pastoral” is a world of illusions of digital space. Along with the digital method of reproducing and producing the world, new symbolism arises. What does something that is fundamentally cerebral and invisible look like? How can the image of the digital space be shown? What cannot be seen gains visual form with the artist, thanks to expression. In the series of interactive pictures “Free Wi-Fi”, as the viewer approaches a wave lights up, symbolizing the magical means of communication, which as we know has a wave nature. In the object “Gadget and Number”, 3D models are placed in a collage on a matrix of a liquid crystal panel, living in this space. In the installation “Overture”, figures of porcelain girl shepherds printed on a 3D printer are placed on a screen, reproducing a digital meadow accompanied by the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully. If a pastoral in the traditional understanding is a peaceful bucolic scene, lit with bright sunshine, a digital pastoral is a digital mirror which shows something that does not exist in reality, is a reflection of a reflection. Instead of sunlight illuminating idyllic landscapes, digital spaces flicker with cold lunar silver – a reflection of the light of the sun. Identical 3D shepherdesses rotate in a mirror they are reflected in, creating a likeness of a likeness. The porcelain girls admire themselves, looking into selfie gadgets, embodying the stage of the mirror in modern technology. The lunar characters of the digital world reflected in their own reflections live a parallel life, no less and no more happy and sad than their pastoral prototypes. Olesya Turkina