artintelligence

The artist group AES+F (made up of Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky + Vladimir Fridkes) showed their three-screen CGI film Last Riot 2005-07 (VIDEO CLIP) in the Russian Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. AES+F’s website describes the work thusly:

The virtual world generated by the real world of the past twentieth century … [is pictured as an] organism coming from a test-tube, [it] expands, leaving its borders and grasping new zones, absorbs its founders and mutates in something absolutely new. In this new world the real wars look like a game on www.americasarmy.com, and prison tortures appear [as the] sadistic exercises of modern valkyries. Technologies and materials transform the artificial environment and techniques into a fantasy landscape of the new … [epoch]. This paradise also is a mutated world with frozen time where all past … [epochs conjoin] with the future, where inhabitants lose their sex, and become closer to angels. The world, where any most severe, vague or erotic imagination is natural in the fake unsteady 3D perspective. The heroes of new … [epoch] have only one identity, the identity of the rebel of last riot. The last riot , where all are fighting against all and against themselves, where no difference exists any more between victim and aggressor, male and female. This world celebrates the end of ideology, history and ethics. (AES+F)

Last Riot is a utopian/dystopian vision of the future. There is no real death, what there is instead is an unending soft sado-masochism gift wrapped in late capitalist consumerist designer clothing and weaponised accessories. Power in the form of industry, weaponry and battle is represented in advertising/propagandistic terms somewhere in between Benneton and Pre-Raphaelite obsession with Nordic mythology (which also appealed to the Nazis). What we see, in fact, is the sado-masochistic seduction of Nazi propaganda projected into the 21st century, into the world of XBox 360 and Playstation 3.

The young and beautiful at one level represent the utopian future, and there is little contradiction in the fact that they are engaged in constant warfare because the world they live in the is the world of the first person shooter game. These ‘Valkyries’ dressed in casual designer fashion caress each other with Teutonic swords playing Hegelian master/slave games in a magic land that more or less allegorises the world of the American Empire and a Gazprom-powered, Putinised Russia.

CHECK OUT POSTS ON MUNSTER, DOCUMENTA & VENICE BY SELECTING FROM CATEGORIES TOP RIGHT OF SCREEN