EGOR KRAFT

BIO


Egor Kraft works at the intersection of arts, media, technology, film, critical design and research. Egor acquired his education from Gerlesborg School of Fine Art (SE), Moscow Rodchenko Art School (RU), Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT), Central Saint Martin’s College (UK) and ‘The New Normal’ at Strelka Institute (RU).

He participated in The 5th and 2nd Moscow International Biennials for Young Art, Ars Electronica , ‘Open Codes’ in ZKM, WRO Biennial, IMPAKT Festival, Vienna Contemporary, Manifesta X, Parallel, Cyfest, 1st Kyiv Biennale and group shows in ZKM, Hermitage, Garage, MOMMA, MAMM, PERMM, Polytechnic Museum (Moscow), Tretyakov Gallery and many other international shows, festivals, screenings and panels internationally. Egor was nominated for various prizes including the State Innovation Art Prize (RU), Kuryokhin Prize (RU) twice, Creative Enterprise Award (UK) and the Pulsar Prize (FR). He is a fellow of STARTS Residencies (EU) grant programme of 2019. In 2017 he was included in the New East 100, a list of people, places and projects shaping our world today by London based Calvert Journal.

 
 

'Magnachrome' is an online intervention consisting of a faux website for a non-existent American company specialising in the applied chemistry. On the website, the fictitious company announces a breakthrough consisting of a previously ‘undiscovered’ primal color. The website is presentation of non-facts as news — including advertorials and video interviews — explores the intrinsic power of the media to transform public perception and stand in for new forms of knowledge production. It explores the perversions of phantasy and reality, the actuality and the carefully constructed fiction, the legitimation of lying and the demand of aspiring beyond the boundaries of the given. A viral sensation with broad social impact continues to attract significant online attention, subscribers are growing, Google search of ‘New Color’ delivers the site at the top of the list, emails are received daily. There was released a book comprised of those emails as a documentation and current outcome.

Video overview of my solo show Content Aware Studies @ Alexander Levy, Berlin. 2019

 
 

STATEMENT


Egor’s work finds itself on the boundary between reality and its virtual misrepresentation, involving artificial information systems, computational technologies, films, interventions often in conjunction with traditional medias. As part of his research based practice, he tends to develop speculative narratives questioning co-existence of human irrational reasoning and a ubiquitous impartial and quantitative orders rendered by mechanic agency and technologies of today and tomorrow.

Structures of exponentially increasing capacities, synthetic intelligence, data monopolies as power structures, ubiquitous mechanic analysis and interpretation, planetary scale computation, techno-politics vs geopolitics, speculative crypto economies, DNA design and genetic machine developments – all these and many other cognitive perspectives reconstitute the aspect of human and a new geological epoch. In how far is the human aspect subject to technology? To what degree and from what viewpoint is the human aspect autonomous, unpredictable, faulty, irrational? How shall this human aspect coexist along with the precise ubiquitous machinic automated organisation? Having once seen the surface under a microscope, we will never again see it as we knew it before. How may we redefine the 'human' after seeing the world through the lens other synthetic forms of perception and thinking? Investigating this political, ethical, philosophical and aesthetic questions constitutes new challenges for artistic production, as a primordially ‘human’ project.