WAITING (part 1)

By Lyudmila Belova

Pavlov Institute of Physiology , Museum of Academician Pavlov in Koltushi,St.Petersburg Techno-Art Center, New Anthropology project, Koltushi, St. Petersburg, 2019


Bioethics is a system of concepts about the moral limits and boundaries of human intrusion into the depths of the environment” (New Philosophical Encyclopedia)

The installation “Waiting” consists of three parts.

The site-specific installation “Waiting Room”, the installation “Laboratory/creative workshop” and the video installation “Waiting Room 2”.

The site-specific installation “Waiting Room” is created in a room which served as a place to prepare dogs before sending them to an operating theater or sound chamber. Dogs selected for experiments were taken here and waited their turn.

 

The room preserves the authentic “compartments” where dogs were taught to take the right stance during the experiment. Each compartment is illuminated with an LED strip, and has a collar hanging in it and an aluminum bowl on the floor.
In the center of the room is a metal table with the following words engraved on the surface
When I begin an experiment where the animal will die at the end, I feel a heavy sense of regret that I am cutting short a vibrant life, that I am the executioner of a living being. When I cut up and destroy a living animal, I suppress in myself the severe reproach that with my rough and ignorant hand I am breaking an inexpressibly artistic mechanism. But I endure this in the interests of truth and benefiting humanity”.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov.
Starting from the 1930s, experiments with dogs were carried out here regularly. Nowadays dogs are no longer used in experiments.
The installation features audio of interviews with employees of the institute who worked with dogs.
Other audio includes the constant sound of running water, conversations of employees, dogs barking, noises etc.

The video “Pavlov’s Dogs” is projected on one wall of the room, featuring the dog Tina who still lives at the institute, and who was used in many chronic experiments.


The installation “Laboratory- Creative workshop”

The first part of the installation “Waiting room” examines the ethics of using animals in scientific experiments. Today, when scientific and technical progress is swiftly developing, and the concept of “artificial intellect” is gradually becoming part of our everyday lives, issues of bioethics directly concern humans, not just animals.
A discussion about the future relationship between the human and artificial intellect is held in the second part of the “Waiting” installation, and is called “Laboratory – creative workshop”

The antagonism between “the sciences and the humanities, physicists and poets”, which arose in the late 1950s, has now passed through its aggressive phases, and turned into mutual interest and the desire to study the world together by figures from science and culture. The laboratory-workshop is a model of this interdisciplinary processes, in which scientists, a computer programmer, artist and philosopher discuss vital problems.


Video interviews with scientists from the institute of physiology: Svetlana Sergeevna Sergeeva, Yury Yevgenevich Shelepin, Alexei Kharauzov, Roman Malashin, Oleg Vetrovoy, and with the philosopher Alla Mitrofanovna and the artist Vitaly Pushnitsky, can be seen and heard in the video frames on the tables. The room is filled with numerous artefacts found in the building of the old laboratory, along with photographic posters from the 1980s provided by professor O.S. Sotnikov.

Third [part of the project: the video installation “Waiting Room 2”

Through a doorway that leads from the laboratory-creative workshop to the last room, we observe a shadow of a person walking in the next room, approaching the door from time to time. We do not know and cannot see who is in the next room. Who is it? A person, a hybrid or a completely artificial body… This shadow is an allegory of the future – it is blurry and its outlines cannot be seen clearly.

installation video

video -Pavlov,s dogs (part of the installation)

The New Anthropologe Project