(2020) PROCESSES

 Ludmila Belova 

“Processes”
 
“Process” (from the Latin Processus – progress) 

a successive change of phenomena and states in the development of something
 
            In the light of new biomedical technologies, genetic engineering and the transplantation of artificially grown organs, experts on biomedical law at Stanford University propose to broaden the legal term of “human” and introduce a new concept – “essentially a person” or “mainly a person. This was reported by Science magazine (Knoppers, Greely, Biotechnologies nibbling at the legal “human”).12. 2019

 

PROCESSES taking place in different fields of science and medicine bring about the smooth transition of the human being into a hybrid state, and the subsequent fusing of the human essence with artificial intelligence.

PROCESSES of change in human life caused by new technologies, the organization of life, goals and tasks are already changing, and will change very swiftly in the future.

The influence of new technologies and scientific discoveries on human life and on humans themselves, contemplation of the development of artificial intelligence, the “human” and the “post-human” – all of these themes are studied at the “PROCESSES” exhibition.

 

In the first hall, the exhibition is arranged around the main object – a plastic figure of a smiling girl. She is a hybrid of a figure of the 1950s and a modern-day selfie stick. The girl photographs herself in a strange, artificially lit space, where robotic, bird-like insects are flying around.

 

The girl exists in the exhibition space as a symbol of the transition of the human into a new artificial virtual world, in which everything is cheerful and interesting, but where there is no sunlight or anything natural.

The girl “Digit”, as she is called, takes a photograph of herself against the background of the picture “Modelling the future”, which depicts a modeling field (from programs for creating 3D objects), with schematic depictions of two types of neural networks: natural and artificial. The modeling field is an image of the modern world, which lacks the stability of concepts and postulates that was characteristic of the past, as there can be no stable and constant position of this field in the virtual space. Action takes place in the picture – the symbolic PROCESS of downloading information.

 

The object “Digit and Gadget” was made on a TV screen. The TV is one of the first attributes of humans’ entrance into the world of technology, and then into the digital world. Almost every home had a TV, and it became a symbol of comfort, replacing the former symbol of the home, the hearth. The PROCESS of broadcasting is impossible on this TV, as its matrix base is broken, and now the monitor has turned into a static object. It “shows” one of the favorite subjects for paintings that decorated people’s homes in the 18th-19thcenturies – a pastoral love story. Here the lovers are “Gadget” and “Digit”. Gadget is the figure of a shepherd from embroidery of the 19thcentury, and Digit is a model for 3D printing, copied from a statuette of the 1950s. The entire pastoral also takes place on a modeling field and symbolizes virtual space.

 

Besides the TV, as an essential attribute of the human dwelling, porcelain plates hang on the walls, which were often used as interior decorations. They contain the history of new technologies, with the names of gadgets, programs and devices written on the plates using the traditional technique of overglaze painting.

The first hall is a view of the human house, which has changed somewhat from new technologies.

 

The second hall contains the installation “Processes” – a visualization of concepts about neural networks of the brain. The six-channel audio installation created by Igor Potsukailo is a sonic imagining of the PROCESSES constantly taking place in the human head.

 

The third hall opens with the painting “Nature”, in which immersion in the biological nature of the human takes place, with a depiction of the concept of the “inner Universe”, of the microworld, and specifically of natural neural networks.

A PROCESS of constant movement and transformation, revealing the multi-layered nature of the image, takes place in two pictures with the title “Outside”. Here the static and set nature of the observation point breaks down.

“Outside and inside. Structural identity”. The structure of the painting may belong to a natural landscape: grass, roots, branches, flowers, and to the micro-world: neutrons, axons, synapses and neural networks.

 

The painting “Connection” once more shows the attributes of the program interface for 3D modelling. In this field, the PROCESS of “calibration and attachment” takes place for a certain artificial object (symbol of an AI diagram of an artificial neural network) and a natural substance.

On two paintings with the common title “Process”, natural and artificial structures are depicted at the moment of merging together. The overall color scheme, built on a combination of fluorescent colors, refers to photographs of the microworld of the human being taken by an electron microscope.

 

The video installation “Transition” consists of two mirror videos taken in a metro underpass. The video is projected on to a tile wall, in which a diagram of artificial neural networks is depicted as a symbol of AI.
 

The last hall is dedicated to the non-human, post-human and trans-human. In the video installation “Pastoral”, the plastic figure of a girl, already familiar to us from the first hall, duplicated in 15 sister copies, “dances” on a field of “digital” pixel grass, to a musical mix that combines compositions by Jean-Baptiste Lully and the song of electronic birds.

 

The exhibition ends with a painting from the “Modelling the future” series used as a refrain. We see the same theme and a similar composition as in the painting at the start of the exhibition, only here the background is more prominent, shining through a model lattice and through neural networks, showing the present of another global network, the existence of which is not obvious, but possible. Everything is moving and transforming, including people themselves, who take the evolutionary PROCESS to a new stage.

 

 ------------Gleb Yershov. 

Ludmila Belova. “Processes”.

Over the last 20 years, the relationship of contemporary art with science has become an entire sector, or industry, with its own laws. One year ago, Ludmila Belova was also integrated into this sphere, taking part in the major collective project “New anthropology” in Koltushi. For Petersburg, the interaction of artists with researchers from the Pavlov Institute of Physiology proved to be a significant event in the field of science art. Ludmila admits that “she has never worked in science art”, but that her previous project, “Modelling the future” was “linked with thoughts about the future of human beings in the digital world”.

The project “Processes” is a continuation of this field of studies which are highly relevant and attractive not only for a specialized group, but much more widely – for everyone who has ever thought about discoveries which fundamentally change our views and concepts about what human consciousness is. “PROCESSES” is a journey exhibition through “a space with no certainty”: you find yourself immersed in the world of the expanding consciousness of the human, whose interface is an open-ended system.

The artist conveys the virtual reality of the digital future in recognizable forms – the fragile sculpture of a girl from the 1950s acts a guide to the realm of artificial intelligence, fearlessly venturing into a world which resembles an endless open network space. The smiling girl Digit (as the artist calls her) is grown from a selfie stick – a metaphor of her digital duplication in the Internet. This is Alice in Wonderland, the alter ego of the author herself, ready to enter a county with different spatial and temporal dimensions. Fantastic robot birds fly around, as a reference to the virtual 3D reality depicted behind her in the picture “Modelling the future”. This is a portal, an entry to virtual reality. “Digit” takes a selfie of herself in front of a picture where two types of neural networks are displayed: natural and artificial.

The canvases with a depiction of the “web valley of gear” – patterns that vanish into the depth – are made in a technique similar to dripping – they are even created on the floor, and then also hung on the wall in expectation of further work. The hair-thin threads create an effect not only of contemplation, but of immersion in a microworld: the eye adjusts to the sight of atom vision, and the scale is transferred. In the Russian avant-garde, Malevich and Filonov, as Kovtun succinctly put it, were armed with two magnifying devices – one with a telescope, seeing planets in space, and the other with a microscope, revealing the no less extensive atomic universe. In this case, this involves the visualization of processes, which allow thoughts in the human mind to make their own movement, the process of thinking. 

Before us lie three realities. The first is the birth of thoughts in the human brain, which remain a mystery for neurobiologists. The second is the virtual reality of computer modelling, which is use to model the reality of the first order. The third is the reality of the painted space, which visibly conveys images to us which may be expressed most adequately in the language of abstract art. The methods of capturing space using the arrangement of certain geometric structures and attempts to create a certain model of its arrangement make it possible to combine different elements of reduced forms. The metaphor of the digital space may be an array, a lattice with empty cells, resembling Sol LeWitt’s minimalist sculpture, while the neuron structures and the connections are depicted most accurately with Jackson Pollock’s clumps of layered paint. This fusion of two worlds is shown in Belova’s paintings, where fluorescent thread-like patterns of lines immerse us in the microworld of the brain, which can now be displayed in photographs made with an electron microscope.

Mikhail Yampolsky, in his lectures on the phenomenon of depiction, cites the observations of anthropologist Tim Ingold about the nature of lines. “He classifies two types: he calls one a “thread” and the other a “trace”. A thread is a line which has no surface. The nervous system, neurons and connections between them in the brain have no surface, they resemble threads. A trace differs from a thread, because it is left on the surface, a trace without a surface does not exist on principle. Additionally, Ingold discussed phantom lines which only exist in our consciousness: geometric lines, meridians, parallels, the equator”. In her works, Belova tries to combine the depictions of all these types of lines, visualizing an intelligible space as an endless neural network, in which the biological and technological coexist, combining, merging into each other, as forms of recording the human and artificial intelligence. As Yampolsky writes: “The fact that lines exist as threads, and then become traces, and then break through the surface which ceases to support them – these are facts of our consciousness, flickering through the relations of these recordings, which gain materiality or lose it, appear on the surface, and break through again…”

This concerns the inevitable beginning for the emergence of any sign – a surface, from which the history of writing and any image in general begins. For the modern computer consciousness, the transition to 3D reality and its main modelling takes place in the optical extension of a surface into depth. The screen, the boundary, is overcome, and becomes transparent. In the strategic perspective, many artists of the 20-21stcenturies dreamed about and attempted to overcome this restriction of the canvas in their paintings, and go beyond the boundaries of four dimensions. The viewpoint of the “observer” also changes – it is constantly moving, and furthermore the observer becomes an actor of its establishment in the PROCESS of active viewing-participation.

Belova also plays on this movability, the constant movement of the viewer in the exhibition, with her audio and video installations – for she is fond of this multichannel type of representation, which allows the active use of traditional and innovative technologies and techniques. In the installation “Conectom”, the flatness of the painting is left for real space, where “coarse reality” is depicted as the neural networks of the brain. The six-channel audio installation by Igor Potsukailo is a sonic imagining of the PROCESSES constantly taking place in the human head. The exhibition/journey is a visualization of the transition of consciousness into a different state, where the artificial neural network gradually fuses with the natural one, and even replaces it.

The key theme played out in this project is the theme of duplication, the digital mirror world which as Belova shows, is ceasing to be an additional, parallel reality, but creates a dynamic of transition, movement, PROCESS. In her work, this theme, refracted in the interest of optical effects such as reflections, shadows, duplications and refrains, becomes a central one.