2021 FLASHES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

 FLASHES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

 24.12-25.12.2021

 Non-State Non-Russian Museum

 Heraclitus wrote that lightning rules everything. Lightning instantly illuminates, makes the world visible and conceivable.  Lightning is the Logos, that is, the Word, the Law, the Thought. The intuition of the ancient philosopher surprisingly outstripped the latest discoveries - thinking, indeed an electrical impulse.

 Neurons, dendrites, axons, neurotransmitters, synapses - these words seem to explain the structure of consciousness, thought. Each discovery in this area is echoed in another - a neural network, artificial intelligence over and over again seeks to co-operate with human cognitive functions.  This, of course, cannot but give rise to anxiety, alienation and apathy: one of the last mysteries - inner peace, freedom, choice, turn out to be calculated, reproduced and controlled before our eyes.

 It is logical that boring computer models, identical and emasculated as office iconography, are responsible for the visuality of this process.  Lyudmila Belova strives to give a different flesh to these images, emotionally colored, tactile.  Its ceramic neurons affably wave their plastic tails, synapses rhythmically sparkle with a New Year's garland in a network of polymer tubes.  This ironic move presents cold biochemical abstractions and programming algorithms in a tangible, festive and slightly pornographic-DPI way.  But it seems that there is something here besides the Russian desire to folklore everything complex, clever and frightening.  That heat that pottery implicitly contains, that lightning that lurks in the flickering of a garland, reminds us of the identity of thinking and the Logos, of the Heraclitean fire from which the world was created.  About the divine nature of thought and its irreducibility to a physical device.

                                               Alexander Dashevsky