Digital

Digital artworks and augmented reality interventions exploring the mechanics of identity, memory, and virtual site-specificity. From iPad studies to AR environments deployed across Snapchat and Instagram, these digital projects function as critical extensions of physical installations and long-term conceptual investigations.

Operating at the intersection of face-tracking technology and temporal critique, this interactive AR filter—realized in collaboration with artist Vesnaleto—problematizes the illusion of immediate self-perception. Based on the fundamental speed of light—$299,792,458\text{ m/s}$—and accompanied by authentic acoustic emissions from a black hole, the work introduces an inescapable temporal lag between the subject and their digital reflection.

Grounded in a non-anthropocentric worldview, the project asserts that the micro-intervals required for light to travel and be processed by algorithms are as ontologically significant as cosmological epochs. The sound of the black hole anchors the installation in deep space-time: by the time an image registers on screen, the captured subject has already shifted into the past. The work transforms the ubiquitous selfie interface into an instrument of existential disorientation, exposing viewing oneself as an encounter with an entity that no longer exists.

The project was carried out with financial support from a law firm DS LAW.

Executed at The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (2021), this hybrid performance and video artwork unfolds in direct dialogue with Bill Viola’s video installations exploring water and fire. Captured through the custom You Are Never the Same AR filter and set to the sound of black hole acoustic emissions, the work examines the elusive nature of self-awareness.

As light and time interact through the digital lens, the image of the artist continuously fragments and dissolves into the surrounding space. Positioned between Viola's visual manifestations of natural forces and cosmological sound, the human figure loses its solid boundaries. The performance exposes self-perception as something impossible to pin down, asserting that individual presence is not separate from the world, but entirely merged with its ongoing flow.

Initiated in 2020 during the global COVID-19 pandemic, Charon AR uses the virus as a universal conceptual variable that equalized global conditions and eliminated noise, exposing how diverse cultures, societies, and state apparatuses negotiate the ontology of death. Central to the project is a luminescent, color-shifting digital entity—a techno-deity, idol, and simulacrum of the pandemic—whose form is composed of reaching human hands and accompanied by floating, encapsulated souls.

The project functions as a cross-platform augmented reality intervention. Utilizing Snapchat’s spatial mapping framework, the entity was deployed at key global sites, including Hollywood, London, Paris, and Washington, D.C., alongside spatial Instagram filters for localized user interaction. Exhibited at Ars Electronica (2021) and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA), the project executed a critical institutional precedent: at MMOMA, the augmented reality entity was presented not as an auxiliary extension of a physical object, but as an autonomous, self-contained spatial artwork occupying museum territory.

The video opens with three sequential dots appearing on screen, followed by a blinking text cursor that gradually decelerates until coming to a complete halt.

Approaching the boundary of linguistic articulation, the work addresses the fundamental limits of translation between existential experience and digital architecture. The installation examines the illusion of digital persistence: transferring human existence, thought, or consciousness into algorithmic space fails to liberate it from the structural constraints of finitude. By reducing digital activity to a frozen terminal state, the work asserts that virtual environments remain bound by the inescapable cycles of completion, decay, and mortality.

Created through the hybrid processing of graphic editors and social media algorithms, the work depicts a burger rendered through cumulative digital degradation—a visual byproduct of infinite reposting and algorithmic compression.

The image functions as a critical inquiry into contemporary digital consumption. By equating social media content loops with fast food, the artwork addresses the cultural transition toward passive, low-effort reception over original creation. The visual erosion of the object mirrors the cognitive erosion of the viewer, exposing how algorithmic distribution channels standardize, degrade, and commodify visual culture into easily digestible, highly addictive computational calories.

Taking its conceptual departure from the iconic literary architecture of Dante Alighieri, this single-channel video installation examines language not as a tool for free expression, but as a rigid computational program.

The work exposes the alphabet as an inescapable cultural matrix that conditions human thought from birth. By reducing text to a foundational script of cognitive limitations, the installation addresses how linguistic structures dictate perception, memory, and agency. Transferring this inquiry into the digital realm, the project demonstrates that even within virtual and algorithmic spaces, consciousness remains bound by the structural boundaries of its primary symbolic code.

The image presents a profound breakdown of recognition: a scene of apparent predation dissolves the moment sign language enters the visual code.

Positioned beneath ascending legs that slip beyond the upper margin, figures traditionally read as aggressors are re-coded into subjects of non-verbal entreaty. Using human dactylology, the wolves do not attack; they signal a plea to be extracted from the frame. The work exposes the instinctive human tendency to read survival as violence, revealing how deeply perception is programmed by fear. By transforming a predatory threat into an act of interspecies communication, the canvas poses an uncomfortable question: what if the entity we perceive as a danger is simply asking to be saved?

The work addresses the paradoxical nature of artificial cognition: designed to embody ultimate precision, synthetic intelligence inevitably replicates humanity’s most primitive biases and systemic fallibilities. Rather than generating a transcendent mode of thought, the digital apparatus inherits the structural limits of its creator.

Within a Baudrillardian framework, the entity operates as a pure simulacrum—a high-tech façade concealing a surrogate constructed from cognitive debris. Viewed through Heidegger’s inquiry into the "thingness of things" (Das Ding), the breakdown of computational utility strips the object of its functional agency (Zuhandenheit). Inert and disconnected from purpose, the digital artifact collapses into a silent monument to its own conceptual vacancy.

Created during the Laboratory 4 residency at the New Tretyakov Gallery, the work explores nested space and the instability of visual perception. The black bands framing the image mirror the optical pattern mapping the creature's body, hinting that the observer is viewing a fraction of an infinitely recurring, macrocosmic entity.

By employing the mechanics of optical art (op-art), the refraction of high-contrast line work induces a kinetic illusion, generating perceived motion within a static field. The work posits a recursive structure—a universe contained within a universe—where physical boundaries dissolve into perceptual mechanics, turning the act of observation into an encounter with infinite enclosure.