Mykyta Shalenny is a Ukrainian artist and architect working in the contemporary arts who lives and works in Dnipro. In 2011 he won the PinchukArtCentre Audience Award, and was recognized for the Best Installation at the ArtVilnius'15 Festival in Lithuania. Here he tells how international mobility grant helped him implement 'Bridge.VR' project in collaboration with the Danish studio of virtual reality .
At last year's Venice Biennale one piece that really impressed me was created with support from the Danish virtual reality studio Khora Contemporary. This is an international group that works with artists operating in new media. I got to know Khora in Venice and then we started to correspond. They were interested in my project script for Bridge. VR, which addresses the issues of refugees all over the world, and they offered me the opportunity to work free-of-charge with their studio specialists and use their lab to bring my watercolour graphics into virtual reality.
In 2017 the project "The Bridge. An Object." was like the embodiment of a conveyor between worlds in its presentation at the Fifth Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art. It's a wooden model of a bridge that has a beginning but no end. You can use it to transport yourself anywhere, changing its position vertically and horizontally. The goal of creating this object was the desire to realise a potential illusion – to look beyond the horizon. Life shows us that it is impossible to get closer to the horizon. Physically and optically, the distance to it is 25-30 km, but as soon as we cover this distance we see the horizon again perpetually in motion. This can be seen as a metaphor for the desire for subconscious flight – a desire endemic in Ukrainians and those from other former Soviet countries.
This virtual reality project visualizes the metaphor, basing in on the Fisherman's Bridge in Kyiv which is currently being dismantled and so actually goes nowhere. I extended that bridge to infinity by drawing a long line circling the globe on Google Maps. After looking at thousands of photos by Google users, I fitted the world together and suggested that viewers could a group and cross over the bridge into the unknown, moving across all these locations. What arises is a sense of uncertainty and simultaneously, one of curiosity that draws us to the bridge. We don't know where we are running to, just that we need to run.
Over my two weeks in Copenhagen I met with Peter Fisher, the head of Khora Contemporary, and we discussed my script, looked at sketches and created a pilot project. After returning home with all this material we met online to work out different versions of the piece.
I also visited the workshop of the celebrated Danish sculptor Christian Lemmerts, who also uses virtual reality. He shared his experience with projects at the crossroads of art and new technology. It was worthwhile to observe with my own eyes how he develops graphics and sculptures, and how he lives in general. I was attempting to work out his artistic approaches for myself because of the highly realistic nature of his sculpture.
Before my trip I didn't have a precise idea of how virtual reality works. I was able to embed myself in the project creation process of world-renowned artists and got to see how it all happened. VR is an instrument and I understood from insiders how to use it correctly, which techniques are better and what was best to avoid. Every medium has its golden mean and you shouldn't violate that.
I was given a certain limit - 200 hours of studio work and all its employees - and I had to implement my project in a way that corresponded to this particular time frame and its corresponding budget. If you come up with a very complex animation your script needs to be adapted, shortened and restricted in its possibilities. On the one hand, that might seem like it would hinder an artist, but on the other, it develops creative thinking and clears out the noise, making things simpler and more expressive.
Sound is an important component that needs to be tackled separately. Creating this kind of art is very different from everything else because [if it's not done well] the sound can spoil everything and turn it into a computer game. I worked with a wonderful composer from Vienna, Nadia Odessyuk. We became acquainted unexpectedly through Facebook and she sent me some of her compositions, one of which I really liked, so I suggested we collaborate. I flew from Copenhagen to meet her in Austria, where we listened to the music written for this project, performed by live musicians on violin and cello. She had grasped exactly what I wanted to express.
We implemented the project quickly, presenting it a month later in Berlin at the Frieder Burda Museum of Modern Art alongside works by the likes of David Lachapelle and George Baselitz. Khora Contemporary undertook a promotional campaign, applying for installations of The Bridge. VR. at festivals and competitions, and we were selected for the VRHAM! VR Arts Festival in Hamburg. There I met with pioneers in the field of virtual reality. Khora also featured the project in Silicon Valley alongside the work of Paul McCarthy.
After that a Slovenian curator became interested and invited us to take part in an exhibition in Maribor. We also made it onto the shortlist of the prestigious Leipzig festival and were nominated for the main prize in the Digital category at the Geneva International Film Festival. The Danish Foundation also presented Bridge. VR. at Design Week in Beijing.
To make a virtual reality project "art" and not turn it into a computer game takes a certain technique that I could manage myself. Too often VR comes out far too encyclopaedic, like a visit to the planetarium to watch some popular science film with no artistic quality at all.
Art is not just the retelling of reality, it's the world of the artist. The fantasy worlds of Louise Bourgeois or Anselm Kiefer. There's a real high to this work that we can appreciate because it has nothing to do with reality. On Kiefer's planet an different physical laws and a different gravitational force is at work making it an interesting place to travel to. Everything that exists in reality I can already see and don't the help of glasses. The task of virtual reality in the arts, however, is to create a different dimension.
My next project will be more complicated, riskier. I plan to add the use of another type of VR technology - camera 360, which employs four devices to generate a 3-D image that you can view from all sides. I also want to develop the Bridge series. I foresee further collaboration with Khora Contemporary in both the implementation and promotion of new projects at the intersection of classical and contemporary media. This is the Danish Foundation's immediate interest.
Photo & video credits: Nikita Shalenny, http://nikitashalenny.com
