Cloud storage

Installation for Street Art Museum, Saint Petersburg, 2015

 

I’m attracted by the things that have, among their quotidian routine function, have a second degree of perception. This is why I was the most interested by matte film (1570x3050 mm), daily waste product of the laminated plastics fabric. It is the separating layer on the final stage of plastic production. First it is threated promptly and carefully, the film is glazed and transparent but after the press it’s surface becomes matte, more rough and brittle, so it’s pitilessly crumpled and taken to the heap. There it becomes trash, waste product. 

Apparently, not only it is a story of a deformation of the material, but also of a very special feeling. It’s a feeling of a mistical action, energy transition from one object to another, maybe even worth losing its own essence. Lightness, thinness and euphemerism of the film create an impression of a certain non-material substance, a soul, a carrier. This substance transfers, during the process of production, certain information to another substance and gives its life for it. I appreciate used film as an informational case containing the memory about the process of production, about the touches of labors’ hands, about the pressure of the masher and about the sounds of a working manufactory. I wanted to save it, roll into a cloud-cocoon, spherical information container. 

The interaction between the fabrics and the museum is also a sort of energy exchange between the art and the machines. The boiler-room is the center, the core, the heart of any production. It’s the place where the fuel transforms into the steam, the energy that fullfeels the machines. 

This is why tt’s in the boiler-room of the museum, right under the roof, where a cloud storage installation appeared, where rolled spheres of the “production matrix” keep the information about both technological and artistical process.