Wide Thinker
Site-specific XR installation, Open Studios, Winzavod, Moscow and Fabrika Elmat, Most Festival, Kaluga
Three 2-minute 360-degree videos with sound, viewable via YouTube 360, VR headset, or smartphone, across 3 locations in the gallery online
At the centre of Wide Thinker is a question about the capacity of a place to contain multiple worlds — worlds never planned by the architect. Working surfaces, furniture, animals and faces of the Open Studios Season 5 participants, captured inside the installation using a 3D-scanning app, can be read as the organic interior of a single creature, frozen at a particular moment in time.
Wide Thinker turns the gallery into a permanent local online museum, preserving the memory of a specific spatial moment.
Wide Thinker Vol.2 continues the project in a new context — the former Elmat factory in Kaluga. If the first iteration captured the interior life of an active creative space, this version inhabits an industrial building in a different state: partly emptied, heavy with its own history, somewhere between use and abandonment.
The visitor enters an almost empty space with a wire sculpture at its centre and hears the sound of breathing in sleep. Its source is not immediately apparent. Only through the VR headset does the visitor discover what is producing the sound: an image of a sleeping body appears within the sculpture.
Credits
Shown in Open Studios, Season 5, Winzavod Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020
Curated by Andrey Parshikov
Shown at MOST Art Fest, the first all-Russian festival of contemporary art, Kaluga, 18 October to 3 November 2020
Organised by PRO ART'S Centre for Contemporary Culture
Artistic director: Alexey Mayorov
Festival patron: Leonid Meerovich
Exhibition and education programme coordinator: Maria Mayorova
With the support of the Russian Cultural Foundation, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Culture of the Kaluga Region
