About the exhibition:
The exhibition traces the origins and development of computer music in the USSR.
The project marks the 80th anniversary of Mikhail Zalivadny, a St Petersburg music theorist and composer who worked with Kazan light-music artists from the late 1960s. His unpublished 1998 book “Music and the Computer: Forms of Interaction” surveyed Soviet and international practice in the second half of the twentieth century and provided the starting point for the exhibition.
The exhibition presents early experiments by Rudolf Zaripov, a pioneer of computer music in the USSR; the creative algorithms of Kazan cyberneticists Rais Bukharaev and Maya Rytvinskaya; and research by Bulat Galeev and Rustem Saifullin into generating and controlling sound.
Curatorial group: Anastasia Maksimova, Olga Kolganova, Evgeniy Klimin, Elena Semyonova.
Early electronic computers filled entire rooms with banks of cabinets. Musicians and researchers began exploring their creative potential almost immediately. In the late 1950s, the Ural-1 valve computer generated the first Soviet computer-composed pieces, known as the “Ural Tunes”.
Visitors can explore rare documents, technological artefacts, diagrams, photographs, graphic works and videos. An interactive spatial-audio console, designed by Prometheus Student Engineering Bureau in the 1970s and modernised in 2025, lets visitors guide computer-generated melodies through the gallery.
The first curator-led tours will take place at 15:00 on 13 and 14 June as part of the Summer Book Festival.
The exhibition was developed with the Smena Centre for Contemporary Culture, the Mikhail Zalivadny Centre for Art Integration and the CAFePARTY international digital-art festival, with grant support from the Rais of the Republic of Tatarstan.
12 June–12 September 2026
“Music and Computers: When Computers Were Big” at the archive of the “Bulat Galeev–Prometheus” Foundation for the Support of Audiovisual and Technological Art.
Opening hours:
Weekdays: 12:00–20:00
Weekends: 11:00–20:00
Curator-led tours take place on Fridays at 15:00.
Tickets: 200 roubles. Admission is free for children under 10 and visitors with disabilities.
Website: https://archive.prometheuskzn.ru
Tickets: https://s-m-e-n-a.org/muzyka-i-jevm-kogda-kompjutery-byli-bolshimi/
