The exhibition explores early media-art festivals in the USSR and technological experiments combining light and sound. It focuses on Prometheus Student Engineering Bureau and artist Sergei Zorin, whose work appeared at light-music festivals from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Dreamlaser designed a purpose-built exhibition environment that reveals both the ideas and the engineering behind the archival objects. The studio also created a new installation inspired by synaesthesia and the atmosphere of a former printing works.
The project continues the INTERVALS festival programme exploring the origins of digital art.
The exhibition was created with support from the Creative Practices Team.
Organisers:
dreamlaser
TSEKH space *
“Bulat Galeev–Prometheus” Foundation for the Support of Audiovisual and Technological Art
Centre for Contemporary Culture “Smena”
Sergei Zorin Centre for the Development of Light and Sound Art (Zorin-Art)
Curators: Anna Gagarina, Kirill Mayevsky, Anastasia Maksimova.
About the exhibition:
Artists, composers and inventors have explored the synthesis of light and music since the early twentieth century. In the USSR, audiovisual art developed in particularly close contact with science and engineering.
A leading centre for this research was Prometheus Student Engineering Bureau in Kazan. Its members built equipment for concerts and films, developed architectural lighting and design installations, and explored sensory therapies for cosmonauts.
Prometheus also organised regular light-music conferences and festivals in Kazan, combining exhibitions of new work with discussion and performance.
These early media-art festivals drew participants and audiences from across the USSR and prompted lively debate in the press. The largest, Light and Music in 1987, involved around 500 participants, nine venues and more than 20,000 visitors.
The festival format allowed artists to demonstrate unusual instruments in action and to present electronic concerts and light performances. Contemporary festivals such as INTERVALS continue this work.
Light artist Sergei Zorin was a regular participant. He had built his own light instruments since the early 1960s and presented them both at festivals and in purpose-built “Optical Theatres”. Such theatres operated in Moscow, Italy and the village of Vladimirskoye in the Nizhny Novgorod region.
The exhibition brings together objects and videos from Prometheus with Sergei Zorin’s light instruments, first shown at Kazan festivals between the 1960s and the 1980s. Dreamlaser designed the exhibition to reveal both the ideas and the engineering behind the works. The studio also created a new installation: a field of interactive LED panels with multichannel sound, inspired by synaesthesia and the atmosphere of a former printing works.
Entry is with an exhibition ticket.
