“Artist’s expression gesture in the digital age”.
Denis Davydov and Nikolay Koshelev in conversation.
Denis Davydov — CGI Artist and Founder of the Instigators art group.
Nikolay Koshelev — well-known international contemporary artist, who focuses to move his expressive gestures out of canonical canvas.
Denis Davydov: Let’s talk what brought us together, except our exceptional charisma.
Nikolay Koshelev: Well, I think it was the combo of big city life and love for art, fashion and design.
Denis Davydov: Coming from a similar background, me as the computer graphic artist exploring new language of the digital world and you as an emerging contemporary artist, who is in continuous search for experimentation of forms, placed us in the same “room”.
Nikolay Koshelev: Yes, art became very variable and it is undergoing constant transformation, where the future depends on our flexibility and ability to transform. So, I was thinking of multiple paths that the work of art could take in the new digital era and I am sure we saw the way out, collaborating together with Instigators.
Denis Davydov: Museums of contemporary art admit the difficulties being in the step with contemporaneity. As Gertrude Stein said: “You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both”,- and I totally agree on that. If in the earlier years, the artists were bringing their art in museums to establish themselves, like Marcel Duchamp did with his Fountain, now the time has come to liberate the artworks from the museum halls into the free digital world of NFTs. How do you feel about it?
Nikolay Koshelev: For me it has always been relevant to go beyond the limits and examine how far the artist’s expression can go within the development of new visual technologies. That’s a challenging task for all participants of the art’s world and it’s market.
Denis Davydov: I always believed that computer graphics plays a progressive role in how we interpret reality and definitely it became a framework of a new vision as we experiment the world through digital devices on a daily basis. Moreover, living and working in the biggest metropolis like Moscow and New York taught us to bring big ideas.
Nikolay Koshelev: This is exactly how we have been driven to the idea of the project Exhibited from a Museum with Instigators. The rise of digitality opened up new possibilities to expand. This a new form of mediation of experience rather than just an object stuck in the warehouse in Geneva or hanged on the wall at the Guggenheim.
Denis Davydov: We will be the first artists who are going to accomplish this activist action, exporting the real physical objects, currently located in the State Tretyakov Gallery, into an online eternity as blockchain.
Nikolay Koshelev: Yes, this is the first attempt of its kind, whereby we can track the path of a work of art from museum halls to the crypto-world space, in so doing again putting the issue of copies and originals at the cutting edge of discussions.
Denis Davydov: Our project Exported from a Museum is founded on two symbols that are sacral for your authorial poetic — the Mask-Ankh and the All-Seeing Skull, forcing us to again consider the nature of depiction in art. Tell us how you personally experience the process of the shift from the offline to online?
Nikolay Koshelev: The digital space has created the ability for a work of art to go beyond the confines of the obvious “vortex of items in a museum environment.” And it is not about the simple transaction to jpeg or to any other online formats and it was a very complex process.
Denis Davydov: Right, hybridizing material art with new technologies, led us to a new digital medium. To export this piece from the museum, we have used the latest technologies of 3D real-time scanning in order to bring it up to you in the most detailed and realistic form that it could be ever presented in NFT.
Nikolay Koshelev: That’s true. If for the art museum the limits are its walls, in the world of NFTs, the only limit is the imagination of the artist. The process of NFTing with Instigators was pure joy. We brought together works from the museum space into the new portal of reality.
Denis Davydov: Issuing a unique set of new synthetic materials imitating volcanic rock, corals, sugar and valuable minerals, which pair the physical objects (Mask-Ankh and All-Seeing Skull) made the items look desirable.
Nikolay Koshelev: This is the NFTs craze, it gives rise to new forms.
Denis Davydov: Let’s talk about the craze of our upcoming product with the highest resolution NFT that has ever been produced (16K resolution) in order to make a projection to the skyscraper in Manhattan, for instance. That’s ambitious!
Nikolay Koshelev: I have been challenged through all my life as a creator and visioner to expand through visual media. The NFT has the strongest tool to do it, not worse than television, computer or museum.
Denis Davydov: Instigators projects will raise a wide range of issues in the new circumstances that surround us: where does the work actually exist — in a museum or in the code of its digital version, backed up by a synthetic contract? Who is a contemporary artist today, if he’s split between evermore new spaces? What does the portrait of a new collector look like?
Nikolay Koshelev: Technologies are transforming realities of individual and social life, that also has the essential impact on museum and gallery systems.
Denis Davydov: Thank you for the chat. Let’s address the last message to our readers: don’t miss the drop on April, 16 exclusively on Rarible: Instigators x Nikolay Koshelev.
Special thanks to everyone who helped in the implementation of the project, and personally to:
Visualisation and Programming: Dmitriy Kornienko, Eugeniy Padalkin, Kikcha, Alexander Stepanov
PR and Communications: Alyona Solovyova, Ekaterina Privezentseva
Coordinating: Amalia Tumasova
Art Consulting: Andrey Misiano
Music: Farhad Farzaliev
