Seeing Another Game / rendered in liminal resolution

The video essay and installation by matiush first explore how images are created in new paradigms of artistic production (and production in general), the extent to which the the means of making an image can be autonomous, and how interfaces and their stylistics influence perceptions of the present and the future.

The artist has worked at Garage Studios and The Vaults at GES‑2 House of Culture, documenting the process of her own labor. In the video essay, which is shown in a game engine that expands it into a virtual environment, she uses scanned models of these spaces. She incorporates her different roles: user, researcher, guest artist, aspiring specialist in the management of technological systems. For example, she transforms herself into a digital icon, a character who performs an operator function in interacting with various tools. Through customizing the dialogue between such splitting types of activity, matiush first discovers how her identity as an artist changes.

matiush first draws from the interface of the program Paint and the operating systems of the of the 2000s, which were iconic for her as a child, to begin a journey through the worlds of artists, theorists, and directors who are important to her: Chris Marker, Olia Lialina, Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Rosa Menkman, and others. Through their reflections and images, documentary recordings, and her own experience, the artist traces the emergence of automated image‑making systems, approaching questions of the resolution of the image and the political properties lurking within it.

For the artist, one of the important milestones in this vector of technological history is the emergence of robotic arms, which have evolved into complex manipulators that can handle a huge number of operations of all kinds. matiush first worked with a Kuka robotic arm to create parametrically deformed models of chairs assembled using automated milling and manual labor and to draw a pencil version of an ASCII image made up of algorithmically distorted characters, which again required specific manual customization and maintenance. These objects are presented in the installation and also appear in the world of the video essay.

In her work the artist involves the viewer in constant movement between physical and virtual space. In these shifts, she notes how the limitations and inaccuracies she encountered in the process of making become a particular means of expression and clarifies how the representation of the world changes its properties and the possibilities within it.