Chto Delat

The new video by Chto Delat, shot despite coronavirus and arrests, tells the story of a utopian laboratory in which the protagonists are simultaneously scientists and test subjects. While co-authoring the film, they experiment on themselves, aiming to develop new forms of automatic social behavior for survival in a rapidly changing world. The results of the work of the Laboratory of Stoppage, the Risk and Leisure Laboratory, the Anti-Helplessness Laboratory, the Trip Laboratory of Surplus Enthusiasm, the Laboratory of the Wandering Body, and the Laboratory of Applied Nausea will be of assistance to humanity in the near future. Each protagonist wears blue workers’ overalls, reminiscent of those of “Dada mechanic” John Heartfield, which were also worn in solidarity with industrial workers.

The action of the film takes place inside a three-dimensional structure made from cardboard, which simulates virtual communication via Zoom in the real space of the film set. Enclosed in individual capsules/windows resembling prison cells or spaceship compartments, the participants in the experiment suddenly open portals/gaps leading from one space to another, overcoming the alienation of remote communication by augmenting tactile and bodily interaction. In the exhibition space, the video is supplemented with an interactive installation: the virtual backgrounds featured in the film in the “windows” of the six protagonists turn out to be retractable curtains, behind which an “exit” into the surrounding reality is concealed, just like in Martha Rosler’s series of anti-war collages House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home.

The original idea for the work, which was conceived in the summer of 2020, has undergone an unpredictable transformation in the rapidly changing reality of recent months; a transformation that Chto Delat members tried to reflect upon through the creation of an almost confessionally personal autobiographical film. The result of a collective effort, mutual discussions, and bodily practices, the scenario explores adaptation to a changing social and biological life. Importantly, this is not just about the pandemic, which forced people to “glue” themselves to screens or get used to carpal tunnel syndrome, but also about social, political, and environmental changes. The lever for imagining a new future becomes our reflexes, the basic form of the nervous system’s activity, which brings us closer to the entire organic world and is responsible for the “automatic” part of human life. In the context of critique of reflexes and post-Pavlovian speculative science dealing with nature, there is discussion of conditioned reflexes: those which arise in reaction to adaptation to changing conditions and those anticipating the organism’s future needs. The latter is a prediction of what will be required in a second, an hour or a year; an embodiment of how our brain constructs what psychophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein called “a required future.”