Mikhail Maksimov
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Mikhail Maksimov
Flatality, 2021
Three-channel video installation
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Mikhail Maksimov’s new work is consonant with the word “fatality,” which stands for the final stage of finishing off the enemy, different for each character, in the fighting game Mortal Kombat. Flatality explores various disturbances in the perception of space and refers to spatial experiences invoked by the pandemic. During lockdown, for most people the world narrowed to the size of a room, meaning distance—from home to the local store and from person to person—began to play a decisive role in their lives. By developing the principle of modeling potential realities, Flatality addresses modification of the world via physical experience: according to the artist, “a change in one coordinate in space alters the order of creating a narrative. If we make ourselves a home in a pipe, we will have to create linear works forever.” Within the coordinates of the altered, “layering” consciousness, the artist develops a new type of narrative, a “distance drama” in which the action unfolds not in time but in distance. He also expands the space-time boundaries of the medium, which is based on the flow of time (of the author and the viewer) and is created in the virtual space and presented in the real one. Around ten short videos combine to create three sequences of approximately 36 minutes each, asynchronized with each other. These video sequences are constantly diverging in the installation space, creating an endless set of combinations like generative art, thus undermining the usual canon of runtime as the main measure of time-based art and making use of the characteristics of the space.
The vocalized direct speech reproduces patients’ evidence about pathological sensations of space connected with a loss of volume, a flattening of the visible picture due to derealization or with the loss of proprioceptive perception in patients with Kandinsky-Clérambault syndrome. The almost incomprehensible, incoherently delusional descriptions of internal states are voiced by speech synthesizers and acquire a detachedly artistic character: “moveshki” and “Frankogols” make themselves at home in the recognizable psychedelic style of Maksimov’s 3D animation. The artist finds a visual and spatial correspondence with the syndromes listed,1 using a “self-written space flattener” as a plug- in for a 3D program for creating virtual landscapes. Flatality plunges the viewer into the speech haze of individual psychopathologies, while also performing as a cartography of Russian landscapes, from the Kola Peninsula to Tuva. A series of alternating panoramas of flattened spaces grows from an individual’s inner experience into a diagnostic assessment of the unsettled condition and problematic nature of existence in the diversity of the country’s spaces. According to the artist, the subjective “inconvenience inside one’s head” can be read as an objective “inconvenience inside the country,” even though we understand that “illness is a personal matter and only health loves to be together.”
EL
1. Along with derealization and Kandinsky-Clérambault syndrome, the work uses descriptions of schizophasia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, oneiroid syndrome, and the loss of the sense of numeration.