MADE IN CYLAND

As a part of his ongoing artistic practice, Alexey Grachev continues to play with a word’s meaning. He merges a title with different definitions into how to perceive a word and the artwork it was named after.

This interactive installation is a set of speakers with antennas working as the theremin. The installation is located in the field, and it creates a sound field. A sound appears when someone moves in close proximity. People can move freely between objects. Each object is based on a round printed circuit board (PCB), and each board has a graphic depiction of a contact field. Its composition refers to various images made from above the Earth’s point of view — from circular fields of center-pivot irrigation to circular formations on crop fields hinting at the signs of extraterrestrial life. A satellite vision extends the perception of reality to the planetary level, where the trueness of what is captured is blurred in abstract forms. The sense of one’s own position in this view is lost in coordinate numbers associated with low-resolution pixelated data.

If you come back to the field and there is no one around, the artwork is still active. The theremins’ antennas swing in the wind and make short sounds. This movement disturbs the state of the system. They call upon us to enter the field, to change a field, to feel ourselves on the game field.