ANTON LAPOV
   

February—July 2017

ANTON LAPOV
   

February—July 2017

Info

Anton Lapov is our new resident within the Gaude Polonia scholarship program for young cultural professionals from Central and East European countries.

Anton Lapov (b. 1984, Ukraine) is a media-artist, musician, researcher and independent curator based in Kyiv. He was born in Luhansk and graduated from National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (M.A. in Prehistory and Archeology). He attended New Art School (course Media-art for practitioners, Kyiv, 2013) and was among participants of the 4th Moscow Curatorial Summer School (2015).

Between 2011 and 2014 Lapov was involved in development of local artistic community in Luhansk organising events in a field of experimental electronic music, media-art and museological research. During that time he established Art-cluster R+N+D — platform for creative collaborations between artists, musicians and hackers from Donbass region. Since beginning of War in Donbass he forced to move from Luhansk and Art-cluster R+N+D was re-launched in Kyiv on new web-local basis focusing on media-art practices solely. Meanwhile, in 2015 he, together with Larion Lozovoy, started multidisciplinary art-group Critical Archiving Laboratory dedicated to reconsideration of museological concepts.

In 2015 Lapov became a researcher in Open Archive of Ukrainian Media-Art, specialising in exploration of history of Ukrainian electronic music and media-art in Eastern Ukraine. As educator Lapov constantly gives theoretical lectures, artist talks, practical workshops at different venues and publishes articles in Ukrainian and European editions. He is currently teaching course Museum Studies at M.A. Program Curator of Contemporary Art at National Pedagogical Dragomanov University in Kyiv.

Lapov is a resident of Biruchiy contemporary art project (Ukraine, 2013-2015) and Flux Factory (New York, 2017). He took place in numerous exhibitions and educational projects in Ukraine, Austria, Germany, Italy, Poland and Russia. With art-group Supovoy Nabor, he was awarded Special Prize on MUHi (Young Ukrainian Artists) competition (Kyiv, 2015) and nominated for Visible Award 2017 as Critical Archiving Laboratory (Cittadellarte – Pistoletto Foundation, Italy).

Plan of residency

During my residency, I want to focus on working with the digital WRO Archive and explore the problematics of the data analysis and data representation. Moreover, it seems interesting to me to analyse this particular art archive as a node in global system of art production, challenging institutional authority of expertise and evaluation that is in close connection to speculative nature of the contemporary art market. Final results of this research would be a generative media installation, web application and an article.

1. Research stage (February 2017): Exploration of topics related to fields of machine learning/data analysis, choosing software/hardware tools and sketching general algorithm for data analysis. Preliminary exploration of the digital WRO Archive. Choosing theoretical and historiographical backgrounds for research.

2. Development and realisation stage (March–May 2017): Working with data-sets from the WRO Archive and collecting other data from web. Implementation and customising of algorithms, writing code for real-time analysis and converting the data into different domains (audio, visual, tangible). Developing a system for automatic exposition, documentation and recontextualising of the final results of data transformation. Setup and public presentation of work.

3. Extrapolating research stage (June–July 2017): Preparing article for publication results of research. Extrapolation of general algorithmical principles of work to other domains (physical products, web-application, etc). Preparing stand-alone application for approbation on materials of Open Archive of Ukranian Art and other digital art archives.