Phygital Is the New Digital or Art 3.0. From Digital to Objects

With “Phygital Is the New Digital” exhibition Instigators art group brings together like-minded artists that work in the digital art sphere and use the possibilities of blockchain to create works that are both digital and physical at the same time. The relatively new term “phygital” comes from the merger of two English words: “physical” and “digital”. The authors are attempting to answer one of the key questions of the industry: what justifies the use of blockchain technology in art, and how do artists understand the connection between digital and physical objects.

 

The exhibition starts with a work by Kirill Rave based on anthropological research. Rave digitizes the skull of an ancient person and by using computer algorithms restores the parts taken by history. As part of the “Sacred Creatures” project Uta Bekaia and Denis Davydov developed a series of animated sculptures based on original sketches. On one hand, is was an experimental transfer of watercolor textures into digital ones. On the other hand, it was a reaction to such current trend in the blockchain community as limited technological avatars for the metaverses. Davydov’s personal “The Others Will Join” project ended up at the exhibition almost by accident. The artist discovered the image of misha_no_name digital figurine in his imagination, but more than six months later, by chance, he discovered the original sculpture, which he had obviously seen before. Dmitry Shabalin, who works with masks on a regular basis, also explores the theme of avatars and the “transposition” of materials into a digital space. He considers the latter to be a kind of analogue of space. With her “Soft Infiltration” series, Ksenia Obukhovskaya refers to David Cronenberg’s post-humanistic universe by physically reproducing the surgical instruments from his film “Dead Ringers”.

List of artists:

Uta Bekaia, Denis Davydov, Ksenia Obukhovskaya, Kirill Rave, Dimitri Shabalin

Curators:

Instigators art group