STAGE (Science & Technological Art Graduate Exhibition) is an annual exhibition made to present the diploma projects of the Art&Science master’s students. The presented works are created in a transdisciplinary logic and include biological research, technological experiments, and formal search.

The events of the last year have significantly shifted the physical boundaries, not only changing the experience of living the space, but also the way we feel. In the context of changing intimacy to distance, touch to sight, and participation to detached observation, the familiar scene of interactions revealed the voids hidden behind imaginary scenarios of the future.

Throughout the exhibition, the search for lost experiences and attempts to model alternative ways of living together are comparable to the theatrical experience. The theatre acts as a metaphor for game experiments and speculations, where the curtain serves as a boundary between fiction and reality for the spectator. During the exhibition, the ambiguity and confusion of the ruined present is played out behind it. Each project acts as a separate stage, where the diversity of scientific and technological discourse is revealed. At the intersection of the analog and digital worlds, an immersive artistic sensibility arises, and replaces the closed theatrical representation with co-tuning and presence.

Behind the curtain, the visitor becomes an element of a complex network of relationships, where the dynamics of the environment form the experience of living together and feeling. This facilitates the simultaneous placement of the person on the stage and in the auditorium, sharing the position of both the observer and the participant.

Materialization of personal sensuality in a media environment (L. Andrushchenko’s "Touch"), an attempt to hear one’s own Self (M. Mikhailova’s "LOOKLOUD"), or sensory experiences "expansion" (D. Zotova’s "Sense mode") become a way to define new subject boundaries. The search for an all-connected experience of the world can be continued by merging with the ubiquitous cybernetic information network ("Cyberriza" by G. Kirghizov); by feeling the previously inaccessible experience that goes beyond human boundaries ("I — Other" by S. Osbanova); or by searching for scientific grounds for the practice of caring, which is based on symbiotic formation (P. Belokrinitskaya). At the same time, technologies are an integral element of such relations, acting as a link in the space of multiple connections. They permeate cultural processes ("Neural tarot" by J. Kuzmina-Gryoza), and also address the vitality of matter through the technology agency (PHYSDYS "Psychosomasys").

The unlimited scope of speculative thinking allows the exposed projects to build possible scenarios for the future, while not ignoring the present, finding utopian elements in everyday practices and in co-existence with others.

Khristina Ots, Asya Kaplan