AT THE BEGINNING IT WAS JUST A LYRICAL INCIDENT

Her name was Tamara. We met on facebook last spring. She was painting huge flowers with a brush on canvas. She liked watercolors and mandarin oranges. Everything about her was beautiful: sentimental dresses, the shy faces she made in her photographs, and the distance that kept us under the agonizing and most necessary, unique stress. She lived in Tokyo. I was rusting away in Moscow. We were happy while we were together. We were united by the sentimental thread of the Internet, which didn’t require a place to live, a salary, or official documents. We chatted serenely and exulted in each other for ten hours a day. One April day, I decided that I wanted to change our reality for the better and entered her photograph, positioning myself in the digital shadow in an orange jacket. I thus compromised, digitized our feelings, and my Tamara blanched, flickered for a few hours, and then completely dissolved from the picture. The magic had ended. I cried nights, until the summer. Soon, in remembrance of Tamara, I started improving reality. I acquired five thousand friends and told each one of them my love story… in pictures.

 

HOW I DID IT

To create and nourish my greenhouse, I added five thousand friends on Facebook. The selection was not representative enough for scientific purposes, but an intuitive artistic experiment allows one to begin with small numbers. In general, my friends were artists, cinematographers, and theater school graduates.

Ten thousand photographs were selected from my friends’ pages for the orange insemination in the social network stream. In essence, the orange jacket is the microchip that society is sorely lacking. Instructions for surviving in the disturbing sea of clip art. After further selection of one thousand clean photographs from the ten thousand, I photographed my own poses for the improvement and fertilization of my friends’ images. I photographed five thousand of my own poses in very high resolution.

For the synthesis of the image so loved by Facebook, I found that picture quality is irrelevant: a posed photograph, good lighting, polite poses, composition, and focus are enemies of the modern dialect. So that I wouldn’t give off an air of dead things, I set to work learning the language, indulging every newfangled notion. High-level detail, composition, and harmony were completely left out, and soon I began a constructive dialogue with my friends. This language showed itself to be the pure language of the new pixel/clip art world, throughout which billions of my spermatozoa will be spread.

I don’t make copies of photographs. I don’t enter them from the side or from the back. When possible, I become the backbone. To create a new visual concentration. Now some of the photographs from the nameless sea of the masses will live for centuries. In slightly skewing the event horizon with the far-sightedness of the experiment, I have galloped ahead spraying my orange vaccine, a blueprint for survival.

Kuzma Vostrikov