Russia (bbabo.net), - At a performance by Ralph Becker, an engineer by first education who became an artist, a fluid cold metal called galinston changed shape under the influence of electrodes in the artist's hands, forming a bizarre pattern, reminiscent of living cells and drawings by Joan Miro .

Moreover, the metal began to sound, creating its own "musical accompaniment". "It sounds like punk music," commented a young lady next door knowingly. She, of course, sees better. To me, the performance of the artist, in collaboration with Galinston, reminded me more of the films of the Dadaists of the 1920s. Only there geometric figures worked: circling and moving, they created the effect of an endless movement of forms. But with Becker, the movement of metal was unpredictable, including for the artist himself. And this allowance for randomness, the unpredictability of the result determined the drive of the action on the stage.

Ralph Becker showed his performance in the West Wing of the New Tretyakov Gallery. The performance was timed to the symposium, which in turn accompanied the exhibition "New Elements", prepared by the Art&Science laboratory. This is already the second international project in this space curated by Daria Parkhomenko and Dietmar Offenhuber (Austria/USA), which captivates with a well-balanced balance of poetry, precise calculation, and technological ingenuity.

This exhibition confirms that knowledge is essentially a poetic act. Often the basis of both is a comparison, a comparison of phenomena of a different order. Such as, for example, cosmic dust (taken by the NASA telescope in 1982) and dust emissions that eat into the lungs of the inhabitants of Mumbai. Akhmatova's line "If only you knew from what rubbish poetry grows, knowing no shame" in the appendix to the work of Thomas Saraceno acquires an almost literal illustration. An Argentinean artist has printed photographs of space dust on hand-made paper using ink from carbon extracted from the air of an Indian metropolis. In this work "Printed matter(s)", made a year before the advent of COVID 19, the theme of "clean lungs" suddenly turns out to be not only ecological, not only medical, but takes on a tragic planetary dimension. Accentuated also by the fact that there are already very different life spans - dust in space and dust in the lungs of a city dweller.

The theme of time, especially the "deep time" that geologists love to talk about and that poets and blockbusters love to imagine, is one of the key images in the New Elements exhibition. An unimaginable thickness of centuries lives in the layers of ice of glaciers, "chroniclers" of the life of the planet. Their chronicle is deciphered by glaciologists, physicists, biologists. The project of the scientist Andrei Glazovsky, which shows the melting of glaciers in photographs separated by a century, teaches you to peer into the "writings" of the ice giants. Finnish artist Erich Berger, one of those who worked at CERN, takes photographs of places where the natural background of radioactivity is increased. The landscape, which is filmed with photosensitive film and gamma film, is like a double portrait of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, showing two sides of the same phenomenon. Berger's interest in the deep time past is closely linked to his anxiety about the deep future time: Finland was one of the first countries to build the world's most expensive nuclear waste repository at a depth of 420 meters, in the expectation that they could be stored there for up to a hundred thousand years.

The gift of "hearing the call of the future" in the context of the exhibition is closely related to the ability to read the language of stones, glaciers, flowers (as in the project of the Japanese Reichi Kurokawa), rain (for example, in the "photograms" of Tuula Nyarhinen) or clouds (projects of the research group "Forensic Architecture" )… This language requires not only observation, but also translation. We can say that the artist turns out to be an interpreter, conveying the messages of the Earth to people. But at the same time, he relies not on mystical insights, but on complex (or not very) tools and technologies. Technologies that may require the participation of neural networks or simply offer to repeat them as a home experiment, in the spirit of "do it yourself!". In any case, man uses this tool to ask himself and nature questions. So, after printing on a 3D printer the shell of an ammonite, the predecessor of octopuses, who lived millions of years ago around the time of the dinosaurs, Japanese artist Aki Inomata put this shell in an aquarium next to a baby octopus and filmed how he explores it with curiosity, settling comfortably, as if puppy in a basket.But, as you know, the observer by the very fact of his appearance changes the situation. And the rule works not only in physics. This "observer effect", which, whether it wants to or not, turns out to be a participant in events, is laid in their installations by Teresa Schubert and Thomas Feuerstein. With Teresa Schubert, the viewer is involved in a chain of interactions, at one end of which are algae in a bioreactor and a random number generator, and at the other end is a forest and server substations. And Thomas Feuerstein creates poetry of pure water (and the purest alcohol) literally out of thin air. In his installation, the speakers' breath turns into icicles on the microphone, icicles into water, which flows drop into flasks. The flasks are connected to the "primordial soup", where amino acids are synthesized. Speeches about art, one might say, before the eyes of the astonished public turn into "living water", wittily referring not only to the theory of evolution, but also to the work of Marcel Duchamp "The Great Glass".

In general, the exhibition "New Elements" builds a trusting relationship with the viewer, hoping that this experience of meeting with poetry and science will be useful to us in our relationship with nature and the world.

Direct speech

Ralf Becker, artist:

From the point of view of the audience, your performance looked like something between a scientific experiment and a rock concert. And what were your tasks?

Ralph Becker: I would say it's more of an anti-performance. This is a kind of staging a scientific experiment. Trying to transfer it to another space. I focus on the audiovisual "creativity" of the machine. On the one hand, she is the instrument I play. On the other hand, although I improvise, albeit according to the planned plan, I cannot accurately foresee the result. Sometimes the system behaves in one way, sometimes in another. Breakup happens all the time...

Between experimental expectations and visual experience?

Ralph Becker: Between people's perceptions and ideas of what things or organic matter look like.

In the 18th century, the observation of scientific experiments was fashionable in secular salons, at royal courts. Interestingly, today this practice is also becoming popular.

Ralph Becker: This is an important reference for me. By the way, I showed a slide with a picture of the Royal Society in Britain, which showed the moment of demonstration of experience for the elite. Today these screenings are available to everyone. I am attracted by the opportunity to open the process "behind the scenes" to the audience, they can feel like witnesses of a scientific and artistic experiment.

Which contemporary artist has inspired you the most?

Ralph Becker: There are many such artists. I am a big fan of Swiss artist Roman Signer. His works are entertaining, conceptual, about success and failure, about irrationality in a calculated world.

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