The inspiring curator/artist Alexei Shulgin will lead a performance by 386dx, a cyberpunk rock band. The band consists of some rather old techno hardware, a light show, a smoke machine, some software and Shulgin dancing as Master of Ceremony with a pc keyboard. By hacking and freaking inventively with this mishmash of technojunk suddenly a band is born. A striking career move for
this Muscovite after he more or less accidentally moved on from his more traditional artistic endeavours in the early nineties and became more and more involved in the obscure world of Net art. If up to him, that experiment has also come to an end and he is looking for other paths. Since 1994 Shulgin has also made an impact as exhibition curator for Net art as it enables him to break through his relative isolation as an artist and join an international arena of fellow artists and media in-crowd. For although Net art is presented in terms of 'the democratic ideal', seven years down the road it is still at least as obscure as video art was initially. Museums and galleries have tried to avoid the same historic mistake with yet another media inquisition this time round, and have tried to seek out contact with this underground movement, but the gap between living and working on the Net and ambling about physical museum spaces still seems unbridgeable today. But not to Shulgin, for although his business model has not yet become a resounding success, he is one of the contemporary artists who, precisely because of his experiments with the Net, have a freedom that is almost old-fashioned with regard to much art seen now on the official circuit.
– Willem van Weelden
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Alexei Shulgin ° 1963, Moscow, Russia
Lives and works in Moscow and St Petersburg, Russia
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