Alexey: We don’t stick to some specific materials, we always have exactly ones that we need. So
they are different every time and if you think about it, it doesn’t matter, it only matters, when you use
them.
Olga: Every time we need to learn to work with new material. For example, the last piece that we
are working on right now is a transportable micro chromatograph, gas analyzer, it’s the second
project, in which we work with gas and smells, but now we’re interested in different aspects of it and
our intentions are different as well.
First project, when we worked with gas analyzing, was very, very interactive, it was built on
interaction with public. That new project is quite autistic and doesn’t interact with people much.
Alexey: It’s a backpack and a musical instrument, like a street organ that contains different ways of
creating sound, and the person (who carries it) can smell any place and recreate the scent in the
form of sound. Because the smells everywhere are very different, we get a unique melody that plays
what the air contains. All the processes are invisible for people, they can hear the music directly and
understand, what the smells around them contain, even if they can’t sense them. The idea is about
this traveling character who collects the scents of different cities and sound maps of various city
smells,
Olga: and the street organ is needed to resolve the person in the crowd, the man just walks and
creates music, that way he can collect data about what is hidden in the air. And that data of gas
situation in the city controls the sound directly, so the person is just carrying both devices and also
turning the handle to generate the power so it doesn’t depend on electricity.
Natalia: On the one hand, it’s a very middle age approach, the contemporary artist behaves in a
very middle aged way, walking and playing music, he has a direction of walking, and that direction
varies, so there’s a lot of live situations in it, connections to government, to locals, so there is a little
interactive part in it, because there’s people, but that could also be happening in a field, where
there’s no one round. The difficulty is that devices work on static electricity that you can charge, or
generate power with handle, there’s a so called motor soldier inside that gives power to the whole
portable installation.
