International Contemporary Art Festival EverArt Weekend

The international contemporary art festival EverArt Weekend will take place on July 3-5, 2020. The event aims to make art open, accessible, and understandable for everyone. The festival will take place online for the first time in Russia.

The festival’s program features over 50 events: exhibitions by Russian and international artists, exclusive shows, performances, online meetings with gallerists, lectures, virtual tours of artists’ studios and collectors’ houses, meetups with curators and art celebrities. The event will include 30 art spaces and 300 artists. 

This year, EverArt Weekend focuses on “Art from a distance”. Can a laptop screen capture the atmosphere of a gallery? Can an AI create better than a human? Such musings on the future of art were the starting points for the works presented at the event. 

The program includes two modules: “Watching” and “Communicating”. 

1. “Watching” consists of online exhibitions that will be open round the clock on July 3-5 on the event’s website and Yandex.Collections. Here, visitors can see the Yandex gallery of neural network art, where an AI is both the artist and the curator, as well as the Neural Network Apophenia science art project by well-known international artists. 

2. “Communicating” is made up of lectures, talks, tours, online presentations and visits to artists. This module will feature three events by ITMO’s Art & Science Center on July 4 with experts in the fields of art, science and technology (to attend the events – held in Russian – you need to register using the links below): 

• The discussion “Artificial intelligence: new ways of interaction” – will cover trends in AI development that were boosted during the pandemic, the effects these trends have on society and art, and the challenges and prospects they might bring. The discussion will be moderated by Dimitri Ozerkov, the director of the Hermitage Museum’s Department of Contemporary Art and head of ITMO’s Art & Science Master’s program. Among the speakers are the Paris-based art group Obvious, who were the first to auction a picture created by an AI they’d made, Egor Kraft and others;

• The lecture “Looking into the future: cyberart” will be about the way the new aesthetics is formed in the process of human-technology coevolution; about the new art forms created by posthumans by experimenting in the fields of cybernetics, AI and bioengineering. The lecture will be given by Ekaterina Nikitina, PhD in Literature Studies, member of the Posthuman Studies Lab platform, a lecturer at ITMO’s Master’s program in Art & Science; 

• The stream “Art & Science: developing a project in real time”. Media artists from the BIOROBOTY019 art group will demonstrate the process of creating an art project online – from an idea to a prototype. Those watching the stream will see how scientists and artists find common grounds for collaboration.  

On July 3-5 all of the EverArt Weekend livestreams will be available for free at the event’s Facebook and Instagram. The streams will be available for a month after the festival with paid subscription. 

Read more about the event and its participants on the festival’s official website.