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Speak, Memory...
Victory Over The Sun catalog
text: Vitaly Patsukov

"Our memory is forever present in the future." Vladimir Nabokov
The art of Alina and Jeff Bliumis is nourished by the paradoxical context created at the point where the cinema, video art and modern technologies meet. Their system of imagery investigates the spaces of energy and memory, crossing cultural codes and freely moving along the axis of time. Their strategies are based on the latest scientific paradigms while developing their personal visual discourse.

The project "Sphere of Memory" is a metaphor of sorts for the Earth's planetary-wide magnetic field. It consists of two polarized screens retaining information signals even after their action is over. The screens' even surfaces are filled with light, which they are able to conserve within the preset rhythmic range. As part of the project the pulsing information of the "condensing object" creates a dual system ("0-1") to register all the variations of the light current. The functional principle of the light energy within this current and within its rhythmic intermittency brings to mind the famous action of John Cage "4'33" where each moment possesses its specific artistic "density" as it concludes the cycle while immediately generating a new phase in the "space of memory".

The screen surfaces in the project are endowed with multidimensionality: they absorb light as a cosmologic "black hole". However, unlike the latter's gravitational functionality the screens return the received information to us as images of "laminated memory". In the visual-plastic strategies of Alina and Jeff Bliumis memory exists within the system "expectation-oblivion-action" and glimmers with its plasmatic states indicating the universal ties between human consciousness and man's physical essences.