The project «Liminal.tmp» was implemented as an all-out installation at the HSE ART GALLERY gallery on the Small Pioner Exhibition, under the supervision of Sasha Kuznetsov, the exhibit: 24 April-22 May 2025.
Entry zone
In the digital age, our perception of space changed. We no longer «in» and «out» the virtual world — we constantly exist at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds. This is not a temporary state, but our new norm is a hybrid existence, where digital and material interaction is continuous, enriching and redistinguishing each other. Technology allows us to see and feel things that used to go undetected. They help to display the invisible and create new ways of interacting with space. However, the digital dimension is not neutral; it shapes our perception, thinking and behaviour in ways that we do not always understand. We control the digital dimension as much as it controls us, creating a complex system of interdependence.
The exhibition is an all-out installation that has taken over the entire HSE ART GALLERY space on the Little Pionera. It is deliberately designed as a liminal, i.e. a transition zone between digital and physical, allowing the viewer — sometimes in the form of a ride — not only to understand the specificity of our environment, but also to feel it physically.
Entry zone
In the entrance zone of the installation, there is a video manifesto describing the key contrasts and paradoxes of the hybrid space. The text of the manifesto explores the duality in which we exist: «Hybrid space is completely intangible = Hybrid space is as physical as possible», «We see space with our own eyes = Space looks at us through the cameras.» The visual language of the manifesto mimics system failures and software code, highlighting the instability of the digital-physical boundary.
Video manifesto
When moving to the next hall, a special view is built that simulates the corridor at the end of which the illusion of the continuation of this space is created on the wall. The corridor deepens on the final wall and is further deepened by the screen, which is placed and continues into virtual digital space.
The first room contains flat figures of virtual visitors to the gallery, the digital doppelgangers of viewers that exist in parallel with real visitors. These silhouettes create a sense of the presence of an invisible audience in the gallery space in the alternative dimension. The shapes exist at different stages of reordering, from the chess grid of transparency (not yet written textures) to the finished images.
As we enter the second room, we see the physicalized windows of the computer interface. Moving between them, the viewer discovers the illusion of spaces that do not exist in the physical world — niches, corridors, and surfaces that appear only when the point of view changes.
The video in the tablet on the wall represents the exact angle of the space that is right behind that wall. In the video version, a static reality comes to life — people come in, events happen, and a portal painted on the wall becomes a functional passage through which someone really enters space.
In the corner of the room is a screen showing the digital doppelganger of the same corner space. At times, there are shadows in the frame from passing virtual visitors — residents of parallel digital measurements of the gallery, creating a sense of invisible entities in the same space.
Graphics performed by a pencil showing silhouettes in the interior of the gallery are distributed to the rooms. In these drawings it is indistinguishable that the shadow of the real person, or his vast presence in space, is creating visual uncertainty between the projection and the body.
The third room represents the quintessence of the hybrid space, where the viewer is fully drowned in a joint presence environment with digital visitors to the gallery that met in previous parts of the installation. The real-time camera captures the image of the spectator against the background of the chromacea and integrates it into a three-dimensional virtual space projected to the opposite wall, creating experience of simultaneous physical and virtual presence.
Thanks curator of Sasha Kuznetsk Gallery team HSE ART GALLYERY Vasse Prkova, Anastasia Shabashia Kozlova and friends of the Anastasia, Svetlane Naumova Group Ranking Daria Dogaeva, Polina Maleva, Lisa Ra, Vadim Revin, Alice Andreicheva for photographs of the exhibition to Roman Konova for reporting to Lena Lapina to the operator at the opening of Cyril Kustov’s filmmaker Philippe Gridneuv
