International Festival of Modern Music and Media Arts

This week the First International Festival of Modern Music and Media Arts (MIGZ) will take place in Moscow.  The festival’s aim is to showcase new electronic music and related video installations from both Russia and other centers of digital art around the world.  The local contingent will include the work of St. Petersburg’s Dasha Kronberg (below).

In the minds of MIGZ’s organizers, the appearance of electronic art forms in Russia approximately twenty years ago is something worth celebrating and reconsidering in the light of new technical developments.  Of particular interest is the growth of Russian dance music from a performative angle – in other words, the increasing significance of the public themselves as an integral part of club-based performance.

By bringing together as many people as possible, both artists and audiences, these theories of collaborative creativity can both be discussed and enacted.  The unwashed masses look more than ready.

With direct reference to (and respect for) related Western events such as Barcelona’s Sonar or Amsterdam Dance, the staff at MIGZ have a full roster of activities over September 19 and 20.  These include both seminars and master-classes in the field of digital arts.  Over the next few days we will be highlighting some of the Russian musical acts.

One of these is Masha Era, who has collaborated not only with various experimental theater groups around Russia, but also abroad, most notably with Bruno Schnebelin in France.

Together with musician Il’ia Shapovalov, Masha Era now creates for MGIZ what she refers to as “tragic, grotesque, and comic songs,” typically in a light and under-produced electro or techno vein.

Several of her Victorian or belle-epoque leanings as evinced by these images (especially the swinging girl) combine in one of her presentations entitled “Non-Existence.”

This is, in effect, a “video installation in which a small girl, dressed in white, appears [from complete darkness] and sings a fairy’s lullaby.”

“She does so within the limits of a black, room-like cube.  Anybody entering the cube feels themselves outside of both time and space.  They are also divorced from their own introspection.”

This, together with several of her other musical and video works, plays upon what Masha Era sees as the enduring, if not “immense” beauty of fin de siecle photos.  In the context of a digital festival, these views take on a interesting significance.  As we saw with bands like Sansara a few days ago, there appears to be an increasing tendency towards what might be called digital decadence in web-based Russian music.

The initial freedom brought by Russian net-labels (the great escape from high-street merchandising) is at times more constraining than liberating.  Promotion across a faceless, unbounded expanse is difficult, to say the least.  Early, heady romanticism over web-based music on occasion becomes extreme cynicism, exacerbated by low public interest and the uneven distribution of fast connection speeds nationwide.

As a result, smiles turn to frowns, and we reach the sad, if not willful dourness of projects such as Masha Era.  As long as we avoid the risk of Japan’s hikikomori, though, all should be well; this is, after all, a problem of exteriority – of engaging the world and its daunting (new) dimensions.

In a very Russian manner, despite the massive advantages of digital, non-physical interaction across the world’s largest country, the only way to start working is apparently to travel for days on bumpy, rusty trains, huddle together in dilapidated buildings, sit down on wobbly chairs… and talk.

If it lessens the chance of the “tragic and grotesque,” we’re all for it.

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