Thesis Chapters by Anton Makarevych (Lapov)
KHARKIV PHOTO FORUM, 2020
In his article Lapov provides and analyses new archival evidences of artistic practices of East-U... more In his article Lapov provides and analyses new archival evidences of artistic practices of East-Ukrainian sound and video artists in the 1990s. Emphasis is put on unique pathways of aesthetic evolution which happened outside mainstream of East-European art.
Drafts by Anton Makarevych (Lapov)
This essay revisits Karl Marx’s early and late writings to develop an anthropological perspective... more This essay revisits Karl Marx’s early and late writings to develop an anthropological perspective on the relationship between humans and machines. Focusing on the concepts of species-being, life-activity, and the inorganic body articulated in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and linking them to the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, the paper interprets machines both as organs of capital and as potential organs of the collective worker. Through close readings of Marx and engagement with contemporary commentators such as Judith Butler, Matteo Pasquinelli, and Nick Srnicek, the essay argues that the integration of machinery into capitalist production intensifies alienation by transforming living labor into the inorganic substrate of capital. At the same time, Marx’s dialectical framework reveals the possibility of overcoming this alienation: as machine-based productivity reduces necessary labor time, it also creates conditions for the free development of human capacities beyond wage labor. By reframing the machine as part of humanity’s “inorganic body,” the essay suggests that appropriating machinery as a collective organ of species-being is essential for addressing the crises of late capitalism, including environmental degradation and the precaritization of labor.
Affective Mobilization is an interactive audio environment designed to investigate collective bod... more Affective Mobilization is an interactive audio environment designed to investigate collective body awareness and affective states through real-time sound synthesis. The system integrates three core subsystems—computer vision for tracking participant positions, custom handheld devices for gesture recognition, and a sound engine implemented in Pure Data—linked via OSC communication. Machine learning techniques, including k-nearest neighbors and Hidden Markov models, are applied to movement and gesture data to generate non-linear mappings between participant actions and audio output. By avoiding conventional visual immersivity and instead prioritizing sensorimotor interaction, the project examines how non-intuitive interface design can disrupt metaphorical stereotypes and foster novel modes of embodied communication. The technical framework is embedded in a mixed-media installation that underscores the artist’s experience as a Ukrainian refugee and situates the work within a decolonial and geopolitical context. The paper discusses both the implementation of the system and its capacity to provoke reflection on collective responsibility in conditions of global crisis, demonstrating how interactive art can operate as both an experimental interface and a mode of affective mobilization.
Let Us Say This Again, Opaquely. A Natural Oasis? A Transnational Research Programme 2016-2017. – Milano: Postmedia Books, 2016
A dichotomy between the global/local, the modern/traditional, the cultural/barbaric, the industri... more A dichotomy between the global/local, the modern/traditional, the cultural/barbaric, the industrial/agrarian, the written/oral as a product of logic generated by the modernity project of the West is what presently governs the principle of relations between the "centre" and the "periphery". To describe global epistemological colonisation, postocolonial theoreticians Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo who refrain from using the historic term "colonialism" which tends to give insight into economic and political relations employ the concept of coloniality, thus accentuating the discursive foundations of modernity which determine the conditions of power-submission interrelation in various areas of expertise. In particular, we are concerned with the behavioral peculiarities of the domain of artistic production, the latter being the scope of research undertaken by the nomadic curatorial school A Natural Oasis? which has provided the framework for this text. The task set by this educational platform is to create an artistic project that would enable deconstruction of the colonial mechanism per se, resulting in a redefinition of the categories "centre" and "periphery". With the above in mind, the international curator group made a number of journeys to several European countries: San Marino, Malta, Montenegro, and Kosovo (one of the authors was refused entry to the latter due to strained diplomatic relations between this country and Ukraine). A critical analysis of processes involved in the making of cultural identity which are typical of such "peripheral" territories, and a reflection on implicit mechanisms of "field research" techniques of observation over the Other have dictated the discursive-conceptual framework of this text where the former determines the authors' focus on the investigation of the Ukrainian sociocultural context and the latter directs attention to the ethical agenda. Introduction of a new locus on the geocultural map of A Natural Oasis? project is justified, apart from the personal bias of the authors, by the specific sociocultural peculiarities of this country which identity had been shaped at the crossroads of post-colonial, post-imperial and post-Soviet growth trajectories determining its marginal geopolitical position regardless of a sizeable territory. While in the case of Southern countries, such as Malta or San Marino, the point at hand is what Roberto Dainotto has labelled "marginalisation of one's own internal boundaries" referring to the perception of the South as a defective version of the North, the recourse to this context raises a much wider range of issues associated with the theme of cultural orientalism and subjectification of the Other. Furthermore, the subject-object model of relations between Europe and Ukraine as a periphery of its cultural ecumene makes it possible to examine the matter of marginalisation through the cause-effect relationship of both coloniality and self-colonisation. Aside from identifying a series of symptomatic phenomena peculiar to the Ukrainian cultural space, the present text problematizes the sheer fact of its representation by unveiling the repressive nature of strategies and practices hidden beyond narrative formations. A deliberate positioning of phenomena and manifestations of Ukrainian reality in museum cards used for the exhibit stocktaking and cataloguing mimics the mechanics of European positivist scientific knowledge with its constant commitment to categorisation as a means of generalizing the output of artistic and, in a wider sense, cultural production with a view to subsequent discursive exploitation thereof. Without making claims to a comprehensive investigation of the Ukrainian sociocultural landscape, this analytical effort rather represents an attempt at "a topographic survey" of its individual fragments whose partially intuitive and hypothetical nature merely provides a vector for further critical research of the issues at hand: ambivalent connection between "documentarism" and "ethnographism" (Card No.1); archiving principles and epistemological instrumentalisation (Card No.2); search for cultural identity vs. self-exoticisation (Card No.3); institutional mimicry to the beat of cultural globalisation (Card No.4); hybridity of post-colonial subject (Card No.5); artistic practices and their circulation against the background of a grave political crisis (Card No.6). The present text aims to develop knowledge of itself and own subjectness, with the sincere discourse and internal energy seen not only and no so much as a strategy of physical and symbolic resistance (negative model) but rather as a re-existence experience in which the tendency towards slavish imitation of the Centre is replaced with subversive borrowing of its strategies and techniques in order to challenge it.
Papers by Anton Makarevych (Lapov)
The Importance of net.art Legacy and the Right to Communicate
Revista Vórtex, 2021
His artistic practice combines methodologies of humanities with computational aesthetics ideas. H... more His artistic practice combines methodologies of humanities with computational aesthetics ideas. He focuses on exploring ecosystems via data visualization and sonification, research of militarization of societies by means of web-based art, problematics of alternative communication systems through the lens of radio-art.
Uploads
Thesis Chapters by Anton Makarevych (Lapov)
Drafts by Anton Makarevych (Lapov)
Papers by Anton Makarevych (Lapov)