Filipp Groubnov: I think of science and physics in particular as one of the many perspectives that make the work. For me the interest has always been in the inquiry itself and this inquiry can take different shapes.
I was introduced to physics by my parents and specifically through the books of a brilliant scientist “Richard Feynman”. He is a well known figure in the scientific world not only because of his vast professional achievements, but also because of the way he could break down even the most complex concepts into simple and engaging terms without sacrificing the depth of the discussion. He had this very cunning inquisitive mind and when I was reading his books, what resonated with me was the way he asked questions, not only the science itself.

I think that is what influenced me the most and continues to influence the way I approach art. A way of asking questions, inquiring into your environment, seeing how relative everything is. That is why I don’t stay within the margins of “science” as an academic discipline, even though I find the knowledge that it provides to be extremely important. This knowledge is often integral to my work, but it doesn’t take the role of objective, dominant truth. It is maybe just one of the multiple questions asked in a situation that I create.

Introducing a living being into a situation changes a lot in terms of perception, both for the artist and the audience. Working with living beings also introduces different measurements of time, as the various organisms exist within their own rhythm and chronological scale. Not less important is a question of care which can get tricky within the exhibition setting.

I think the most important change in the audience’s perception has to do with the most obvious: engagement with something living. It can be considered that any object, any painting or a sculpture in a museum is living too since their physicality undergoes constant invisible movement. But in the classical western idea of ​​museums, the aim of the institution is to preserve objects of art and get rid of the change as much as possible.

A radically different paradigm is needed when part of an artwork is a living being. Simply because the nature of life lies in the constant change and development. I think the audience can sense the “aliveness” of a work and it changes how they interact with it. To me it seems that if a part of the installation includes, for example, living microorganisms, somehow the whole installation becomes part of a living system. And somehow naturally we just engage differently with the living beings. We don’t want to see them frozen in time. We want to see them move and evolve, curious as to where they are going and what they perceive. That is the kind of interaction I want to facilitate with my projects.

Creating “Pochva” was a long and a very introspective process. To date, it is probably the most personal project that I have ever made. I think this work was really born out of necessity. Pochva started as a way to reflect on some extreme changes happening around me and a way to strengthen a waning connection that I have with my birthplace.

Starting with the attempted revolution in Belarus in 2020 and following the shocking news of the Russian invasion into Ukraine, I have started to feel that many things that constitute my identity and my past are falling apart. Due to the possible issues with the military service I have decided to not visit Belarus since the war in Ukraine started, and the feelings of isolation together with the resentment of the invasion have been very hard to deal with.

I felt that in response to that I started being more and more consumed by the idea of ​​a Paradise as a kind of unachievable place/state that is somehow situated between the physical and mental reality. I became fascinated with an idea of ​​a place like Garden of Eden and I spent a considerable amount of time researching medieval “Mappae Mundi” and ways of how this place that exists between the physical and mental was mapped by different people throughout the history.

On the other hand I started researching game engines and how they can be used to facilitate between digital and physical data. I thought that in a way a game engine connected with the data from a physical sensor is kind of reminding me of a place like the Garden of Eden that exists as an interplay between mental and physical.

Eventually the concept of Paradise became a bit more of a background and the work shifted towards a much more personal direction. I ended up using my idealistic memories of the Holy Spring in the village of my grandparents and the electricity produced by the microorganisms living in the soil of that village.

History in general plays an important role in my practice. However, when I work with history I treat it as an active, living being. I am not so interested in using the past as a kind of a metaphorical apparatus or a fixed object for worship. In my opinion history is an interaction in itself. A changing entity physically present in the environment, the genetic code and in the landscape of the humans mind.

When it comes to the Soviet Union, personally I just have a very strong fascination with it. It was such a unique and disturbing configuration of many cultures and circumstances. Culturally it was a time of many discoveries, avant-garde movements and extremely futuristic visions, but also the time of censorship and widespread desperation. I grew up on the ruins of those futuristic visions in an undefined cultural wasteland. Reflecting on Soviet time for me is like studying ruins of ancient Egypt or Greece.

Thinking of the differences in interpretation of various audiences I just accept the fact that it will always be a certain kind of unexpected combustion of the viewers own cultural heritage and the notions communicated in the piece. The truth is that my projects are mainly exposed in the countries whose population doesn’t have a very strong cultural understanding of Soviet identity. And for me that is not a problem. I think here lies the difference between the work being a kind of a carrier of the message versus the work being a space of negotiation. And I am much more interested in the later.

To answer this question, I think it is best for me to start with telling about an approach I have to my own practice. I started within the more classical fine arts background, where the relationship between the audience and the artwork is often classified as an interaction of a viewer and a cultural object. This cultural object being exposed as an artifact in itself and a historical signifier. In this kind of setting the “viewer” is usually positioned outside of the work, as they are invited to contemplate the product of a foreign culture or of a foreign mind from a distance. That is the experience that I have with the way artworks are often presented in museums and galleries.

I am interested in a different kind of interaction between the viewer and the artwork, which in my case is usually a situation rather than an object. At the moment I am thinking of my own works in terms of creating spaces for negotiation. In a sense that the goal is not in creating a finalized object, but rather a kind of situation that can change and evolve meanings and physical attributes. Where the viewer enters the work as a co-creator or a co-negotiator of the meanings.

To go back to your original question: I think that the value of the artists is exactly within their ability to foster this re-negotiation that involves the “viewer” and the “public”. Narratives of utopia and dystopia are spaces of negotiation too. When an artist can open up these spaces and allow for new visions to be crafted with the audience that are not outsiders, but are subjects of the work – that is very powerful in my opinion. I think in that way we can achieve profound change in the future imaginaries.

If the question is whether or not I am concerned that AI can take over artistic expression, I can say that I am not troubled at all. There are various other ethical concerns that AIs can invoke. These concerns are well addressed by some artists who talk about bias in the algorithms, shift in warfare that the automation brings, etc.

I don’t think that algorithms can limit artistic expression, because in my opinion humans creativity is inextricably connected to technology. Starting from the time someone came up with the idea of ​​using pigment to outline the silhouette of their hand on the wall of a cave, and continuing into the era when the oil paints were invented and later when the camera was introduced. Each of these inventions profoundly changed the creative expression.

I believe it could be argued that creativity itself is not a static quality within the humans, but rather a mode of interaction with the environment and technology. The invention of the camera forever changed the media of painting and storytelling. One could say that it took away the jobs of the realist-painters, however that would be neglecting the multitude of opportunities that the world of cinema opened up.

I feel that the development of AI will forever change all aspects of art making. That is happening already. Hard to predict where it will take us. The only thing sure is that we will once again have to re-evaluate what it means to be humans. But in my opinion there is no need to worry about AI competing for the area of ​​artistic expression. We will be making some new forms of expression together.

Recently I have been looking more closely into the development of Artificial Intelligence and specifically Large Language Models (LLMs). I am really interested in seeing where this technology will go, as it is developing so fast right in front of our eyes. Since I have a long-going fascination with the humans mind, I have been skeptical towards AI initially. However, I am seeing now that it is growing into a very promising and complex entity that will for sure change a lot, if not all aspects of humans and planetary life.

In the coming projects I will start integrating LLMs and I want to see how we can extend our intelligence and our relationship with the environment through them. In one of the coming projects I want to focus on the subject of prediction and forecasting. Which I see as very important modes of interactions that humans use to conjure meanings and strategies.

I think current AI models like Chat GPT already changed how we interact with digital systems and that will only change more. Integrating an agent will be perceived as semi conscious within the system of the work will definitely require the viewer to reassess a lot of things about themselves and to look at the work differently.