I started my artistic activity with painting, coming from panel painting through experimentations with different textures and surfaces to the work with various media. I wanted to integrate the time aspect in my works, so I started to deal mainly with the time-based art forms like film, performance and especially with video.
Applying new media in my artworks, I realised certain theoretical and conceptual problems related to the use of technologies in contemporary art. In recent years I am getting more and more interested in exploring the changes, which the latest technological boom brings to current art practice. Observation of this rapid intrusion of new technologies into all spheres of human activity makes me think about what in these circumstances nowadays can be considered art and how I can deal with this as an artist.
In my recent projects I have started to work with the several aspects of this problematic, which are especially interesting and relevant for me now.
The first thing which interests me in the relation between art and technologies is the extent to which art itself can be understood as a technology, and vice versa, to which extent technologies can be seen as art. An ancient greek word "techne" meant both art and skill, and this connection still remains meaningful and intriguing for me.
The interplay between art and technologies became a subject of concern in my most recent works. So, in the sound composition "Song for the Media Art Muse" I want in a slightly ironical form to reflect the motivation, which drives contemporary artists to use or not to use new media in their art practice.
In the project "The Bolek and Lolek Cosmos" the development of a utopian technology became for me a sort of a new art form and another way of artistic expression. At the same moment in "Bolek and Lolek.." I also played with the idea of the ephemerality of technical progress. The utopia of a possibility to solve all the human problems with the help of all kinds of tools and gadgets has an evident romantic aureole, to which I tried to allude in this work.
In the opera-performance "Beguiling Orpheus" I was rather interested to scrutinise the problem of the dissolution of an individual in a completely artificial technological environment. But I considered this issue not just from a common perspective of a passive man attacked by technologies, but rather I want to explore the possibilities of an interaction between a person and an artificial environment, putting a real actor into virtual scenography in the context of the live stage performance.

maxim tyminko