The Sensual Experience of the City
Changes in Contemplation is a series of projects about subjective impressions of different cities. These installations can be called urban casts or portraits of cities.
In the series, the artist addresses the theme of human interaction with the world around him and asks the viewer the question: Are you a stranger to the place in which you live?

«Changes in Contemplation» is a sound installation consisting of nine sounding clay prints of Yekaterinburg.

The everyday triangle «Home-Work-Supermarket» hangs over the inhabitant of the modern metropolis. Confining ourselves to a minimum number of familiar places, we begin to perceive the space around us as an optional scenery, and the movement between locations - a forced necessity. Communication with everyday reality turns into a rare hobby. The project suggests approaching the city from an active explorer's position and appeals to the practice of a psychogeographic drift (a term introduced by Guy Debord) - a conscious admiration of the surroundings and enjoyment of randomness.

Subjective data in the form of impressions of the body of the city were collected using clay blanks while drifting through Yekaterinburg. The resulting casts, intuitively bearing the flair of ancient fossils and cave paintings, recorded recognizable forms and ornaments of reality. Subsequently, they were subjected to algorithmic analysis and sonification*. The texture of the clay was turned into spectrograms to play sound in the Max MSP program, which allowed the combination of traditional material and digital technology.

The project does not indicate the exact location of the creation of each clay blank, which absorbed grains of reality. The coordinates are hidden behind visual, tactile, and auditory elements that, like spots in a Rorschach test, trigger a flow of associations and invite the viewer to a prolonged search that goes far beyond the exhibition space. The viewer can expand the spectrum of perception of the city by looking, touching, and listening to the exhibit.

* A process in which mathematical data are used as formulas to create sounds combined into music.