In my work I start from an emerged image — intuitive, coming from outside. It's not the concept that's primary, but a sensation, a vague form that sets the direction. Theory comes later — as a way, in Boris Groys' words, to understand why I do exactly what I do. Art remains a mystery; media is merely a way to partake in this mystery.
My projects are often connected with large datasets — emails in the "AVOID" project, thousands of video shorts in "Metanoia". I'm close to Lev Manovich's cultural analytics: working with data allows discovering what's invisible by other means, while it's important for me to maintain an artistic rather than engineering, statistical, or scientific optic. As a media researcher, I develop the term "post-archival art" — art that doesn't strive to preserve or reconstruct, but comprehends excess, decay, loss, and the infinite birth of data in the living body of the archive.
The archive ceases to be a stable form and transforms into a fluid medium, and the artist's task here is to outline the boundaries of the material (whether it's the quasi-archive of doorbells from the "Musical Fragments Shaper" project, personal photo archives with cut-out objects in the "Non-Object Photography" project) and find a form capable of condensing and filling with life figures that would otherwise inevitably disappear in the unceasing data flow.
The media I use are not tools of illustration, but ways to reveal their immanent power. Code is needed where only code can handle it: processing thousands of messages, creating video from thousands of clips. Code is necessary where we need to overcome the imposed limitations of proprietary software interfaces. Circuit design and microcontrollers in turn allow intervening in existing systems, hacking their logic — as in the misuse approach to clock mechanisms (in the "60BPM" project) or hacking an SD card and a tiny screen in the "Kino-Eye, or Cinema for Birds" project.
Electronics provides conditionally inanimate objects with agency, gives them voice, creating a visible and audible artistic image. We make a return from the digital world to the material, fragile realm subject to the entropy of the physical world. For the same reason, plotter graphics, with which computer art of the 60s and 70s began, remains an important practical direction for me: it's the classic attempt to draw a perfect line or perfect circle, only now with the help of a computer, code, and machine.
It's important for me to overcome the subjectivity of personal preferences and submit to the material, allowing it to dictate (and more often whisper) the form of the future work. In this sense I'm interested in the idea of "death of the author", in the sense that the artist acts not as creator and genius, but as a conduit of the material and ideas they work with.