TOTAL RECALL, January-March
1999

Just buy someone else’s recollections, and it will change your life!
Do you remember how Arnold Schwartzenneger did it in the film "Total Recall", when he applied to the company selling recollections?

Famous French artists came to Moscow to open a branch of this company. At the exhibition "Total Recall", together with Russian artists, they show their own and others’ recollections. You’ll see video programs, video installations, interactive computer projects, art works on CD-ROMs, and their performances.

Recollection is the most simple for man possibility to transfer himself into another time and space. You don’t need spaceships for such trip. Studying others’ recollections (in the form of books, films or other visual images), we get a unique opportunity to touch collective memory of mankind, to enter the worlds we have never imagined. The best example is Chris Marker’s CD-ROM "Immemory" presented at the exhibition, a garden of the artist’s recollections he had been gathering during his lifetime, trying to systematize them now.

The exhibition "Total Recall" will be running at Art Media Center "TV Gallery" from January 28 – March 10. (6, Bolshaya Yakimanka, metro "Polyanka", tel. 2380269, 2389666)

Participators (among them there are real "stars" of modern European art): Isabel Levenes, Frederick Lecaunt, Chris Marker, Ksaviet Moer, Planet Shawarma, Heavenly Commission (Sergey Anufriev and Arkady Nasonov), Factory of Found Clothes, Vladislav Efimov, Nina Kotel, Yury Leiderman, Andrey Monastirsky, Aliona Romanova, Vladomir Salnikov, Vadim Fishkin, Gore Chakhal, Aristarkh Chernishov, Maria Chuikova, Sergey Shutov.

Performances of French group "Planet Shawarma" will take place at clubs O.G.I. (Tryokhprudny pereulok 11/13, from Janua ry 16), Krai (Spartakovskaya Ploschad 14, performance "Tsunami – the Tunnel of Love", January 19), Luch (5th Monetchikovsky per. 5, February 18, 6 p.m. – 11 p.m.)

Within the framework of the exhibition the program Video Art from George Pompidou Contemporary Art Center's collection is presented.

The project has been executed with the assistance of: Soros Contemporary Art Center, State Contemporary Art Center (Moscow), AFFA (Paris), French Cultural Center (Moscow), company "PHOTO-technique by MAIL", magazines "Cinema Art", "Computer and Life", "Computer at Home", "Art Magazine", "Ptutch", "OM", radio "Station 106.8 FM".

TOTAL RECALL. Multimedia project
(Dedicated to Phillip K. Dick)

The exhibition is dedicated to Phillip K. Dick, one of the most famous authors of science- fiction, who introduced into modern cultural mythology the themes of memory falsification, problematical character of determining one’s identity in the situation of realities changing and being produced by virtual technologies. Such films as "Total Recall" and "Running Along the Razor-Edge", were based on his novels.
According to the film plot, "Total Recall" is the name of the company offering recollections for implantation. The exposition has been designed as this very company, where each of the presented works is a recollection of such kind being offered to the audience. Here the two versions of the plot are possible, either in the spirit of the film "Total Recall", where artificial rememberances can act as a sort of entertainment compensating the meagreness of the real life, or in the spirit of "Running Along the Razor-Edge" (which is also a film version of Phillip K. Dick), where the art works presented in the form of recollections, should make a "memory" of a non-human being, which, having been endowed by it, finds his human identity.

The question of the "user" of these artificial recollections remains open, as each of potential viewers is free to consider himself to be both an android longing to become man, and man wishing to change a frustrating ordinariness of his everyday life.

The problems of the project are connected with the idea of the relativity of one’s identity and its construction by appropriation of someone else’s memory, they are connected with the nature of a recollection itself, which must appear as something being alien to a personal experience of the artist, who prepares it for being "installed" into someone else’s memory. A recollection is no longer an object that could be archived or documented, it turns into a sort of gift, into some event discovered once again for letting others live. The fact that the works presented in the project, are supposed to be a sort of "recollections for implantation", makes their existence possible only on the bearer which is "being recorded", i.e. it can be either video or audio tape, diskette or CD.

The participators of the project are famous Russian and French artists: recolections’ exchange becomes at the same time the exchange of intercultural art experience.

One of the project’s goals is to activize the role of the art of new media in society’s development. We want to join several audiences, i.e. experts in contemporary art and in the world of computer and media technologies, and socially mobile environment of numerous fans of science-fiction...

The unique character of the project is defined by its indisputable thematic actuality for modern society. Touching the theme of memory, we try to understand what is going on with our human identity in the era of new technologies, new communications, which place us into a virtual off-screen world, turn us into recipients and retranslators of certain informative streams circulating through us. What is personality, what does it become in our electronic epoch?! Now, as Thimothy Leery said, "the Universe, from Galaxy to a tiny atom, consists of bites of infinitely diminished information unities", that, no doubt, affects the ways of the development of a human-being and mankind.

Phillip K. Dick is one of the most charismatic and remarkable authors in science-fiction. Unlike most authors of this genre, Dick did not construct his reality basing on different scientific discoveries or technical inventions, which either have been made or were just supposed to. His probable worlds are produced by visionary imagination possessing irrefutability of a dream, and at the same time by metaphysical search for a certain possible pattern of the world. Roger Zhelyazny said that, in case Phllip K.Dick had been born in the Middle Ages, he would have become a theologian, so that afterwards to be burnt at the stake and enter into history as the greatest heresiarch.

Among permanent motives of Dick there are parallel or virtual worlds, change of time, memory falsification, splitting of reality and consciousness as a result of using drugs, or of schizophrenic experience.

Being too intellectual and too far from entertaining optimism of scientific and technical progress to become popular easy reading-matter, his works have remained in the background for a long time. Phillip K. Dick gained real glory as a cultic author not in the 60s-70s, when his main novels were written, but in the 80s-90s, actually after his death (Phillip K.Dick died in 1982), to a great extent because of screen adaptations. No doubt, one of the greatest films of the recent decades is Ridly Scott’s "Running Along the Razor-Edge", and also "Total Recall" and "Babblers".

Born in 1928, Phillip K. Dick belongs to the same generation as William Berrows, Ken Kinzy or Thimothy Leery. The theme of perverted consciousness (no matter by what, be it psychotropics, or electronic stimulators, or psychic desease) attracts him not less than the traditional motive of the world changed either because of new technologies (as in science-fiction), or by new political regimes (as in social anti-utopias). Actually, the main theme of Dick is the problem of personal identity in infinitely modified and always escaping reality, which lost its habitual and recognizable face.

The site has been created with the assistance of the "Open Society Institute" (Soros Foundation). Russia