GRAY CAKE

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Gray Cake is an interdisciplinary art duo currently based in Vladivostok. The two participants, Ekaterina Pryanichnikova and Alexander Serechenko, have pursued artistic careers since 2009 and 2006 respectively, and started collaborating in 2018. In her practice, Ekaterina explores experimental methods of manual printing, also works with video, photography, installation, and has curated a number of projects. Alexander combines programming, web development, and data analysis skills in multidisciplinary work, which covers installation, sound, net-art, web-art; he is active in the Moscow free-jazz improvisation scene.

Recommended by Helena Nikonole and Snejana Krasteva

Backlash, 2020. A specially trained neural network designed to determine whether a person belongs to protesters or the police, and applies retouching to hide the identity of protesters

Backlash, 2020

Game Over, 2019. In collaboration with Nikita Podryadov. In this project, the artists recreated historical photographs of people in the Vladivostok fortress, blending the past and the present with the help of modern technologies

Game Over, 2019. In collaboration with Nikita Podryadov. The Vladivostok fortress was never used in warfare, and for its soldiers, the war ended without ever starting

Game Over, 2019. In collaboration with Nikita Podryadov

Herbarium, 2020. In this video, we see the StyleGAN2 neural network imagine plants that do not exist in nature, accompanied with a soundtrack of a nightingale song processed by the neural network algorithm Magenta DDSP Timbre Transfer

NINA, 2019. This VR installation that recreates an experience of being in an infectious diseases hospital, where Nina, a roommate, shares anecdotes from her life. Albeit resembling a movie plot, they are part of a difficult and moving life of a real person

NINA, 2019. Nina’s incredible life becomes concentrated in a hospital ward and accidentally finds its viewer

Piaget Phenomenon, 2020. The Piaget phenomenon consists in the impossibility of comprehending quantity, size, or volume of objects, or length of time. The work is based on the video documentation of the breakdown of a nerve cell

SNOUM, 2018. SNOUM is a neural network trained to listen to dreams and show them through mimicking the mechanisms of dream generation in one’s mind during sleep

Vremyanka, 2020. This neural network was trained on photos of buildings; the constant change of the image reflects the impossibility of choosing one specific design, and such inconstancy lets one go beyond the limits of statics into a dynamic architecture

Dreams of the Machine. Exploring the idea of the “algorithmic unconscious”, the work features artifacts of neural network algorithms trained to reproduce the experience of human dreaming

Ten Thousand and One Nights. Sister project to Dreams of the Maсhine, the book explores the human experience of dreaming through bringing AI into the equation

Semiconductor, 2020. The sound in this audio-light installation is modulated by changes in the luminous flux, so the piece of music can only be heard with a photoresistor

Loom, work in progress. Meaning both a shadow, a mirage, and a weaving machine, here a loom is used by a neural network, which automatically creates new embroidery patterns based on existing archives

New East Digital Archive