Egor Kraft multidisciplinary practice incorporates AI, video art, and interventions, as well as traditional media. Playing with the boundaries of real and virtual, info and intox, medium and message, Kraft is a virtuoso in blurring the lines of language and semantic in his conceptual field.

His work investigates the ubiquitous mechanisms of technology and virtual development to question the human sense of self and environment in the era of massive machine-based innovation.

As part of his re­search based prac­tice he tends to de­velop spec­u­la­tive nar­ra­tives creating questions on how human irrational subconscious reasoning will co-exist with an omnipresent impartial machine agency, rendered by the technologies of today and tomorrow. Merging classical antiquity with artificial intelligence, the artist reflects on the broader anthropological perspectives of technology and explores the characteristic of media as conductive bodies, which, by essence, are significative of our time and space. In the video works presented in the Charon Cycle, the medium appears as the keystone to explore the definition of « human » and the relationship between « human cognitive perspectives » in this new geological epoch.

 

The work URL Stones aims to study the var­i­ous prop­er­ties and longevity of me­dia car­ri­ers that we as­sign the func­tion of stor­ing, trans­mit­ting and pre­serv­ing knowl­edge, data and in­for­ma­tion. The in­ves­ti­ga­tion will jux­ta­pose the same in­for­ma­tion be­ing held/​trans­mit­ted by two medi­a: stone and online website, which have fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent prop­er­ties. The pro­ject is not com­plete un­til one of two me­dia car­ri­ers is even­tu­ally lost, thus re­veal­ing it’s less durable qual­i­ties in site of the other. In The Link, the URL ad­dress is a full sen­tence: http://​this-is-the.link/​be­tween/​the/​real-and-vir­tual Fa­mil­iar syn­tax sug­gests that it's an ac­tive weblink. A web page lo­cated at the ad­dress given in the link, show­ing a streamed real-time 360-de- gree panorama cam­era view of its lo­ca­tion. By pro­vid­ing such an or­di­nary ac­tion as fol­low­ing the URL, spec­ta­tor lit­er­ally re-en­acts man­i­fested in the link tran­si­tion, emerg­ing be­tween the ac­tual sit­u­a­tion and its vir­tual replica. The work could be seen as both ma­te­r­ial or vir­tual, and even more ac­cu­rately as one, ex­actly in be­tween the two, demon­strat­ing how both gov­ern each other. And may also be re­fer­ring to both Alvin Luciers 'I Am Sit­ting in a Room' and Nam June Paik's 'TV Bud­dha'.

Kraft par­tic­i­pated in The 5th and 2nd Moscow In­ter­na­tional Bi­en­ni­als for Young Art, Vi­enna Con­tem­po­rary, Man­i­festa X, 1st Kyiv Bi­en­nale and group shows in ZKM, Her­mitage, Garage, MOMMA, MAMM, PERMM, Poly­tech­nic Mu­seum (Moscow).
Egor was nom­i­nated for var­i­ous prizes in­clud­ing the State In­no­va­tion Art Prize (RU), Kuryokhin Prize (RU) twice, Cre­ative En­ter­prise Award (UK) and the Pul­sar Prize (FR). He is a fel­low of STARTS Res­i­den­cies (EU) grant pro­gramme of 2019.
In 2017 he was in­cluded in the New East 100, a list of peo­ple, places and pro­jects shap­ing our world to­day by Lon­don based Calvert Jour­nal.