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.
