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Projects
In my free time I like to create (often philosophy-inspired) art pieces and pursue artistic projects in collaboration with people who have various skills different from mine! Here is some stuff I’ve done in the past couple of years.
In Search of Spider Consciousness – an immersive art installation in Spain, 2023
Inspired by the latest research on the arthropod cognition and possible dimensions of consciousness in different animals, I teamed up with 7 talented people with various different skills to create a giant sculpture of a Portia jumping spider, displayed at the Nowhere Festival in Spain. Visitors would walk under the shining legs, stretching out on both sides of a ca. 12m-long and 3.5m tall structure, and eventually enter the spider's head to be immersed in the spider’s point of view on the world, as represented obliquely (and, of course, partially and imperfectly) through a display of dancing LED lights paired with an original music.
It took us ca. 6 moths of design and preparation, and 5 days in the desert to build this installation. The trip inside the spider's "mind" offered a meditative experience and aimed to inspire curiosity towards other non-human forms of cognition and the potential for conscious experiences in distant creatures.
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Team:
Daria Zakharova – creative lead
Ivan Isakov – engineering, electronics
Paulo Ricca – lights, creative coding
Andrey Novikov – music
Stephen Allwright – build
Lucy Onischenko – design, logistics
Michael Haber – build, logistics
Maribeth Rauh – design, logistics
"What it's like to see like a jumping spider?" – a VR display in London and Bristol, 2024
Based on the physical installation we built in Spain, Ivan Isakov and I created a VR version of the Spider experience to showcase at the LSE Festival and later at the educational workshop for children at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in 2024.
During the LSE Festival, the VR display was coupled with a panel I organized with the support of Jonathan Birch and the ASENT team on the nature and the current state of research on the Invertebrate Minds. The panel brought together people from science, art and philosophy, to discuss different perspectives on the study and representation of the minds of arthropods and other invertebrate animals.
After the success of the LSE Festival display, I joined the project led by Simon Brown, Ross Pain and Giulia Palazzolo to organize a two-day workshop at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. This workshop was dedicated to teaching children to imagine other animals' perceptual systems (other exhibits included bats and weakly-electric fish!). Ivan Isakov and I modified the VR experience to suit younger children, which was extremely well received by both kids and adults.
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I am grateful to my supervisor Jonathan Birch and my colleague Simon Brown for showing so much enthusiasm and support for the "spider-project". With theirs and my main collaborator and partner Ivan Isakov's invaluable support, I was able to turn a philosophy-inspired art piece into an educational display for the general public.
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