Being an artist has always required a certain commitment to a particular media or theme, until transdisciplinary approaches gained their influence. I would certainly consider myself part of a generation of artists who strive for art to transcend the borders of genres and media, and go beyond the singularity of method or message. Though sound is the main actor in my artistic research, this particular word "beyond" can describe the direction I follow in the most accurate way. 

I cannot call it a goal, since it’s not achievable. Yet, I believe the human subject is always inwardly drawn towards some uncharted else. As a sound artist, I call this “else” a “sonorous outplace”.

 

I am one of those with a complicated biography.

I was born in Poltava, Ukraine, and studied in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, where I emerged as an artist on the free jazz improvisational scene. I fled Russia due to the political situation to the only country I could legally stay in as an artist with unstable income and as a jew - Israel, where I haven’t found peace either.

This cannot but be reflected in my art. The majority of my recent works are informed by these conflicts and carry an anti-war message in varied implications. These days, questioning various forms of belonging has become an ethical and political obligation. And it's not only in the context of war that I would consider myself a poet of exile.

Yet, just as a person cannot be reduced to their place of origin, location or skin colour, neither can my art be circumscribed by these themes. 

 

Over the years, my research has encompassed various issues, from the questions of form that can speak on its own - as for instance politics of frequency, text as such, and the regimes of signs, that shape our culture, - to more contextual ones, such as crises we are dealing with on ecological, existential and socio-political levels. Yet, my main lenses are cosmological and cosmopolitical with a special interest in perceptual transmutation that may open a space for potential change.

 

Technically, my approach to sound is rooted in musique concrète, with an emphasis on acousmatic reversal of sonic signifiers, and a dynamic procession, employing psychoacoustic, live electronic and resampling techniques, from a travelling resonance to granular synthesis, aiming to alter not just pitches, durations or amplitudes, but perceptual identifications and, consequently, the listener’s state of mind.

 

Drawing on the ideas of autopoiesis and quantum mechanics, my recent research project “U” pushes a traditional acousmatic route to its limit: from unseen sound source to its “lavish absence”, taking a focused attention as the basis for both creation and transformation.

 

If art can have any purpose at all, it may appear as a drive to transform and to be transformed. 

 

The magnitude of the performances I undertake, though neatly prepared, is usually not predetermined - it strongly relies on space, time, chance, and those present. The actor appears in the process of listening.