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“Amazing images from the height of communism showing how a futuristic and all-conquering Soviet Union might have looked in 2017 have emerged in Moscow. The fantastical prediction of an idealized communist paradise - with the West defeated - was made almost half a century ago and envisaged Russia as it marked the centenary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In this brave new world, there are under-ice cities in the USSR's polar regions where the season was 'eternal spring' with their own tropical sea and beach. Heat is obtained from 'the bowels of the earth' by 'underground boat 'moles' made from extremely heat-resistant steel' tapping into sources of perpetual energy. And Soviet apparatchiks tamper with nature to reverse two of Siberia's mighty rivers - the Yenisei and Ob (the fifth and seventh longest in the world) - to flow into the Caspian Sea, instead of the Arctic Ocean, to feed states of the union. The slide show was intended as a propaganda filled comic strip for Soviet children in 1960 allowing a glimpse the exciting future of their country, which - in fact- was to collapse in ruins in 1991 after nations such Ukraine voted for independence.” 

Read more here. 

Some images from the story below:

The front cover of the propaganda comic strip depicts a futuristic world of cities in the sky, high speed trains and space shuttles venturing into outer space. The western capitalists have been defeated but attempt a feeble fight back in the story.

The cartoon story predicted that the Soviet Union would be at the forefront of technology with heat obtained from 'the bowels of the earth.' The roots of the Union came in 1917 when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government.

The picture in the backdrop shows a towering skyscraper, aircraft dotted across the sky and a high speed train traveling on a glistening white bridge. The portrait painted in the cartoon was far removed from reality and just four years after the piece was released the country encountered a period of economic stagnation from which it would never recover.

Children of 2017 look out to a projection of an immaculate city with blanket white buildings and roads.  'The Era of Stagnation' is deemed to have started in 1964 under the rule of Leonid Brezhnev and lasted until 1985 when Konstantin Chernenko was in office. Experts say the state over budgeted on its military which lead to a prolonged period of economic decline.  

The image shows how 'bridges stretched over bottomless gorges' connect the vast Soviet Union together. It suggests that even mountains, which were blown away by 'precisely-aimed nuclear explosions,' cannot stop the rise of communism nor stunt the growth of the country.

'The sea that was just recently drying up now accepts new deep rivers,' reads the script. The Soviet Union, which was then presided over by President Nikita Khrushchev, shows it can play god in 2017 managing to beat nature by reversing two of Siberia's mighty rivers - the Yenisei and Ob (the fifth and seventh longest in the world) - to flow into the Caspian Sea instead of the Arctic Ocean.

This map shows the tumultuous route the waters would have taken to reach the Caspian Sea which would have served the Soviet states of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. This underlined in no uncertain context the strength the Union would have upon its centenary year.

Propagandists also claimed that the socialists state would build a dam across the Bering Strait linking Russia and an Alaska 'liberated' from capitalism. The dam can also accommdate 'nuclear powered trains' on double decker railway lines. 'See nuclear powered trains rushing across it. The dam blocked a cold current from the Arctic Ocean, so improving the climate of the Far East' the caption reads.

Elsewhere, defeated Western 'imperialists' have been banished to a remote island in the southern Pacific and are trying desperately to claw back land by building bombs with the manpower they have left.

Not content with conquering the world the communists were able to reach the depths of space to expand the Soviet Union's burgeoning territory.  The state consisted of now 15 separate countries including European nations such as Estonia, Moldova and Latvia. The union also encompassed Central Asian powerhouses Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

'Photonic rockets - interstellar ships - swept across space at near the speed of light, heading for the nearest, yet so distant planetary system of Alpha Centauri,' the script reads as a scientist gives a class to attentive students.

After an introduction to the impending achievements of the Union the story focuses on a boy called Igor who was awoken by another technological advancement of the regime. The boy's alarm clock sends out a hand to pinch its owner's nose to wake them.

by Peter Kirn

Excerpted from here

Wassily Kandinsky "Red Yellow Blue", 1925, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

“Russia has put image to music in the form of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, in Wassily Kandinsky’s vibrant abstract paintings and numerous oversized dramatic spectacles. But lesser known are the country's experiments with electrified visual music, particularly those conducted in the Soviet period. These strange, ahead-of-their-time inventions are now being reborn with a new generation of artists.

VISION INTO REALITY

Jean Delville's cover illustration for  Scriabin's Prometheus: The Poem Of Fire composition

In theatre, dance and music, Russian and Soviet-era artwork used every available technology to achieve a trans-disciplinary, immersive aesthetic experience. They continued to innovate with machine-driven optics and light when many other electronic music experiments were left literally in darkness. And if the composer Richard Wagner only theorised about Gesamtkunstwerk, it was the Russians who attempted to turn their fanciful visions into reality.

In this age of electrified machines, Russia's fascination with visual music can be traced to its spiritual forefather, the composer Alexander Scriabin. He found esoteric, spiritual meaning in the connection between colour and sound, with different musical notes producing synesthesia – the merging of one sense with another. To recreate the stimuli in his mind, he even added a line for colour organ ("clavier à lumières") to his mystical tone poem Prometheus: The Poem Of Fire from 1910. That creation splashed colour around the theatre in time with shifts in the music.

CITY AS SYMPHONY

Arseny Avraamov's "Ornamental Sound Animation", patterns that would be used as the basis for sound production

In early Russian visual music creations, you find a connection between music and painting. Futurist Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné's "Optophonic Piano” instrument created in 1907 employed hand-painted discs, spun in front of lights by a mechanical apparatus controlled from a keyboard.

Avant-garde composer Arseny Avraamov (1886–1944) was known for ideas like his raucous Symphony Of Factory Sirens. This work used an entire city as its instrument – employing factory sirens, automobile horns, the foghorns of the Soviet naval fleet alongside machine guns, cannons airplanes, a large band and choir performing the socialist anthem “Internationale”, among many other elements – all to create a massive-scale composition.

KGB AND SOVIET SPACE PROGRAM

Diagram of Evgeny Sholpo's Variophone that produced "ornamental sound"

In fact, it's possible to imagine an alternative history of the synthesizer, one in which optical-electronic technology is employed in place of analogue (and later digital) circuitry. Drawn to the uniquely organic sounds that can be created, artists are reinterpreting this history, made accessible by the internet and by researchers like Andrey Smirnov, a specialist in the history of Russian visual and musical technologies. Derek Holzer and Mariska de Groot have each been inspired by the earlier inventions to work with the medium of opto-mechanical-electronic tone wheels. These spinning discs transform patterns of light and shadow into simultaneous sound.

Other works are just now coming to light. Some of these productions had military backing for research into the effects of audiovisual stimulation on different subjects. The KGB, Soviet air force and space program each supported the development of light instruments as technology that might eventually have intelligence or aerospace applications. Asking my Russian friends with some expertise in the area is itself a strange experience – they're initially surprised I don't know about the connection, then cagey about details, which were tightly classified in the age before Glastnost.

LIGHTING UP SOVIET LIVING ROOMS

Bulat Galeev's "Indicator"  a light and sound instrument designed for Soviet spacecraft.  Courtesy Institute Prometheus

These projects might seem like off-hours hobbies – and the engineers certainly had to frequently scrounge for parts, but the USSR bureaucrats evidently believed in their usefulness to the Soviet agenda. None other than legendary rocket engineer Sergey Korolev requested the "Indicator" to be produced by Bulat Galeev – a light and sound instrument designed for spacecraft. Instead of blaring klaxons and blinking buttons, the Indicator showed data as swirls of abstract colour – looking more like science fiction, or at least your screen saver, than what you'd expect from an average 1960s control panel. The design saw real-world tests, even if lighter, more compact conventional instrumentation won out in practice.

Following military experimentation, the light organs were popularised for the regular Russian citizen. An invention called "Disco" was mass produced, and brought sound-reactive coloured lighting effects to Soviet kitchens and living rooms. For those who couldn't afford to buy such things, DIY was an option. The Moscow Central Radio Club managed by the state even published electronics diagrams of inventions from the USSR as well as the West in pamphlets, and in the days before the internet, would respond to written inquiries from hobbyists electronics creators. This meant that psychedelic coloured lighting was a regular feature in music performances.

If you didn't encounter them there, you might even have some mandatory exposure to audiovisual installations in the relaxation rooms of factories, like the auto production facility at Kamaz. There, the USSR hoped, the abstract animations would sooth workers and boost productivity.”

More about The Mars Generation can be found here.  

About:

“Since NASA’s first mission to Mars in 1964, humanity has seen the planet as the ideal target for the first interplanetary space mission. In The Mars Generation, director Michael Barnett delves into space exploration’s history and current state while looking beyond technology to what we will really need to get to the Red Planet: the power of youthful dreams.

Through amazing archival footage of the space program as well as interviews with a number of scientists and astronauts—including Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and Sunita Williams—Barnett provides an overview of the history and current state of space exploration. The film juxtaposes this with a revealing and intimate look at participants in NASA’s space camp for youth. These self-proclaimed “space nerds” aspire to be the scientists, engineers, and technicians on whose shoulders humanity will reach the Red Planet. Their infectious passion and optimism is the heart of the film, leaving little doubt that if given the support and opportunities they need, they will get us there.”  

- Sundance

Also see here.

Find it on Netflix here. 

The Institute for Communist Crimes argues that banning Communist-era films from television would reduce nostalgia for the old regime, but movie buffs say it’s an attack on the country’s cinematic heritage.

Fatjona Mejdini

'Butterfly in My Cabin', an Albanian film from 1988. Photo: YouTube screenshot. 

“The proposal from the state-funded Institute for Communist Crimes to ban movies produced during the communist era from television has triggered a public backlash and opened up debate about the place that Communist-era art should have in today’s Albania.

Agron Tufa, a well-known author and the director of the Institute for Communist Crimes, told BIRN that a draft recommendation that it intended to eventually become a law being prepared in collaboration with other institutes.

"The initiative is led by us and aims to contribute to the decommunisation of society. The movies during that time served as a massive brainwashing tool to convey genocidal propaganda and hate amid classes," Tufa said.

"Today we are at risk, since the showing of these movies keeps alive and activates nostalgia for the dictatorship... They do great damage to public health and are an ethical and aesthetic catastrophe which affects the younger generation," he added.

He said that the overwhelming majority of Communist-era films should be banned from television and those few which are not so full of propaganda should only be aired with a studio announcement beforehand about the reasons for showing them.

The institute has no official powers to do anythkng more than propose new legislation.

But its proposal has sparked negative reactions from the public, including criticism from people who were involved in the films themselves.

Kolec Traboini, who served as a screenwriter at the Kinostudio production house for 16 years during Communism, said he considered the initiative unacceptable.

"The Albanian movie is history, although some don't want to accept it. It is one thing to hate communism and another is to know the realities of that time," Traboini wrote on Facebook.

The actress Monika Lubonja also expressed concern over the initiative, and said she appreciated the work of her older colleagues under Communism.

"If somebody asked me, at what time would you want to be an actress, I would definitely say at the time of [Communist-era actresses] Marie Logoreci, Tinka Kurtit, Margarita Xhepes… a time when art had spirit, sacrifices, emotions and love," Lubonja wrote on Facebook.

Some also suggested that it would be unfair to ban the films produced under Communism while some people who held important positions under the former regime are still active in political life.

Many also expressed nostalgia about the good acting and the memorable quotes from Communist-era films that have remained in the public mind.””

Source: Balkan Insight

By Sarah Rose Sharp

Moon Deed (image courtesy Julio Orta)

“Can we make art that transcends petty terrestrial concerns? The Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon (MOCAM) has drawn together a diverse group of contemporary artists (including myself) to create work for a speculative museum that might one day exist on the moon. MOCAM was conceived in 2016 by visual artist Julio Orta in response to what he views as “the inevitable creation of human communities on the moon in the near future.” The museum purchased a plot on the moon through a website that issues deeds for property. The territory spreads over 20 acres in area D6, Quadrant Charlie, Lot Number 1/0581-0600, located 001 squares south and 001 squares east of the extreme northwest corner of what the deed terms “the recognized Lunar Chart.”

“Although governments and private entities are working on tourism and colonization of the moon, they seem to have no concern whatsoever for the arts,” states the MOCAM mission statement. MOCAM is working to address that situation, and in conjunction with the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, has begun a process “dedicated [to] displaying the most interesting, cutting edge, relevant art from the world, moon habitants, or in the case of future encounters, any other form of intelligent life we may meet.”

The inaugural show, Mystic Hyperstitians in the Heart of Empire, is being staged as a thought experiment of MOCAM on its online digital proxy, but the same works are also physically part of a bigger show, The Museum of Real and Odd, which opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary (IndyMOCA) Art early February. Mystic Hyperstitians was curated by Joey Cannizzaro, who chose to organize the show around the following prompt: “If extolling the virtues of self-expression and individual genius actually empowers capitalist ideology, then how can artists make work that is anti-conformist without promoting the values of individualism and its attendant isolation?”

After being invited to collaborate with artist Cedric Tai on his piece for the show, I took the opportunity to interview MOCAM founder Julio Orta and inaugural curator Joey Cannizzaro over email, who unpacked the inspiration, implications, and future prospects of the museum.”