AES+F, 2003-2005

Series of pictures, series of drawings, series of bronze sculptures (modeling by Alexey Shpakovskiy).

Action Half-Life is a multimedia project that investigates the aftermath of totalitarian ideologies and the perpetuation of totalitarian visual culture through contemporary immersive media, including its effect on the body. Taking its title from Half-Life, a popular first-person shooter video game released in 1998, this project employs the aesthetic language of popular Hollywood sci-fi films — specifically Starship Troopers and the Star Wars saga — in order to distill a genealogy of the contemporary iconography of heroism, understood to be a total effect of ideology and militarization of the body. Nubile youth in various tableaux bear futuristic weapons whilst assuming poses in allusion to the compositions of Alexandr Deyneka or Rodchenko’s photographs. Originally composed of a series of photographic digital collages, a set of drawings on paper, and a series of bronze and brass sculptures (modeling by Alexey Shpakovsky) entitled Warriors, the project also consists of two commissions: a series of photographic portraits for the Horstmann family, complete with military paraphernalia and set in a bucolic Alpine location, and a stainless-steel version of the Warriors in larger scale for the Kolon Industries building lobby in Seoul. In the photographic digital collages, teenagers and preadolescents dressed in white are transposed onto a desert wasteland, gazing off toward the horizon in anticipation of an ever-looming enemy. In the sculptural works boys and girls assume bellicose postures inspired by early Renaissance depictions of David, while brandishing heavy futuristic weaponry and bearing complex virtual reality headgear that serve to isolate each within their own experience. Although in totalitarian visual cultures, Soviet Realism especially, figures were pictured largely composed as a group in collective pursuit of a national cause, in the post-Soviet, globalized, capitalist phase marked by a global state of perpetual war concomitant with the emergence of the simulacrum, the project’s protagonists are depicted in profound alienation from one another. Twentieth-century totalitarianism is gone, but the effect of ideology and its influence on the body remain, leaving the young heroes 2003–2005 18 digital collages, 5 sculptures (bronze and brass cast, stainless-steel cast), 15 drawings in perpetual search for a new enemy — ever isolated, ever alienated, ever vigilant, and ever violent.

Photographing child models separately in a pavilion and rendering the final composition (as well as the weapons themselves — obviously the children held only props) using digital tools produces a quality of estrangement between the figures and serves as a critical existential commentary on the alienated nature of human existence in the age of the virtual — as in Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie or Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt.

Action Half-Life was presented at the 14th Sydney Biennial and the Rencontres festival of photography in Arles, France, in 2004, the FotoFest in Houston, Texas, in 2006, les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France, in 2008, and the 10th Havana Biennial in 2009. The project was also prominently featured in the 2007 collective’s mid-career retrospective at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg as well as in the survey exhibition Le vert paradis at the Passage de Retz in Paris the same year; then it traveled to MACRO Future in Rome in 2008. Works from the project have since been shown in different configurations at various museums and galleries around the world.