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Endless Attractions Museum
Ekaterinburg
The artistic collaboration of Anastasia Krokhaleva and Denis Perevalov, called the "Endless Attractions Museum", was formed in 2017.

Anastasia Krokhaleva became interested in 'light art' while doing a degree in History of Art. Her first light installation was created for the UNDARK festival in 2014. As an artist, she has been working with light and sound interactive installations.

Denis Perevalov is an artist, mathematician and programmer. Since 2010, he has collaborated with artists, performers and poets creating media installations and performances.

The artists explore the boundaries of the human in the modern, technologically advanced world. The essence of their work, often hidden under a thick curtain of sensors, algorithms, mechanisms and lighting devices, are post-apocalyptic, dystopic and eschatological topics, in which human beings are criticized, while robots are made human.
"What is the wind thinking about?"
About the project in the artist residence
As the humans' place in the world has been redefined, the term "Anthropocene" has become a buzzword in modern philosophy giving rise to a tendency to give vitality to the agents of the objective world and nature, which was previously considered inanimate.

In their work, the artists Anastasia Krokhaleva and Denis Perevalov have tried to capture and decipher the messages that wind sends to people. Using special devices, the artists measure the wind speed in the area of Shishim Hill in Ekaterinburg. Then this data is transmitted to an artificial neural network developed by the artists, which seeks to find logic in them.

The result of the neural network is presented as a dynamic image on a flexible screen, located around the area where the data has been collected. Thus, the "Endless Attractions museum" collective are metaphorically trying to present "the thoughts of the wind" as pulsating light.
As a part of our research project "What is the wind thinking about?" for the Shishim Hill artist residence, we planned to measure wind speed in the Shishim Hill area using video recordings of the fluctuations of fabric flags tied to ropes. We wanted to study the data by passing it through an artificial neural network, which could catch a logic in the way the wind blows, and then translate it into a pattern on the LED screen. While working on the project, we assumed that the neural network understands the wind, and it can predict changes in the graphs of its speed. Therefore, we created a recurrent neural network that solves this problem, and the values of the internal memory cells of a working neural network were shown as light strips demonstrating 'thoughts of the wind'.

The video with the light strips was shown at the final event at the residence as a 3D model of the LED installation, with its colours changing depending on the wind speed in the Shishim Hill area in real time. We then presented the project at the UNDARK festival as a finished installation demonstrating the recorded video.

"The Endless Attractions Museum" collective