ART
/ DESIGN
CLOUD DATA
07/2023 – current
Computer Vision Software
TEAM:
Kate Umnova,
Artem Konevskikh,
Maria Korolkova
'Cloud Data' is the project dedicated to collaborative machine-human imagination, represented as a thousand-year-old guessing game of cloud watching and the resemblance of cloud forms. The project aims to explore the intersection of associative intelligence and creative thinking in neural networks and uses machine vision to conduct visual analysis of physical clouds in the sky. The software analyses cloud shapes and the associations they evoke through the lens of AI and human imagination. By combining human-made and machine-generated object guesses, we aim to create a new perspective on the art of cloud watching and to question the relationship between human and machine imagination.
AVRGD
Series of Images
10/2018 – now
Series of panoramas captured on a phone from moving vehicles: airplanes, ferries and trains. In this project I wanted to create averaged images of roads I travel, using a DIY approach to movement documentation. I let two machines (a vehicle and a camera) communicate with each other and remove my viewers' agency from the process.

THIS SIM DOESN'T EXIST
03/2023
Series of Images
A diffusion model generates images by finding familiar patterns within a latent noise. Human perception works in a similar way: we compare perceived information with models that emerge from our memory. To build a projection of the world at any given moment we divide incoming signals into segments that make sense to us. For this series, I produced a dataset of images in Sims 4 and used them to train a diffusion model. Understanding Sims as a digital projection of living experience I wanted to enclose the gap between the technology and a material it processes. I was interested to see into simulated imagination of a model, namely, what it 'sees' when it is able to 'close its eyes' and mark up an internal latent space without particular image or text instruction.


HAIR PINS
06/2022
Series of AR Filters
Hair begins to grow under the skin and releases the obsolete body to the surface. With the visible, dead, part of the hair, we perform the rituals of washing, combing and shaping. A series of AR filters 'Hair Pins' turns my head back to the viewer and weaves the projection of the face into different hairstyles. Hair can feel the movement of air and touch. Nerve receptors in the roots create a sensory map of tension that is unique to each hairstyle. AR medium allows one to combine a live experience with a non-living layer of a digital mask. Through a series of relationships between hair and fictitious hair clips, I wanted to give shape to my sensory states.
ЕСЛИ <ТОГДА> ИНАЧЕ
05/2025
Exhibition @ Si19
EXHIBITION SITE ↗
ARTISTS:
Anastasia Indeykina, Maria Knyazeva, Elizaveta Maiboroda, Adelina Fishova, Anna Chekushkina, Anastasia Chernenko, Stepan Shechkov
CURATORS:
Kate Umnova, Adelina Fishova
If birds fly low, it will rain. Gravity is constant, otherwise objects lose their balance. If we observe a cloud for a long time, we will see its shape changing. Conditions define expectations, but do not convey the nuances of the emerging experience. Between a directing condition and the result, a gap arises that eludes linear logic. If < then > else is a search for new forms of description that can preserve the complexity of the initial message. The exhibition explores nature, communication, time, emotions, the rhythm of habits. Proposing new systems of 'condition — response' relationships, the authors discover connections existed previously only as a forefeeling. Visitors' behavior influences weather, dance generates space, the movement of invisible wind flows becomes writing, attention gives birth to poetry.
CRITICAL SHIFTS
10/2024
Exhibition @ Barin Han
EXHIBITION SITE ↗
ARTISTS:
Greta Alfraro, Rong Bao, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Burçak Bingöl, Gülizar Çepoğlu, Marjolijn Dijkman, Sinem Dişli, FRAUD, Jim Hobbs, Merve İşeri, Saodat Ismailova, Ege Kanar, Jiabao Li, Marie-Luce Nadal, Yağiz Özgen, Julien Prévieux, Sümer Sayin, Pip Thornton, Dimitri Venkov, Emma Waltraud Howes, Cansu Yıldıran
CURATORS:
Maria Korolkova, Margarita Osepyan, Kate Umnova
Everything shifts. Everything is being shifted. Alongside larger geosocial and geopolitical migration of peoples and matter come daily shifts that remain unnoticed, yet often become agents of critical transformation, openness and new beginnings. By exploring these smaller movements of matter, form and meaning, Critical Shifts offers two techniques of following subtle alternations, impalpable variations, and illusive temporalities of constant change – extraction and displacement. ‘Critical Shifts’ showcases works of contemporary artists who embrace shifts – whether through material, metaphorical or invisible form – as a method of their diverse practices and consider extraction and Displacement as internal to any knowledge production. Fish are being caught in Spanish waters; women move silently through a deserted landscape in Uzbekistan; a word from a nineteenth century poem is inserted into a Google Ad and becomes a commodity; a water fountain outside a mosque in Istanbul becomes a drinking point for pigeons. We are surrounded by the spontaneous and the unknown. We navigate if by shifts.
OBSERVE NOT CAPTURE
05/2024
Exhibition @ GROUND Solyanka
Selected Publications:
GROUND Solyanka ↗
HSE ↗
Supported by:
P.Y.E ↗
ARTISTS:
Diana Artemyeva, Tatyana Vedernikova, Elizaveta Shturneva, Anel Eralieva, Masha Skvo, Adelina Fishova
CURATOR: Kate Umnova
TEXTS: Tatyana Vedernikova
The idea of ​​an artist, common in various cultures, not as a creator but as a person capable of discovering and detecting the invisible and elusive, is today reflected in the concept of artistic research. But the idea of ​​a “direct” gaze is problematic in itself – literal or metaphorical, it is always selective and mediated, and what is seen ultimately becomes a subject of interpretation. Camera lenses, digital screens, optical devices, technical tools turn out to be accomplices in the perception and retransmission of images. Thus, it was from the artists’ experiments with various digital media that the unifying motif of the exhibition was born – a reflection on the nature of observation, modes of vision and fixation. Tightly woven into everyday practices, from a close look at oneself to an attempt to capture the mysterious and unusual, which underlies any scientific and creative research, observation becomes both an object of reflection and an artistic gesture in itself.
MOUNTAINS FROM TEXT, RIVERS FROM VIDEO
03/2024
Exhibition @ ZIL Culture Centre
Selected Publications:
ZIL Culture Centre ↗
HSE ↗
ARTIST: Altana Ayushieva
CURATOR: Kate Umnova
DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE: Adelina Fishova
EDITOR: Arseniy Aksenov
Altana is a media artist from Buryatia, working at the intersection of the digital space of video and performance. Her research interest is grounded in decolonial methodologies and focuses on exploring different forms of perception of temporality, space and memory. At the exhibition, Altana reflects on the topic of power relations within language. Language hierarchies, from local to global, can be traced not only in the number of speakers or the status of the language, but also in the surrounding text - in the media space and in life. By observing how text behaves inside a video image, the author captures traces of peripheral-metropolitan connections. The exhibition invites the viewer to walk through a linguistic landscape that has its own mountains, rivers and plains. Text fragments are scattered between the works - some introduce an independent narrative, others complement the works or are part of them. The texts suggest immersing yourself in a super -dimension, finding yourself in the linguistic landscape itself , moving from physical space to one where the text exists on an equal basis with other objects.
DEMO VERSION
02/2023
VIRTUAL EXHIBITION ↗
Selected Publications: bbe↗
Virtual Opening↗
ARTISTS: Dina Salqin, Natalii Center, Kristina Komarova, Lisa Tukacheva, Natasha Savinova
CURATOR: Kate Umnova
VIRTUAL SPACE: Anna Novikova
In this virtual exhibition, aspiring artists take advantage of their own amateurism in mastering the digital instruments. They perceive technology not as a tool for the creation of digital products, but as a breaking point that opens up new visual and poetic possibilities. The focus of the exhibition is set on the discrepancy between reality and a model which represents it. This ever present gap ignites the creative search of the artists who playfully investigate how and when the border between simplicity and complexity, shell and code, procedure and error, shifts. Artists use popular software as an instrument for self-reflection and observation, and invite the spectator to join them in this insightful adventure.
WHAT TIME ARE YOU? A WALK IN GAME TIME
12/2019 – 2/2020
Exhibition @ Hse Art Gallery
Selected Publications: DTF↗, INGAME↗
ARTISTS: Akihiko Taniguchi, Pippin Barr, Dmitry Kavka, Bram Ruiter, Chris Collins, Petri Purho, Angela Washko, Ksenia Mikhailovskaya, Ilya Rodin, Ilya Grigoriev, Mit Game Lab
CURATOR: Kate Umnova
'What time are you?' is an exhibition, gathering games, machinimas and installations in simulated time modalities.
The concept of time is not material, it reveals itself through changes of variables. With the advent of new media and computer games we got an opportunity to fill physical time with virtual space and edit digital time according to our will: pause, accelerate, slow down. Control over the speed of changes turned the temporal variable into an applied parameter. Game timescale allows overpassing boundaries of possible: influence memory processes, connect different meanings through historical layers, stretch the intensity of personal comfort and have countless tries in search for alternative scenarios.
NEW JAPAN. THE OBSERVER EFFECT
4/2018 – 7/2018
Exhibition @ Solyanka State Gallery
Publications: Afisha Daily↗ , gendai talk↗
CATALOG↗
ARTISTS: Haruyuki Ishii, Takashi Makino, Soichiro Mihara, Yuko Mohri, Ryo Orikasa, Aki Sasamoto, Akihiko Taniguchi, Sayaka Shimada, Lyota Yagi, Jinichi Yamaoka, Onishi Yasuaki, Mai Yamashita + Naoto Kobayashi, exonemo, SHIMURAbros
CURATORS: Kate Umnova, Margarita Osepyan, Johan Rijpma
A group exhibition of Japanese new media art. Contemplation is one of the key elements to eastern philosophy, taking its origins in Zen culture and writing traditions. At the same time, observation allows one to investigate the laws of the physical universe. The term 'Observer Effect' implies an influence that a scientist has on the subject of their observation. Gathered projects turn hidden forces of nature (gravity, kinetic tension, electromagnetism, radiation and more) to the tangible, hearable and visible forms, allowing a viewer to become an observer himself and spend time contemplating.
STELARC'S POSTEVOLUTION:
HYBRIDISATION RATHER THAN TYPIZATION
11/2017 – 1/2018
Exhibition @ Solyanka State Gallery
Selected Publication: Popular Mechanics↗
ARTIST: Stelarc
CURATORS: Katya Krylova, Kate Umnova
A documentary project that was dedicated to the work of Australian artist Stelarc. Being the initiator of the alternative anatomy laboratory at Curtin University (Perth, Australia) Stelarc prefers to see artificial intelligence and robotics as part of a person's personality and has been editing his own body for decades. The project analyses his extreme experiments with the body within the discourse of cyberutopia, a post-gender, post-class, post-racial world of hybrids, aimed at ending the practice of classifying and typifying people by race, age, IQ and other parameters.
META MATTER. A GROUP EXHIBITION OF DUTCH ANIMATION ARTISTS
6/2017 – 9/2017
Exhibition @ Solyanka State Gallery
CATALOG↗
ARTISTS: Lucette Braune, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukacs, Daniel Weissek, Wouter Venema, Douwe Dijkstra, Robbie Cornelissen, Evelin Lohbech, Johan Rijpma, Studio Smack, Wiep Teeuwisse, Tomas Schats, Fons Schiedon

CURATORS: Margarita Osepyan, Kate Umnova, Mette Petters

'Meta Matter' is a group exhibition of Dutch artists who use animation as a way to create meta reality. Within the context of latest technologies, contemporary understanding of material reality has become a subject for reconsideration. Ways, in which motion pictures establish their truth claims react to the progress of computer skills and provide animation with the indexical power. Not only animation questions the traditional means of representing the physical world, it also extends objective narration with an opportunity to convey the protagonists' subjective feelings and emotional states.