NVAIR 2020 - International online exchange program for art residencies.
The program was founded by the NGO Congress of Cultural Activists on the basis of the Nazari Voitovich Art Residence, which has been working since 2017 and is physically located in the Ternopil region.
The aim of the program is to support young artists through international residency projects and artist exchanges with partner organizations in Germany and Slovakia.
This year, due to the pandemic, physical programs were postponed to next year, but in collaboration with Schafhof - European Center for Art Upper Bavaria, we decided to try the online format and got a successful collaboration of Ukrainian and German artists.
Artist is absent - a collaboration of artists with artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
Program curator Lucy Nychai
The presentation was made possible by the institutional support of the UCF

Artist is absent - collaboration of artists with artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

The creative processes began with a game of co-authorship involving a random selection program to move from complete control of the authors to the intervention of artificial intelligence, which already questioned authorship and rather provoked the collective creative consciousness. Perhaps this is closest to imitating the processes of collaboration that occur in physical programs with the close interaction of artists.
In the process, it was determined that the main idea for working within the project should be to find and study the processes of creation, which can interfere with outside activity and reflection on these processes.
Each artist had their own, and quite different, themes with which they worked before. These are the interaction of material and form, the transformation of the visual and the impact of time, conflicts and environmental disasters, practices with digital tools and interest in artificial intelligence. All this, intersecting in the process, turned into a project space in Mozilla Hubs.
The central hall was designed by Vartan Markaryan according to the curator's plan in cooperation with all participants of the program. This is a virtual model of our real program.
In the middle of 4 empty chairs is an image from the real central workshop of the Residence. An additional advantage in the virtual space is the difficult mobility, only regular users can feel comfortable there. There are 4 corridors in the central gallery, which lead to isolated halls with projects of individual artists. In general, the room is a virtual image of the real situation in quarantine as a whole.