The installation “Metabolic Design” attempts to create a model of a metabolic network. The term ‘metabolic’ is used in the project in a broad and flexible way. It refers to flows, particles, relationships, and infections that are unaware of scale, systems, boundaries, or “different worlds.” They freely slide along membranes, form interfaces for the interaction of anything with anything, redistribute resources and bodies according to their own algorithms. These metabolic particles can be a song, a fungal infection,a psychedelic a ritual, a software API, a standardized fastener, a property right, or a symbiotic relationship.
The appeal to design practice indicates the mode of interaction with this metabolic network. The artist understands design as collisions and negotiations between devices, organisms, societies, capitals, technologies, materials, and desires. Design is the ability to feel the metabolic, to enter into respectful and subtle interactions with it.
The video of the same name brings together the contours of several specific metabolic environments associated with Kotlin Island, composed of phytocenoses, sound spaces, urban logistics systems, power relations, and contagion.
The series of objects “Consoles” consists of partly found, partly constructed “devices” that combine everyday intimate situations of metabolic interaction and the technical and material infrastructure of human nests. In Consoles, this infrastructure, which usually carefully hides its face, reveals its own participation in the creation and nourishment of various worlds. Perforated aluminum, both semi-permeable and semi-supportive, acts as the morphological matrix of the consoles.
Especially for the project, poet, translator, and sound philosopher Nikita Safonov developed the text object Five Microtexts on Anarchitecture. The interaction between the exhibition project and Safonov's research is nonlinear in nature; they develop similar but distinct ecosystems that interact intensively at specific points of exchange, while generally attempting tocultivate a new, metabolic type of relationship between various artistic and theoretical assemblages.
