Anna Frants, F-Space (New York), President

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Established in the Internet at the end of 1999, the RusskiAlbum site keeps compiling a catalogue of St Petersburg artists of the second half of the 20th century. Contrary to many other sites related to a similar subject matter, it pursues a specific strategy. As a rule, sites designed to promote and present modern arts, include in the set of their tasks the record of current events, descriptions of conceptions of art projects or list personal data of an artist. Quite often an acquaintance with an artist’s work does not go farther than his/her collection of works presented in the Internet along with proposals to buy them from a virtual shop. Such sites exist in great abundance and generally they are of low quality. Today, there are hardly any sites that choose research as their main feature and offer opinions of art specialists on issues related to modern art. The RusskiAlbum is currently the only site in St Petersburg that is determined to present works of St Petersburg artists of the second half of the 20th century not only by supplying information about artists and their works, but, first and foremost, by incorporating each artist into the context of the St Petersburg art development. One of the important tasks of the www.RusskiAlbum.com is to display trends, schools, workshops, artistic organizations that somehow influenced the St Petersburg art during the second half of the 20th century. The site comprises a ramified data base that may be claimed not only by art lovers but also by researchers. The established base is currently referred to by students of art institutions of St Petersburg, and other users frequenting the RusskiAlbum site come from educational programmes of the USA and Canada. We also think it very important that the number of visitors keeps growing with every day (according to the statistics, the daily number of visitors in August 2001 averaged out at 812 persons). There is a great need of such sites, and we are happy to be able to foresee and consider this interest in our work. The same as with other sites, the menu offers various ways of the search for information. No prominence is given to any specific line, they are of equal importance, though the information may differ depending on the way one chooses. On the one hand, for researchers and those interested there is The Encyclopedia of St Petersburg of the second half of the 20th century where one can find the information about groupings, schools and associations functionuing in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. If one wishes to learn about painters or sculptors, one may choose from categories (types) of arts. On the other hand, since the organizations supporting the RusskiAlbum site, namely, the St Petersburg Arts Project (USA) and the RussiAlbum Foundation (Russia), envisage the setting up of a Centre for Modern Culture on the premises of the Warsaw Railway station, the site presents a project of the refurbishing of the building of the Warsaw railway station and its readjustment for a Centre for Modern Culture. The site www.RusskiAlbum.com comprises reconstruction designs and anyone can leave his/her suggestions about how the new museum should look and what it should house. In our opinion, such suggestions can prove very valuable, since the Centre for Modern Culture must be distinguished by unrestricted democracy. Researchers in controversial issues are welcome to take part in the forum. Today, we offer the proceedings of the discussion held in the D-137 Gallery, with which the foundation has been closely collaborating, on the subject matter entitled “Is the picture still alive?” Participation in such a forum will be of particular interest for those visiting the site since they will be able to continue the discussion started by art specialists, painters, culture researchers, editors of art magazines of St Petersburg. Thus, the subject matter becomes common property and different opinions about the “Is the picture still alive?” problem reach everyone, while the destiny of The Picture no longer looks like a local plot hatched out by the artistic elite of St Petersburg. Similar to other sites dealing with contemporary arts, the RusskiAlbum offers weekly news of the city cultural life provided by the Non-Conformism Museum that kindly gave its permission for its reproduction to be further edited by Nikolai Kononokhin. The RusskiAlbum Organisation (Russia) and the St Petersburg Art Project (USA), apart from working on the site, are engaged in setting up exhibitions and devising the new ways of presenting modern art. The research encompasses the organising of the exhibition space, utilisation of unique equipment at exhibitions, as well as new technologies and innovations designed to present information at the site. Therefore, a user gets not only a chance to familiarise himself/herself with a certain event, but also he/she is given an occasion to look at projects of network art related to the event. The most frequented category happens to be The Exhibition showing the Festival of Modern Art (ART-BOAT) held in New York in May 2001 and the exhibition of St Petersburg’s Modern Art in the UN. The success in work and broad range of interests apart, there is still a gap that both the organisations, the St Petersburg Arts Project (USA) and the RusskiAlbum Foundation (Russia), have not been able to bridge no matter how well they realise the necessity of working along these lines. Nowadays, in our opinion, there is a growing feeling of bad co-ordination within artistic and technological domains. Throughout the history of mankind, the art and science have been interacting high and low in a multi-faceted way. There are fields where it is the art that influences technology and production, and fields where such interaction looks only but natural, for example, the relation between design and architecture. The technology and art undergoing constant changes, their interaction remains dynamic. But one can easily distinguish several periods in history when the nature of such interaction changed in quality. For example, the sphere of art which constantly comments on technological happenings and their significance is a recent phenomenon against the background of the very history of arts. This is how the matters stand in the usage of certain technologies aimed to create novel forms of art. For example, here is photography. The majority of people are fully aware of the fact that during the last two decades we have witnessed one of the fundamental changes. If we consider the prospects of technologies in creating new forms of art, the progress in computer technologies offers more possibilities even in comparison with such revolutionary events as the invention of photography and cinematography. An interesting aspect of these perspectives derives from the fact that while in photography it is difficult to foresee various nuances of the achieved results, in computer technologies there is a certain and rather large technological space which must be dealt with at the beginning of the creative process. This is proven by the fact that many people capable of mastering network art refer to new technologies but they traditionally shun the technological education and have not reached the level of competence which is required to fulfil their artistic potential with the help of new technological possibilities. It is evident that a certain number of new creative opportunities can be drawn from this soaring field but one has to spent much effort to educate and support artists craving for the novel. We hope that artists will apply the obtained skills properly. Russia today is enjoying a unique state for the computer art to flourish. In the first place, as compared with the West experience, the percentage of professional artists with a background of sound schooling is relatively low. In contrast with the western style of education where an artistically minded person can go for humanities from his early childhood without boring himself with science, in Russia one is bound to study exact sciences at least till the end of one’s secondary education. Finally, in spite of the openness of the Russian society and the accessibility to various information about technologies from the West, the Russian people, in contrast with their western counterparts, are extremely keen on technological and computer innovations. As a result, artists in Russia represent a group ideally suited to absorb new technologies and to make use of new methodologies in their work. Thus, the organisation St Petersburg Arts Project (USA) and the RusskiAlbum Foundation (Russia) decided to set up a Multi Media Laboratory, an Internet forum, where artists not only could exchange their views on new technologies and their application and their role in modern art, but also could launch joint projects while utilising new technologies and would receive overall support in embedding their ideas into life. Close co-operation of geographically remote artists by way of creating a single work of art is one of the new paradigms brought about by the technological progress. Education of artists in the sphere of new technologies and in the way of their application in creation of new forms of art is another trend which we are planning to tackle. This is a fascinating field, as in that case it will be works of artists and not us that will determine the forms, we only want to provide technical support to make the invention of such technologically oriented and technologically dependent forms of art possible. Thus, the site www.RusskiAlbum.com becomes a virtual space for experiment, where, apart from traditional forms of art, new forms develop, not only of the art itself but also of the form of its presentation, in the context of the catalogued traditional, which constitutes the unique pattern on the St Petersburg art.