Where Dogs Run: Kerosine Chronicles. Fungus & Collector

Opening: Sat 16.05., 19h

The "Where Dogs Run“ artists collective was founded in 2000 in the industrial city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural region. Since their start the group members are Natalia Grekhova, Alexey Korzukhin, Olga Inozemtseva, sometimes joined by a programmist.

Their artistic practice lays primarily in the field of technological art and uses a wide range of multimedia: video, robotics, hybrid installations, performance and DIY packages. The group combines innovative visual techniques with scientific research instruments and low tech aesthetics. Through the technological processes, the artists explore how the mythological and the daily interweave with each other, and examine possible mechanisms that could allow new forms of human interaction with different forms of reality.
Most projects by "Where Dogs Run" deal with scientific problems: the problem of three-body system, Mandelbrot set, machine learning, natural language processing, virtual modeling. They are often done in collaboration with scientists (P. Sternberg State Astronomical Institute and V. Sobolev Institute of Astronomy at the St.Petersburg State University) or commissioned by organizations promoting science (e.g. Dynasty Foundation, Museum of Science at the Pavlov Institute of Physiology of the Russian Academy of Science).
Their critical technological works have gained international appreciation, some of these works, like “the evaporation of the Russian constitution” (2018) or “transcendent index” (2017) from a today´s perspective tragically seem to have anticipated the future.
Among many other international partners, "Where Dogs Run" has been shown twice at ZKM Karlsruhe and has been awarded by Ars Electronica in 2012.
Currently the artists are invited by MuseumsQuartier in cooperation with the Austrian Foreign Ministry to participate in the MQ Artists-in-Residence Program as residents from April to June 2023.

At the MQ Pop-Up showroom there are presented to works by Where Dogs Run:

Kerosine Chronicles. Fungus (2021)
The Kerosine Fungus lives in petrol tanks and thrives on kerosene and diesel as a food source. In its history of development, the kerosene fungus turned out to be one of the few species that not only accompanied humanity through the technological-industrial revolutions, but also benefited from them and thus the dominance of human species.
One of the peculiarities of the fungus is that over the course of its existence it changes the smell of the gasoline in which it lives. This circumstance was the starting point for “Where Dogs Run” to model a situation in which a chemical interaction between mushroom and machine creates a possibility of chemical communication between self-made robots.

Collector (2015)
The “Collector” is an electromechanical organ grinder with a backpack laboratory for air quality analysis. The laboratory for air analysis, which is hung on the back, is operated by a hand crank. The evaluated data on air quality are directly translated into impulses that are transmitted to a Jew`s harp organ. In this way, analysis of air quality of different places can be translate into music.
With the help of the “Collector” a sound archive of the air quality or pollution can be created at certain locations.
The “Collector” was first tested in the steel mono industrial city of Magnitogorsk.

A project in cooperation with BMEIA.