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In early October 2024, dreamlaser, together with T-Bank and URBAN CONTEXT team, opened Cistern, a new media art space in St. Petersburg.
The premises of the former Stepan Razin Brewery in St. Petersburg have recently been transformed into a media art space. The eponymous Cistern exhibition, designed by dreamlaser, marked the opening of this new art venue.
For the Cistern installation, the dreamlaser team drew inspiration from the topic of envisioning the future and the architectural features of the exhibition space.
The hallmark of the former brewery is its fermentation tanks—or cisterns—and the passages between them. Once used to ferment and store beer, these tanks, along with the reinforced concrete ceiling between the site's two levels, have become defining architectural elements of the venue.
The Cistern installation comprises three parts, each embodying different metaphors about humanity's perception of the future and the desire to understand it.
Cisterns
For millennia, the future has stirred contradictory feelings in people: we long to uncover it, to confront it, yet we fear it, and tremble at what lies beyond the horizon. Nevertheless, we always hope for the best.
These opposing emotions are hard to distinguish because together they shape our understanding of the future. However, dreamlaser has attempted to divide them, capturing them within multimedia adaptations of the factory cisterns. Now one of them is infused with hope, the other with fear.
Holographic Sphere
The future is infinitely illusory until it arrives. In the second part of the Cistern installation, the creators propose a thought experiment: what if we could glimpse the future and intervene? Would what we have seen still unfold as expected? The sphere the viewer sees in this space does not truly exist. Yet, it feels real and begins to disintegrate, much like our understanding of the future. Does the future really exist, or is it merely our perception of it?
Levels
The urge to influence the future is inherent in living beings, whether conscious or evolutionary. As we understand more about the world, we gain the ability to predict the future, from forecasting the weather to anticipating a supernova's explosion. The Levels installation reflects the reverberations of events that we cannot trace but whose impact we still feel.
T-Bank Zone
The installation represents a halved cylinder built with LED screens. Outside, it shows the structure and electrical connections of the object designed according to the T-Bank brand style. Inside, it features content on the screens.
The cylinder is surrounded with mirrors on the floor, ceiling and walls which creates a fascinating endless corridor.
Project team:
Andrei Tuboltsev, Denis Chuchko, Anton Kolodyazhny, Alexander Istomin, general producers
Arseny Tyurin, creative director
Olga Volkova, producer
Svetlana Golubeva, multimedia content producer
Sergei Zabosin, technical producer
Andrei Toropov, site development director
Anton Vasin, Kirill Gorshenichev, engineers
R.J.S. studio, graphic design
Alexander Zaripov, composer
Multimedia content:
Cistern installation: Ira Lunina, Andrei Grigoriev, Marina Koreva, Evgeny Kudryavtsev, Vladimir Krupin, Alexandra Kulikova, Grigory Chulanov, Egor Vorobkin.
Levels installation: Igor Lunin, Alisa Voronina
Holographic Sphere installation: Anya Yakovleva, Olga Savelyeva
T-Bank installation: Katya Chetverikova, Alexander Dekterev