The Petersburg Biennale of Computer Graphics
Due ~ 2002

demo-song from Rolamd PMA-5

Initial spadework was recently begun on development of an unprecedented international exhibition of computer graphics to be put up in 2002 at the Pushkinskaya-10 Cultural Center in St. Petersburg, Russia. Artists and galleries from all continents are being invited to participate, with about 1000 works eventually expected to exhibit, in what is intended to be the first of an ongoing series of biennales.

Amongst the individuals most prominently at the helm of this endeavour is the extraordinary Scientist, Programmer and Artist Afanassy Pud, who featured in our last gazette and appears separately on this one again, sharing techniques.

[**for information on how to participate, see text at bottom]

In a forerunner to this first projected biennale, Afanassy and his associates have already staged a major exhibition of computer graphics created by artists of group DIGITAL (Russia) and PODGallery (USA), in the "Museum of Nonconformism Art" at the same Center in early 2001. Uniting the artists was just the single fact that all of their exhibited works were made on computers, thus allowing a rather wide spectrum of computer creativity to be represented before the spectator.

Selection of artists and works was and is taken very seriously in all of this. Digital Art has only now begun to develop in Russia, and not enough professional artists are engaged in it as yet. It was therefore even more interesting to arrange an exhibition together with PODGallery. In the event, selection of artists from PODGallery was first made by Afanassy, and then the selection of the works of these artists to be exhibited was made by Kevin Mutch ~ director of gallery [**see page-bottom for gallery-overview].

The exhibition proceeded 2 weeks with quite substantial success as the first exhibition of digital art on such a scale and of such high quality in Russia ~ 43 works from 31 artists were exposed. The images accompanying this article are all drawn from this show.

1_1 ~ Anrey Polushkin

bottles ~ Nikolaj Bogomolov

Roland Brener

Ken Brown

"Druids_Dawn" ~ Anna Zibrova

"Eye" ~ Jaroslav Gopak

Ragen Mendenhall

Bruce Zeines

For the upcoming Biennale, the following fundamental rules have been outlined to help optimize and manage participation:

1. Stage of selection of works
At this stage, every artist sends to the organizing committee, 2 files in jpg format of no more than 30kb each, or the Web address where it is possible to view the works. After the review of works by the organizing committee, a decision about involvement of the artist in the Biennale will be taken and an invitation and program of the Biennale will be sent to each artist. All conditions of participation in the exhibition will be detailed in the invitation. Some principles are given below.

2. Participation to the Biennale
2.1. Free-of-charge
In this case, after having been invited, the artist sends 1 or 2 files in tiff or jpg formats of such dimensions that it will be possible to print works of good quality. The printing is made at the expense of Biennale. In case the jury recognizes it necessary, the participant gives work for printing of a calendar (only 12 artists from all participants). After the Biennale, the printed work (not files) becomes the property of the sponsors.
2.2. Paid participation
The artist prints work her/himself, and pays it's insurance and mail services. After completion of the exhibition, the works will be sent back to the artist. The artist does not take part to the award program. The works cannot be printed in a calendar.

3. Copyright
All copyrights are saved. An exception is made for the works selected for printing in the calendar.

Curators of galleries of digital art! Your gallery can be represented as a whole. But the final selection of works is to be made by the organizing committee. Principles of selection are the same for galleries and independent artists.