GrOM (Olga Michi Creative Group)

From the ‘Housing of the Future’ and ‘Total rAbotisation’ series

GrOM (Olga Michi Creative Group)

From the ‘Housing of the Future’ and ‘Total rAbotisation’ series

2021–2023; 2025

Pigment printing, plasticisation, Dibond

Courtesy of the artists

The ‘Housing of the Future’ project explores what islands of civilisation might look like when humanity sets off to conquer new worlds. This is a series of large-format digital images depicting interiors with various functional purposes.

Drawing on the traditions of the Düsseldorf School of Photography, GrOM constructs its own utopian world, in which an object reminiscent of Tatlin’s tower with the Earth’s sphere above it appears in all the works. In the early 20th century Tatlin’s tower was conceived by an avant-garde artist as a monument to the Third International and a symbol of the unification of workers. At the beginning of the 21st century contemporary artists are reviving the legacy of Vladimir Tatlin, challenging the need for humanity to unite to preserve civilisation in the future, when the conquest of other worlds will become inevitable.

The ‘Total rAbotisation’ project is a logical continuation of the ‘Housing of the Future’ series. Unlike previous works, it was created using artificial intelligence technologies and without preliminary photographic footage. In ‘Total rAbotisation’ the artists reflect on what makes a person human. Today, in an era when high technology and artificial intelligence are increasingly becoming embedded in everyday life, this theme is especially relevant.

GrOM sees the legacy of world art as a source of recognisable compositional solutions and stylistic features, imbuing familiar subjects and images with futuristic content and the latest technological attributes. In this way the artists highlight a pressing question: what happens to art based on the emotions of a living artist when AI, which thinks not with feelings but with algorithms, comes into play?