Laboratory of Art and Science surprised with digital philosophy

At the Voskhod cultural center in Chernogolovka, local residents – participants in the first science art laboratory – presented the results of their scientific and artistic experiments with a series of digital 3D objects. The MK art observer examined the new space that opened in the legendary sausage house, as well as the street art that has appeared in recent years in the science city.

Just an hour’s drive from Moscow – and you are in Chernogolovka – a city that is valuable primarily not for its drinks, but for its scientific activities. After the Great Patriotic War, the village turned into a city of scientists. This happened thanks to Nikolai Semenov, the only Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry in the Soviet Union. In 1955, he initiated the construction of the Institute of Chemical Physics in Chernogolovka. The village, located among pine forests, was also suitable because a railway was built there (it is not in operation now). The secret scientific institute was built at an accelerated pace, and the population grew significantly: from 300 people in the 1920s to 13 thousand in the 1970s. Academician Semenov himself built a modest one-story house in Chernogolovka. It still stands on First Street – it is now a museum.

The friendly keeper of the furnishings of the Nobel laureate’s house, local historian Zoya Nikolaevna Tolpygo, can talk about Nikolai Semenov for five hours straight. He was a versatile and cheerful person. He loved to joke, danced the mazurka excellently, was popular with the ladies (he was married three times, the last time he married at the age of 77), smoked endlessly (putting butts in his jacket pockets and smoking them from time to time) and lived to be 90 years old. Most importantly, he revolutionized the scientific world by developing the theory of branched chain reactions. The chemical process can be compared to the media process. Imagine you wrote a post and it caught on. The number of reposts grows like an avalanche, according to the principle of branching – from you, like from the root of a tree, the message spreads in branches across the Internet. But sooner or later, interest in the topic wanes, and the post is no longer distributed. It’s the same in chemistry: reactions (polymerization, polycondensation, nuclear) begin with a small outbreak, rapidly grow, and can die out on their own. Nikolay Semenov became the force that charged the chain reaction of the development of a science city in the near Moscow region.

In the center of the city, near the House of Scientists, there is a monument to Nikolai Nikolaevich, where he, in his characteristic free manner, with a cigarette in hand, tells his theories to his colleague, the practical scientist Fyodor Dubitsky, and he has already rolled up his sleeves to bring ideas to life. Bronze figures stand on a canvas that turns into a tablecloth that covers Semenov’s table from that very house-museum, and on it – next to the telephone and typewriter – are the houses and institutes of the science city (urban master plan). The monument to sculptor Artemy Rodionov, whose works decorate the Paris metro (Madeleine station) and the Moscow subway (Mayakovskaya, Sretensky Boulevard, Slavyansky Boulevard), was installed in 2016 on the initiative of the mayor Oleg Egorov.

This event set off a new chain reaction. Not far from the monument to the founder of the city and his associate, a monument to singularity (also by Rodionov) and a mural with an optical effect appeared – the image of birds, black-headed warblers. It was created by a native of the science city, Roman Ivanov. He also wrote graffiti on a transformer booth next to the Institute of Chemical Physics – depicting Semenov using a pattern inspired by diffusion (the chemical process of mutual penetration of substances into each other, embodying chain reactions) on one side of the wall. The other shows an experienced mouse surrounded by molecules illuminated by gel electrophoresis. On the third is the famous portrait of Einstein with his tongue hanging out – in different color spectrums.

Ivanov also created graffiti with portraits of writers that come to life if you point your phone screen at the image. It is located near the school, built according to an individual design by Vladimir Tolmachev in 1962, with its own observatory and telescopes. Recently, a sundial of a non-standard mechanism appeared near the school, where instead of a gnome (an arrow that casts a shadow and indicates the time), there is a scale with hours and minutes. Sunlight falls on them through the slot and indicates the time. And last year, the teacher of this school, on his own, organized the first astronomical festival “Lights Out” in the city – with the participation of contemporary artists. That is, in recent years, art has been slowly taking root in scientific soil, and now it is developing into a whole movement.

A new point of attraction appeared in the monument to Soviet modernism of the 1970s, which was nicknamed “sausage”. The building was built as a social and cultural center, but resourceful architects attached a long “tail” to it with apartments for scientists, calling the multi-entrance structure an extension. Now the cultural center has been revived thanks to the efforts of Oleg Egorov. His second mayoral term ended a couple of weeks ago, and he is now focused on developing culture and sports in the city. He invited the team of curator and urbanist Maria Turkina to Chernogolovka, who worked on the Ural Biennale and this summer held the All-Russian Night of Factories. They organized a laboratory of art and science.

The inside of the laboratory art space was painted by one of the project participants, local physicist Ivan Kasimov. He visualized the singularity. This multi-layered concept in philosophy means a single event, extended in time and space. Kasimov’s visualization looks cosmic: in the center there is just such a black dot, around which planets, space stations and mysterious hieroglyphs are circling. In such an environment, the laboratory participants demonstrate their digital projects, which they have been doing since November and which could in the future appear physically in the city.

The series of installations “Solid Flame” by Vladimir Rakitin, Anastasia Barinova and Daria Goryacheva represents several cylinders, inside of which multi-colored planes walk back and forth. This shows the combustion process discovered in the 1970s. in Chernogolovka by scientist Alexander Merzhanov. This is exactly how a flame behaves in a large reactor during self-propagating high-temperature fusion (SHS). You point your phone at the QR code, and in front of you on the screen is a multi-meter “solid flame” that can be placed at any point in front of you. For now this is a virtual installation, but they hope to install it in the courtyard of the so-called “Merzhanov houses” – a complex built in the late 1980s for employees of the Institute of Structural Macrokinetics (ISMAN), of which Merzhanov was the director.

Maryana Lysenko, Madina Sultanova, Anna Goryacheva created the sound installation “Pine Dreams”. We are talking about the pine tree that adorns the flag of Chernogolovka. Three branches emerge from the tree trunk, seemingly visualizing Semenov’s theory of branched chain reactions. For years the pine tree grew next to the scientific institute, but a couple of years ago it was wiped off the face of the earth by a storm. Now the tree is preserved only on the flag and in the memory of local residents. The laboratory participants just based their project on comparing the principle of chain reactions and tree rings. And they visualized the dreams of the tree-symbol in the form of spheres where people and events related to the history of the city revolve. In addition to the virtual image of a pine tree, in the art center you can find an old gramophone with a section of the trunk instead of a record. The three-headed pine tree also became the hero of another digital project – “Digital Reincarnation” by Roman Ivanov and Elena Martyanova. The tree appears on your phone screen as a crystallized form, as if the pine tree has frozen and turned into molecular networks. The city symbol can be placed anywhere and at any time.

The Ideal Imperfect Perovskite object explores crystalline compounds that are used to convert sunlight into electricity. That is, to create solar panels. Their research is yet another Chernogolov know-how. A sculpture in the form of a crystal lattice could someday appear in a forest or on the surface of a local lake, but for now it can again be seen through the phone.

The next digital work is called “Graphene Opera” (authors: Elena Frolova and Alina Podzorova). The gaming project is dedicated to graphene-based airgel, which was discovered by Nobel laureates, scientists Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who began their scientific career in Chernogolovka. This highly conductive material is used, for example, to produce advanced phone screens: gadgets are covered with a kind of mask. The girls came up with their own graphene masks – for the face and in the form of a crown, repeating the structure of graphene in its shape. You can apply them to yourself on social networks, and each mask has its own melody, performed on a flute.

Another digital installation grows straight out of the floor. At different points in the art space you can find two QR codes, and their design is similar to wall graffiti. You point the screen at the codes and a funnel grows out of oblivion. This attempt to comprehend the general theory of relativity belongs to a group of authors – Olga Vinokurova, Ivan Kasimov, Mikhail Artemov, Kirill Sevastyanov, Dmitry Fomin, Grigory Bakhanov. Together with Kasimov’s mural, it turns out that a triple singularity has grown in this cultural center. In a word, there is not only art and science here, but a whole philosophy. A single city.