1. Which personality qualities help an artist to make art and which hinder?

Being able to reflect and analyze the situation around you helps you understand exactly what you want to say in your work and how to express it.

I also find it important to learn to be more self-confident and not be afraid of judgment. The positive experience of doing «small brave actions» helps in this — point by point overcoming small fears or doubts, standing up for your point of view in those moments when people try to manipulate you or aggressively pressure you. I noticed that the more such experiences accumulated, the stronger I felt, and this was reflected in my art.

All communication skills are useful, too, not so much for creating art, but for someone to see you and your work.


2. What is your favorite thing to do besides art?

I like traveling, learning foreign languages. In general, I like to learn and teach others something, to pass on my experience and skills in working with technology. When I give lectures, I try to turn them into a kind of interactive performance for the audience. And I think that in the metaverse, directing communication as an art form can be a very interesting direction.

"There are a lot of incredibly interesting people in the art community, but sometimes too much shyness prevents me from meeting them in person."

3. How does your art change the world and the culture?

I would like to see statistics on when and how someone has been affected by my works. While I don't have any, I can only assume that I show how virtual reality can be more than just an attraction.

Plus I am putting a lot of effort into developing a VR-community in Russia, so that more artists can try out this new tool. There is some success in this direction: we now have our own space in the center of St. Petersburg. I am cooperating with various universities and other institutions to teach people the basics of working with VR and to show how it can help them in their work.


4. What do you think about the future of contemporary art?  

If a nuclear bomb won’t be dropped on the world, at least I can see a future. I think art will continue to respond to and use technological innovation, to look for ways to solve and rethink emerging problems, and to become more diverse in form and genre.

5. What do you think of the rapidly growing popularity of NFTs? 

I would say that NFT finished its growth at the beginning of this year, and now it is slowly transforming, and the current cryptozyme will lead either to the second birth of the technology in a fresh form, or to a quiet extinction until a radically new solution emerges.

Even though I managed to ride the first wave of NFT hype in the spring of 2021 for a bit and made my first few dollars in the digital art market, I also dipped into the very strange and dark sides of this phenomenon.

Now I could very much criticize NFT. Even my Bad Art winning project also started as a gesture of protest against what that initial good idea of creating digital art collection opportunities had become.

6. Why did you choose VR to bring your ideas to life?

I was interested in all kinds of digital creativity from my childhood, then I drew in «Paint», designed webpages in HTML, then studied «Photoshop», 3D-modeling and so on. I also graduated with an undergraduate degree in computer graphics and design.

I tried VR afterwards and realized that it combines everything, of which I could not choose only one direction. I like to work with space and 3D, and at the same time I love painting and technology.

There's also an endless field of experimentation in VR, and I take great pleasure in blazing paths somewhere that no one has gone before. For the same reason, I face a lot of challenges, but I still feel like I've found myself at this point in my life.

"I think the rise and fall of NFT is an interesting and important precedent, showing that digital art needs new ways of implementation and monetization that protect participants and do not suppress those artists who are more vulnerable."

7. How close to you is the theme of our Bad Art call «Escape»?

As close as possible. If we talk about «escape» as an escapism, then VR is a technological embodiment of this idea. Working with it, one is deeply immersed in exploring different sides of this phenomenon. Although I myself am not inclined to escape from reality, neither through addiction nor denial of what is happening, the practice of isolation during the pandemic gave a rich experience of forced avoidance of the outside world, and the current year has often made me invent new ways to keep myself in order through conscious disconnection from the flow of events. Eventually escapism became a reality with which we are now on a roll.


8. What is most valuable to you (in the world, in life, in creativity)?

Love in the broad sense: for life, for people, for myself, for my work, for different little things, and so on. Everything done with love immediately feels different.