DMITRY KAVKA
TAUTOBOT (from the Greek ταὐτός,
“the same” + bot)
(Russia, Moscow)
The Transformers are sentient machines capable of shapeshifting in response to the world they find themselves in. We can safely assume that in Picasso’s world of Cubist compositions, they would take on Cubist forms. Picasso’s Cubism and the Transformers universe have many traits in common—for example, both involve the deformation and destruction of their objects. Combining these two similar universes gives us a logical tautology; they become funny. And funniness is more characteristic of good guys than evil, so you can rest assured that Picasso’s world is inhabited by the heroic Autobots rather than the violent and dangerous Decepticons. In a 2017 essay, art critic Holland Cotter declares that Picasso’s Le Demoiselles d’Avignon “replaced the benign ideal of the Classical nude with a new race of sexually armed and dangerous beings” (that is, it transformed good into evil). Here, the Autobots have merged with Picasso’s Cubism to transform his “dangerous” world back into a world of good and heroism. Hooray!
Dmitry Kavka is an artist who creates work at the intersection of digital and material realities. By combining various media and means of expression, he is able to explore social shifts, images’ transformations in digital environments, and the contradictions of new sensibilities. His work deploys both new media—digital sculptures, videos, static computer games—and more traditional techniques, such as drawing. He also experiments with new ways of presenting art in virtual reality. For instance, in 2013, he created an online game that housed digital sculptures of himself. At the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, he showed an exhibition of drawings in Google Maps using Google Street View.