Going to the Strawberry Fields

Objects, installation, video, 2019
Exhibiton in Dymchuk Gallery (Kyiv, Ukraine)

Strawberry Fields Forever is a song by «The Beatles», one of the most significant pop-songs of XX century. John Lennon wrote it in memory of the place where he spent his childhood. «Strawberry fields» was the name of an orphanage with a big garden, where he used to come to play with friends. In the mass culture «strawberry fields» became a metaphor of certain ideal place, where one can escape from the surrounding reality and hide from all the troubles. «Strawberry fields» is a beautiful utopia. A perfect world where everything is possible.

Today «strawberry fields» are accessible for anyone, visiting them became an attraction. With the help of digital technologies it became possible to produce utopias on an industrial scale at low cost of resources. The cinema industry headed by the «Dream Factory» – Hollywood – is still the main player in this market. It invests millions in the development of CGI effects and computer graphics to gain billions of profit from those who seek for a rest, shelter and emotions in other worlds. Chroma key is one of those technologies of movie production. It is a background of blue or more often green color on which any visual may be «drawn». But at the same time, it is a concept that has long been included in culture and language as a symbol of irreality, illusory and simulative nature of man-made cinematic worlds.

Each year, the «green screen» gains new territories on the set, gradually replacing real locations, real objects, real bodies and faces of actors. «Green screen» no more aims to create something that doesn’t exist in the reality – it is called to replace reality with its best version.

At the end of 2018, the Disney studio unveiled a teaser trailer for their upcoming resumption of the classic cartoon «The Lion King». The audience was expecting for another live-action adaptation, but there was nothing «live» in what they actually saw. Everything turned to be drawn using chroma key, virtual reality and motion capture technologies. Many people saw in this a certain new manifesto of digital technology stating that our reality is not real enough. That technologies do not simulate any more, do not produce fantoms. They construct from the ground up a new reality – the same as the original, but better – which can become whatever you wish, you need only to stretch your hand. Why dream about strawberry fields if you can settle in them forever?

Green color is a color of the chroma key and hope. It is a promise of new reality, the potential of its manifestation. Like an emptiness which at the same time contains everything and nothing in itself. The infinite number of opportunities, each of which may be embodied, just like none of which. But how often we confuse what is possible and what is real? How often we are ready to refuse the true? In pursuit of the best version of ourselves – to throw ourselves out – for the «strawberry fields» which our imagination draws on the green screen? To reach them finally and not find a single strawberry in a green grass?

The project consists of 3 main parts and an abstract video piece.

Part 1. Flag

To Bear a Flag is to proclaim the identity, the place on the coordinate plane.

The white flag – as we know, the white color contains all the colors at the same time – is gradually replaced by green. Green also contains all the colors. But only as a promise.

In the end, I put a green flag in the middle of the white space of emptiness. Is this the same emptiness, where there are potential «everything» and «nothing»?

Or is this the exhausted non-existence that remains after us when we go to Strawberry Fields?


Part 2. Square meter

In a physical, cultural and linguistic context, it is a symbol of the territory, an expression of a place. Square meters measure the area that a person assigns, makes a part of the personality. A square meter of land or a square meter of the room, a square meter in the capital or in the village – their value is formed only through the prism of human potential that has been invested in them and through which they can be realized.

There was a popular video on YouTube where communal services were painting green grass in green before the arrival of a respectable official. A natural color didn’t seem good enough to make the grass look «grassy». Similarly, we often seek to adapt the territory of our influence to our own ideas about what they should be. To convert real grass into the idea of ​​grass. But does the grass remain the grass?


Part 3. Words

Let me take you down

'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields

Nothing is real

And nothing to get hung about

Strawberry Fields forever

The digital font of the LED screen is based on a versatile structure, from which you can get any of the existing characters. The set of these digital structures is an endless space of language and text capabilities. But at the same time it is zeroing, complete silence. The words on the screen run and gradually lose their meaning, from a specific statement to an abstract one.