The Venice Biennale will help Skolkovo to promote its brand, while IT solutions, applied in the exhibition, may bring dividends to the Foundation in the future
The organizers of the Skolkovo’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale-2012, which will represent Russia at this global cultural event at Venice, Italy, met with reporters almost a month before the show kicks off. Thois move has a quite simple explanation: the end of the August is the period when most of Venice’s population goes on vacations, so exhibition organizers are in a hurry, the exposition is to be fully set way in advance. The Biennale’s commissioner Gregory Revzin and the exhibition’s curator Sergei Choban, together with his partner Sergei Kuznetsov were among those officials, who came to talk to the media to the “Bosko Bar” (GUM central department store) last week.
source: official website of the Venice Biennale-2012
Gregory Revzin is a well-known art critic, historian and architecture critic, who assigned to this position of Biennale’s commissioner few years ago by the Russian Ministry of Culture. And the curator of the Skolkovo’s architectural show Choban (partner in the architectural studio «SPEECH Choban and Kuznetsov") acts as the chief Skolkovo’ Innovation City designer. In an interview to Sk.ru, Sergei Choban said that this prestigious and world famous cultural event can bring "Skolkovo" not only image dividends. The Venice exhibition is actively attended by representatives of the world's business, cultural, scientific and political elite. "The Venice Biennale is the center of attraction, so the Skolkovo project will get there additional attention and impulse for development,” the curator of the exhibition said.
For Sergei Choban and his colleagues "Skolkovo" project has not just scientific, technological and business aspects. “The Innovation City, he said, has important cultural mission, as it is to show, that Russia is moving away from closeness, secrecy in science and technology and seeks to establish common ground, i.e. commonly shared, open, transparent platform for collaborative creative activity,” Choban said.
While Skolkovo’s key architect was focused on cultural issues, Gregory Revzin turned the dialogue towards understand the crucial interests of the state. "The format of the Skolkovo project appeals to global scene, and we're talking here about Moscow as a global city, in various dimensions of this concept," Revzin said.
Skolkovo, as the Russian Commissioner of the Venice biennale exhibition said, as an international project is to be accepted through different international forums, and the Biennale in Venice is one of them. “The biennale, he said, is an excellent platform to represent Skolkovo to international community,” Revzin said. "The Biennale is an international competition of architecture and the public and state interest lies in the fact that the country is exposed at this major international exhibition, so it’s a promotion of the country itself," biennale’s commissioner said.
Sergei Choban (courtesy of archi.ru)
Gregory Revzin (courtesy archi.ru)
Skolkovo’s pavilion may surprise biennale’s visitors with its innovative solution and presentations. The idea, however, wasn’t taken from nowhere. According to Sergei Choban, pavilion’s architects were inspired by the global trend of active use of advanced IT technologies in the exhibition of architectural solutions.
Briefly speaking, to see, what the exhibition looks like, for example, a general plan or any of innovation city’s architectural design, the internet technology is to be used. A software developer came out with an application for Android-compatible tablets and made one for iPads as well.
The application for the Apple products will be available for free download through the App Store. Next to Skolkovo’s pavilion an information billboard will be set, which will inform that the tablet with the application is required. And if visitor doesn’t have a computer or for some reason wasn’t able to upload and install the application, tablets will be available for free for temporary use, while examining the Skolkovo’s pavilion.
"The ultimate source of the information is a website, which links to the entire digital catalog of Skolkovo’s architectural objects,” Choban said. The website will be available to users from August 29, when the biennale begins. And on August 26 it will be opened for a preview to the professional jury of the exhibition. Until that date the information is "not available for publication," as the curator of the exhibition put it. The organizers will have to solve many technical problems. For example, as it turned out, in Venice quality of Internet isn’t ideal in number of locations.
"The examination of the two-level exhibition of Skolkovo’s innovation center will resemble a computer game, in which gamer plays, advancing from low to higher levels,” Sergei Choban said. The game will simulate the process of learning of science with the help of Internet.
“Curiosity, a desire to gain additional knowledge about the material world, is at the heart of the process of scientific knowledge,” the biennale’s organizers say. "We came up with a presentation system, where, just as in the world of science, you encounter first with an unknown, you don’t see the entire picture of the world", Choban said.
"Very abstract architectural, mysterious spaces will meet the visitor, they do not contain elements of the architectural composition, but they animate to the knowledge of the project," - said the architect. The desire of knowledge thus will be "animated" as he put it. Imagine yourself in some abstract, but "inspiring to get the knowledge” two-level space of the pavilion, and you want to know more and more about this or that image, presented in abstract form in front of you.
Getting up close, trying to get more information about object, you will use tablet to download all the information about it. "It may include films, interviews, photographs different texts, which will appear on the tablets, and this will be the main way of learning about Skolkovo’s architecture," Choban said. Meanwhile there will be available historical photos, dedicated to Soviet-time science cities (naukogrady) available at the ground floor.
The Biennale in Venice will last for three months. During this period its electronic archives will be constantly updated, so the project is not static. In the future, according to organizers, the exhibition can be used to promote the brand "Skolkovo" in other countries, regions and other events. The architects and software developers of the exhibition designed everything in such a way that the content (developments, new projects at the Skolkovo city, etc) can always be refreshed and new ones can be uploaded for the show.
Sergei Kuznetsov, Choban’s partner in the architectural studio «SPEECH Choban and Kuznetsov" explained that they " tried to create kind of a monitor to track the changes in the project during and after the Biennale, it’s a tool of information and presentation, which can be filled with any content, update, and display in the future on any other show,” Sergei Kuznetsov said. Given that, the “Skolkovo" foundation has acquired a tool, which can be used for a long time, popularizing innovative ideas.
(courtesy of Resorts of Italy)