The Rites of the Elites, Episodes 1-9, January 6, 2022
AI-generated image (ruDALL-E)
Olga Klimovitskaya is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Kazakhstan and currently based in London. As a third-time immigrant, Klimovitskaya is interested in the adaptation of national and cultural markers of identity via processes of coding and re-coding. When Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014, the artist started watching videos produced by the Russian opposition on YouTube. The Rites of the Elites is based on a broadcast called “Funeral Rehearsal” in which the host, Mark Feygin, speaks with Valery Solovyov and Andrei Kosmach about shamanic practices and blood rituals conducted by the Russian elite in anticipation of the war. Klimovitskaya took phrases from these shamanic speeches proclaiming Russian triumph to train ruDALL-E (the Russian-language version of DALL-E) and produce this series of images. All together, they visualize a surreal, nightmarish world where dark symbols and violent ritual are harnessed by an elite population with little regard for logic or life.
Artist Bio
Olga Klimovitskaya (b. 1981) is a multimedia artist originally from Kazakhstan and currently living in London. She is a graduate of the Iosif Bakshtein Institute of Contemporary Art, where she completed the course New Methods in Contemporary Art. She works with traditional media, such as installations and sculptures, as well as with digital media including video games, augmented reality, and 3D sculptures. Immersion and procedural practices are also a part of her research.
Olga is one of the founders and resident artists of APXIV, an artist-run space and collective. She participated in the Parallel Program of the 6th Moscow International Biennial of Young Art (APXIV, Moscow, 2018), Copenhagen Art Week 2019 (Copenhagen Contemporary, 2019), Postindustrial APXINALLE (A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts of the Urals, Ekaterinburg, 2020). Among her group exhibitions are Land of Musem (PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, Perm, 2019), Presence International Festival of Contemporary Photography (Port Sevkabel, St. Petersburg, 2019, 2020), Communities and Spaces (CCA Vinzavod, Moscow, 2019), Support Group (Cube.Moscow, Moscow, 2020), First Altai Biennial of Contemporary Art (Ust-Koksinsk District, Altai, 2020), and the 7th International Public Art Festival Art Prospect (Gaza DK, St. Petersburg, 2020).
Olga Klimovitskaya on publicly sharing AI prompts:
“I believe that the decision to publicly share the prompts used in creating AI-generated art ultimately comes down to the artist's intent and goals. For instance, sharing prompts can provide a broader context for artwork. In other cases, an artist may choose to keep their prompts private to allow the viewer to create a narrative of their own.
It's critical to note that the prompt is just one of many parameters. Factors such as the AI model used, the dataset the model was trained on, the seed value and the technical words -- all affect the final result.
Therefore, even if prompts are shared, the final artwork is still largely a product of the artist's intuition and experience working with AI.”