UTOPIA CALLING!: Slavs on Screen / Chicks on Speak

We conducted a telematic technicolor ritual – part art performance, part digital séance, part flesh-and-blood concert – connecting and merging (v)realities from Valencia, Cracow, and Vancouver. Anastasiia Vorobiova, visual high priestess, directed a symphony of light and shadow from her Cracow sanctum, beaming frenzied stimuli to our eager retinas. The Utopia of virtual bodies cascaded onto the projection plane, reality layers shuffled in a cosmic deck, playing a roulette of sanity and illusion. Streams trickled in from Vancouver and Cracow, gathering momentum, carving rivulets of perception in this astral confluence of digital and supernatural whispers. Boundaries? In this realm, a mere mirage! Nastia, our spectral guide, borrowed our eyes and senses, leading us through the numinous Numogram, a decimal labyrinth woven by CCRU witches.

Giulia Timis, our Madonna-dipped envoy, draped in a costume of contradictions – bedroom allure, stage charisma – occupied her triptych presence in Valencia, Cracow, and the digital abyss. Then, like a lightning strike, the invasion hit. The intruders, spectral jesters, tore through our reality’s fabric. Their dance, a fever dream – a corseted man-hound, a glitch human entrapped in a silicon web, a cosmic blue spider dangling from the event horizon, and a witch-like VR wraith. And amidst this hallucinatory whirlwind, Chicks on Speed pulsated with an electric presence. Their sound, a defiant cocktail of queer-punk, cabaret, and rave hues, reverberated through the digital ether, raising the energy to fever pitch.

Gleb, navigating the “Good Weather Girl” tune, spiraled us through Yana Ilo’s crystalline “fake gardens”, a tapestry of AI-human intersections, chaotically woven into a dissonant collage. An uncanny human-thing hybrid strode across our screen, an unsettling blend of the organic and inorganic. Towards the finale, with the Chicks singing out against Assange’s incarceration, Taya Kabaeva wielded her digital brush, painting 3D sculptures in virtual blood amidst a Dadaist landscape of war-torn Ukrainian city cut-outs. The debris of buildings, fire, wounded bodies – a jarring, anti-war Google map, the collapse of the virtual’s smooth space.

All the while, Romek, the mischief minion, strummed the strings of “Deep Dark Oceans”, his guitar crying out in harmonic resonance as he romped across the cloister stage of Valencia – a sanctuary repurposed serving god-fearing devotees to nurturing believers in art and freedom. And so it was, UTOPIA CALLING!: Slavs on Screen / Chicks on Speak – a pixel-painted, sound-bathed psychedelic invocation, where the digital and the tangible danced a peculiar pas de deux, leaving us all entranced in the aftermath of this cosmic performance art cabaret.