Actually Existing

This project contains 19 images of myself, showing off my body to a Soviet FED-5 camera loaded with Svema Foto-400 film, itself a modern Ukrainian reproduction of Soviet era film. The text that accompanies these images was created on a 386 computer and broadcast over UHF to a small black-and-white CRT.

"Actually Existing" comes from the phrase "Actually Existing Socialism", which entered into use during the Brezhnev era in the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries. It's meant to evoke a state of socialism which exists not theoretically, but in the real world, though it may depart from orthodox Marxism.

"Actually Existing" is a meditation on desire, and how desire exists in a fundamentally different realm from the realization of that desire. It's about how fantasy can act as a spark to create reality and in doing so, erases some part of itself. It reckons with nostalgia (or ostalgia, in this case) as a way of untangling desire from reality.