Film Director: Eugene Strelkov. 

Script: Eugene Strelkov , Eduard Abubakirov, Vadim Filippov.

Artist: Eugene Strelkov .

Animators: Dmitry Khazan, Eugene Strelkov .

Composer: Mark Buloshnikov.

Sound: Irina Feldman.

Narrated by: Lev Kharlamov.

 

The film tells the story of a missile engineer Ilya Strafievsky, who systematically works to achieve his youthful dream of flying to Mars. The fictional character at times reveals features (as well as individual biographical facts) of a real space dreamer, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The film's visual fabric uses graphics from the futurists and transreasoners’ books: Velimir Khlebnikov, Igor Terentyev and Ilya Zdanevich. Despite the absurdist tone, the film shows admiration for the courage and perseverance of both science and art pioneers.

 

Eugene Strelkov's films are characterized by narrative and visual brevity. Planar solutions resemble book illustrations and create a distinctive and recognizable style. Animation is not Evgeny Strelkov's main activity, and the author manages to find non-standard ways in building the film structure with minimal means. He uses animation as an additional tool of contemporary graphic art, thus expanding the format of the artist's book to a multimedia project.

 

Eugene Strelkov also created a small-circulation (15 copies) artist’s book ‘The Channels of Mars’. The cardboard folder holds tables and maps printed in silk-screen techniques, which supposedly served young Ilya Strafievsky as a homemade manual for watching the Martian channels. The book graphics is based on sketches by 19th century astronomers. This archival cartography is greatly exaggerated, so that the channels ligatures remind sometimes of a neural network drawing or visualization of a multilevel logical problem. Like in his many other projects, Eugene Strelkov plays here with the morphology and semantics of engineer drawing, plentifully introducing scales and tables, graphs and projections, eyepieces and dials into graphics. At the same time, all this science-like nomenclature is used exclusively from the aesthetic perspective. The accumulation of visual material, the declared arbitrariness of its selection, and simultaneous use of hidden codes and formal rules – all of this, in the artist's opinion, has value, evokes emotion and is capable of generating meanings.

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Art-educational project "The Art of Knowing": 

https://www.youtube.com/user/IskusstvoZnat

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To watch the film "Involuntary Prometheus": 

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