Acryl, canvas, light, installation
2017–2018
The artwork was created in collaboration with
Julia Vergazova
Alexey Boriskin: conceptual development
Julia Vergazova: conceptual development, painting, LED installation
Russia is, in many ways, a country of realized cyberpunk—not quite as predicted in Blade Runner, and not in the place or form we expected. The tension between technological development and the tangible, decaying reality around it plays out in the contrast between bright neon and the crumbling texture of the streets. The materials of progress seem imported from an unrealized future and repurposed for street signage, rendered in unrefined font, just as big tech continues to evolve primarily to sell more.
But neon signs are not only about aesthetics. They are a form of dialogue. The limits of our world are the limits of our language. But language is never fully ours - it belongs to the community. Language is how the surrounding world speaks to us.
To understand that space, we can try to deconstruct the language it uses. Visual language consists of two elements: the words themselves and their aesthetics: letters, shapes, fonts. If we shift focus and glance at these words “from beneath our lashes,” they dissolve into a cloud of tags, into visual noise. The aesthetics of neon signage seem more at home in cyberpunk, Blade Runner, or the future imagined by 1960s sci-fi authors than on a döner kiosk. Back in the 1920s, Ilf and Petrov noticed this dissonance: in the USSR, electricity might have been a god or a saint; in the U.S., neon signs became one of its first uses.
The Cyberpunk Dictionary project is an attempt to interact with the city on its own visual-linguistic level. The slogans and labels that have worn grooves into our perception become raw material for a new kind of construction: a neon alphabet in which the conflict between promised futures and decaying realities remains unresolved.
This isn't merely an aestheticization of typographic landscape: it's a method of understanding space through its language. It's an attempt to reassemble, from scraps of phrases, visual noise, and worn-out messages, an alphabet that encodes not just our everyday life, but our future too.
