Welcome to the online exhibition Ornamika.Live! Our exhibit is devoted to Russia’s authentic ornaments and uses a new language to talk about them: it has been designed specifically for online attendance and combines the methods of digital humanities with the instruments of contemporary art.

The exhibit is a project of Ornamika.com ornament lab.

The show is centered around the industrial robot gradually drawing the fragments of ornaments from different regions, centuries, art forms and fields of application. The robot’s movements are smooth and orderly but not always precise, as its «arm» slightly trembles just like a human hand would. Its actions put us in a state of meditative trance as we watch the subtleties of different ornaments and also remind us of the ornaments’ handcrafted nature and the work of their creators.

Robot Maxim is the main protagonist of the exhibit. In its previous life, Maxim used to build cars and now it presents the diversity of Russian ornaments to people all over the world. Its physical likeness of a human arm, a slightly tremulous handwriting and unavoidable imperfections in the process of drawing help to accentuate the original handcrafted nature of the ornaments. Just like a human, our robot artist occasionally takes a break (every day from 11pm to midnight Moscow time and at certain moments of its creative process) and requires moral support.
The robot creates each ornament using its own logic, drawing out separate layers or elements of the pattern and gradually combining them into a single composition. To give you a chance to experience more sensations from the robot’s creative process, we converted its sounds into the website’s dynamic graphics, and in this way the robot’s sounds and the website design are a single system.

The best works created by the robot end up in our gallery on the next day after being drawn and are available for sale at AliExpress Russia website. Each drawing is made on paper with a weight of 200g/m2 and is 100 cm * 100 cm in size. Sign up for updates and never miss any news about the project.

On May 27, at 17:00 (Moscow time), on the last day of the exhibition, we will hold a roundtable discussion entitled «Digital cultural projects: creation approaches and marketing tools» Join!