Alexei Shulgin and the Art of No Brain
Posted by Motherboard on Tuesday, Jul 14, 2009
Motherboard tours Electroboutique, the electronics production company cum roving cyber-art kiosk of Russia’s leading non-pornographic artist, Alexei Shulgin. Shulgin hasn’t been hep to the internet from its very beginning, but he’s definitely been onboard since at least the Compuserve days. In the early 90s, he was one of the first artsy types to adopt the then-brand-new World Wide Web as a medium, creating web pages filled with maddening arrays of random-seeming pictures and text blocks and hidden links to games and secret files and similarly weird and frustrating link pages, as well as helping curate the work of his net-art contemporaries. Shulgin was also the organizer of the world’s first international exhibition of people’s computer desktops.
These days his work has shifted slightly offline and into creating weird electronic fantasy objects such as his giant melty iPod (which works!) and the Super-IBR Real Virtuality goggles, which you wear to help make your actual-reality look like crappy VR.
Shulgin also claims to have formed the world’s first cyberpunk rock act when he started his MIDI cover band 386DX in 1998, though as everybody knows, Billy Idol beat him to the punch by a good five years.
