The Fourth Avatar, 2017

The Fourth Avatar interactive object continues the challenge of what is meaning and definition in contemporary culture, that Joseph Koshut established back in 1965. In his paradigmatic work "One and Three Chairs" in the museum space there were presented a chair itself, a photograph of it and a definition from the explanatory dictionary. Meanwhile Natalia Alfutova, almost 55 years later, addresses semiotics with the help of modern technologies and current algorithms.
The work itself is a terminal (that also refers to the sculptures of minimalists) in which the viewer can place any object: either a box for glasses, a pen or, say, an apple. A special algorithm reads the shape of the object, determines it and immediately finds relevant information on the Internet in local news and lifestyle media. Thus, the actual object itself loses its usual utility function and becomes a symbol that reveals many semantic contexts in the era of the newest technical reproducibility. For example, the same green apple that a visitor took with them for a snack, becomes a global meaning after going through the process of information "transformation". There are hundreds of new, still recently hidden meanings behind it: a recipe for an apple face mask, an immediate review of a new release from Apple, or the conditional news of how a fruit accidentally saved someone's life in a traffic incident.
After each scan the photo and the texts are published on the project website www.stuff.mediamead.org, where the newest explanatory and situational dictionary is formed by the visitors of the exhibition project.