MY MOM TURNS INTO A NEURAL NETWORK

Each time I precariously move from one rented Moscow flat to another one, I lug around (among other things) several thousand black and white pictures, and a few hundred colored ones. Films wrapped up with pharmacy rubber bands, photographs all mixed up and stored in shoe boxes. Some of the pictures were shot by my mom, and most feature her as the subject. The 50s, 60s, a lot from the 70s, assorted 80s and a tiny bit of the 90s. It's hard to tell which decade this or that photograph is from, so I go by haircut styles.
It’s hard to stay silent and pause in conversation with one’s parents, not to interrupt,
embrace the histrionics, and just accept the speech as it goes – one based on manipulative, often mythologized, reminiscences, and containing contradictory pedagogic and political remarks. That is why I do not listen, I record.
Pictures and chunks of text recreate twists of fate in digital. My mom’s name is Galina Ivanovna Tereshenko. Also known as Alla Rotaenko. Also known by a number of other names combined from those two sets. She is a journalist, tv reporter, programmer, publisher, feminist.
She signs her articles with different pseudonyms: “in order for the news feed not to be signed by one name”.
So in this work she transfoms into a neural network, trained on the culture and events of 60s,
retrained in 90s, and so on…
On the other hand I am an editor and a director of this content. I create a new interpretational machine inside me, mechanisms inside which inevitably toss up the meaning in a new way.
Decades go by while the story goes on: institues (National Aerospace University of Kharkiv
- programming, Moscow State University - journalism), works and achievements.
And the common thread is: interest in cultural politics, media, technology, those that “influence brains and hearts”.
During her second degree diploma year she designs and draws diagrams of thinking algorithms, creates texts with typewhrigter, collects material for her thesis. One of the reviewers describes her work this way: “… she dissects Markx as if he was an experimental frog to her”.
Yet right after the presentation of the diploma paper this projects wierdly “dissappears”, straight from the vice rector’s shelf, only to be back in 30 years, in early 00s.
It’s a detective film with an open ending and I advise you to decide yourself on “who’s guilty”.