Alexei Shulgin (; born 1963 in Moscow) is a Russian-born contemporary artist, musician, and online curator. Working out of Moscow and Helsinki, Shulgin established the Immediate Photography Group in 1988 and started his career in this area of study. After 1990, he shifted his interests from photography to the Internet, and in 1994 founded Moscow-WWW-Art-Lab WWW Art Lab, collaborating with many artists from London and Slovenia. That very same year, Shulgin created an online photo museum called "Hot Pictures". In 1997, he continued with the invention of Form Art (Form Art) and the introduction of the Easy Life website (Easy Life). In 1999, Shulgin became Webmaster at FUFME, Inc. Since 2004, Shulgin has been a co-owner of Electroboutique (Electroboutique).
Artistic work Particularly involved with software art and internet art, he is a part of the readme culture and uses code as a form of art. In 1997, he released his first interactive work, Form Art, in which only minimum factors are programmed in the form of HTML. Navigating this site requires aimless click-throughs of blank boxes and links, which lead the viewer through 19 pages of "form art" animations. Behavioral expectations are subverted by frequently overriding default functionality of basic form elements such as radio buttons and list boxes.
Shulgin was among the artists associated with the net.art movement of the 1990s. In 1998, he began 386 DX, a performance project using a PC running Windows 3.1, MIDI files and text-to-speech software to perform cover versions of popular songs. Shulgin described the project as "the world's first cyberpunk rock band".
386 DX has been presented both as a concert performance and as a street performance, including a 2000 performance in Graz, Austria. The work was included in the 2019 New Museum exhibition The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics, which presented works drawn from Rhizome's Net Art Anthology. Recordings from the project were released as The Best of 386 DX and Biggest Smash Hits, the latter through the Staalplaat label.
Exhibitions 2012, Electroboutique, Requiem , Мультимедиа Арт Музей, Москва
References
Sources
External links easylife.org website https://web.archive.org/web/20080419014508/http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/ashulgin/ https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Alexei+Shulgin https://web.archive.org/web/20080501082440/http://sunsite.cs.msu.su/wwwart/ Thomas Dreher: History of Computer Art, chap. VI.3.2 HTML Art with a wider explanation of Alexei Shulgin's "Form Art" (1997).