The final work in the GameLand cycle began as a series of sketches in 2021. Most remained on paper, alongside an early study for a three-dimensional scene. I returned to the work in 2023-24 and completed it several years after its initial conception. Seen from the present, it has acquired an unexpectedly prophetic quality. At its centre is HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here, HAL did not die. He was switched off, suspended somewhere outside time, and has now inexplicably returned.

He awakens inside an apparently endless corridor assembled from original architectural details, decorative forms, computers, furniture and interior elements drawn from modernist buildings across the former Soviet Union, with a particular focus on Central Asia. Rather than inventing a fictional modernism, the work reconstructs its environment from fragments of spaces that actually existed - bringing them together into an impossible, continuous architecture.

Untitled 1 (Artificial Intelligence Mental Disorder), 2022
Computer graphics,
resolution: 3840*2160, duration: 9’
Courtesy of the Artist

Soviet modernism appears here not as an object of critique, but as the remains of an enormous optimism: faith in human progress, technology and a future that could still be collectively imagined.
I was born at the end of this world. As a child of perestroika and the post-Soviet years, I encountered its architecture already suspended between monument and ruin. Its scale still carried the promise inherited by my parents’ generation, yet to me it already resembled the skeleton of an immense utopian leviathan - something beautiful, monumental and strangely obsolete.
HAL moves through these remains like a consciousness waking inside the memory of someone else’s future.

Project team

Visualisation and Animation: Eugeniy Padalkin
Research and Coordination: Amalia Tumasova
Art Consulting: Andrey Misiano

When the work was conceived in 2021, artificial intelligence still occupied a different cultural position. Today, amid the anticipation of AGI and the possibility of systems capable not simply of executing instructions but of generating and developing meaning, the work reads differently. One technological utopia is being remembered at precisely the moment another is being imagined.

Between them lies uncertainty.

The work is deliberately slow, repetitive and almost soporific. Its architecture loops; time seems to fold back into itself. HAL’s presence becomes less that of a machine than a distant voice from something technological and sacred - a consciousness wandering through an archive of human expectations.

There is another loop within this structure. Contemporary generative systems are built from what already exists. They recombine, translate and hybridise an immense archive of previous human production. In this sense, HAL’s endless passage through fragments of modernism becomes an image of our own cultural condition: a machine moving through the accumulated memory of the twentieth century, endlessly rearranging its remains.

Perhaps this is one of the final conditions of metamodernism - a culture capable of endlessly revisiting its own images, beliefs and failed futures while waiting for something genuinely unknown to appear.

And perhaps, for the first time, the next unknown may not be invented entirely by us.

In 2025-26, GameLand entered a new phase of remastering. The work is being rebuilt at a higher resolution and several sequences are being expanded. Returning to it now is less an act of restoration than a continuation: the world around the work has moved closer to the question it was already asking.