In his latest works Life Interface, Argišt Alaverdyan explores the ambiguous boundaries between various entities. The newly created depictions can take the form of plants, animals, robots, or abstract concepts such as maps or other records of the state and shape of the world. Viewed through Alaverdyan’s artistic lens, a distinctive fictional world emerges that is difficult to interpret through ordinary frames of knowledge. To understand it sufficiently as an observer, one must abandon an anthropocentric perspective and remain open to alternatives to our established understanding of concepts like nature and civilization.
The title Life Interface suggests that Alaverdyan is attempting to define a new way of life for which we are seeking guidelines and methods of interpretation. This new life is no longer suitable to be judged solely through a human perspective but rather through the prism of new technologies and interfaces that dictate the interaction between humans and machines. We should ask ourselves what our relationship to these technologies will be and how they will affect our understanding of our own identity and existence. The author does not present a definitive way of interpreting his work, but individual drawings reveal techno-skeptical references—for instance, the motif of the extractivist principle in the use of resources. However, the artistic rendering, which intuitively feels pleasant and employs a color palette that is at times even cheerful, contributes to the uncertainty of one-sided interpretations. Alaverdyan’s work primarily seeks to open a path to these deeper questions and provides inspiration for reflections on what it means to be human in an era where the boundaries between human and machine are increasingly blurred, where virtual identity may hold greater value for many members of society than their everyday physical existence, and where debates about the future alongside ever-advancing forms of artificial existence fill public spaces. His project, comprising a nearly year-long series of 28 drawings, thus builds a bridge between art, technology, and posthumanist philosophy.
Alaverdyan does not attribute solely optical value to visual art. He incorporates his extensive interest in the principles of various games into his compositions and perception of space. For instance, the pattern of chess moves on a chessboard can be perceived as a shape or figure laid out over time. Applied to classical drawing, this approach requires us to rethink the usual perspective on a two-dimensional image and view the static format of drawing as a kind of moving image frozen in time. What can we observe in the author’s drawings because of this?
Veronika Čechová

Argišt Alaverdyan in conversation with Veronika Čechová

Veronika: The audience is seeing your first exhibition based purely on drawings instead of your usual paintings. Can you elaborate on your relationship with this medium?

Argišt: I’ve approached drawing at a slower pace, whereas previously, it primarily served to quickly capture ideas or design compositions for subsequent painting. I focused on breathing and holding breath, which manifests more prominently here than in painting.

V: Can you share your sources of inspiration (not just) for the Life Interface series?

A: I’m interested in the blending of different worlds, which I’ve recently been deliberately, regularly, and intensely exploring—as an observer. From evening gaming sessions of a video game merging fantasy worlds with a dark medieval setting, I moved to reading a book where humans are forced to coexist with an alien race holding radically different values. That evening, I also had to study the rules of a board game for the next day, in which players attempt to restore part of the Amazon rainforest. Before falling asleep, I doomscrolled videos tailored to me by ever-changing algorithms.This mixing of diverse media, genres, and moods can be exhausting, placing us in a position where we constantly need to reassess our boundaries—especially given our immersion in increasingly sophisticated systems vying for our attention. Through this observation and awareness of my own body—alongside the bodies of animals and plants surrounding me—I gradually create a fictional world that transforms complex experiences into abstract and/or metaphorical forms, simplifying them into images. These, in turn, can expand interpretations of what we are—or might be—a part of.

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