Alexander Chizhevsky was a Soviet-era interdisciplinary scientist and biophysicist who invented the disciplines of “heliobiology” (the effect of the sun on biology) and “aero-ionization” (the effect of ions in the air on biology). One of his most crucial projects was his research on the link between the Earth’s climate and the mass activity of civilizations, which came in what he considered eleven-year solar cycles. Chizhevsky is the unseen but central character in Anton Vidokle’s (b. 1965, Moscow) film The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun (2015), the second in his trilogy on the Russian philosophical movement of cosmism, following on from This Is Cosmos (2014). Shot in Kazakhstan, where Chizhevsky was imprisoned and later exiled, it begins and ends as a meditative exercise guided by the narrator. In-between this the story of Chizhevsky’s life and research is intertwined with visual and symbolic imagery of Lenin’s death and preserved body, Ancient Egyptian worship of the sun, and the effect of the sun on social upheavals. The eleven-year solar cycle is divided into four stages of roughly three years each. Following his predictions, we would find ourselves currently in the third stage, considered the one of maximum excitability, revolution, and war. Anton Vidokle (b. 1965, Moscow/New York) is an artist and also the founder of international art platform e-flux. His multidisciplinary practice has focused broadly on experimental artistic education. In 2008, in collaboration with Julieta Aranda, he produced Time/Bank, a project that enabled groups and individuals to bypass money as a measure of value and instead barter time and skills.
self-presentation:
The first thing that Anton Vidokle realized when he awoke naked on the operating table was that the dragon was still there. It was chained to a giant rock in the corner of the laboratory and was making faint hissing sounds. The dragon was female and was squatting next to three very large eggs. As Anton forced himself into a sitting position, the animal stirred and gently licked one of the eggs that was beginning to show a subtle web of cracks. Anton was trying to make sense of all this, but anesthesia was making his mind sluggish and numb. He remembered that there are a number of places where it appears that similar creatures are mentioned in the scriptures. He knew that the word dragon appears 21 times in the Old Testament alone. But still, it was impossibly difficult to believe that this was not a dream.
