Stairway To Melon: Works by Viktor Timofeev

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, May 27 at 7pm for “Stairway To Melon,” a screening of works by Viktor Timofeev, followed by a conversation with artist and filmmaker Ericka Beckman.

“Stairway To Melon” presents six works by Viktor Timofeev created between 2015 and 2024, each exploring the poetics and structures of rule-based systems. Spanning cinematic works made in game engines, experimental alphabets, performative simulations, and collaborative drawing sessions, the program traces a throughline in Timofeev’s practice: a sustained interest in how does functioning of systems—linguistic, algorithmic, or behavioral—impacts one’s agency and govern expression.

Rather than reinforcing order or imposing clarity, systems in Timofeev’s work are open to uncertainty, generating drift and variation. Game environments become sites of misdirection or ritual repetition: alphabets reconfigure into abstract languages, artificial agents follow logics based on improvisation. Across Timofeev’s films and videos, meaning does not arrive fully formed—it flickers, stutters, and reorganizes itself in real time. Through this approach, Timofeev invites viewers into speculative worlds where structure and chance remain in constant tension offering a view not of resolved narratives, but of dynamic, generative conditions for thought and perception.

Following the screening, Timofeev will be joined by Ericka Beckman to discuss cinematic worldmaking, generative aesthetics, and abstraction as a method of reconfiguring systems of meaning.

Films

Alice, Bob, Carol and David (2024, 22 minutes)
A short film created in a game engine blending game mechanics, chance operations, and choreographic loops to explore interdependent character dynamics. Alice, Bob, Carol and David by Viktor Timofeev is an interdisciplinary work combining film, gaming, and performance into a unique choreographic system. Using the Unity game engine, the installation presents four characters—named after cryptographic placeholders—engaged in a loop of improvised, interdependent movements. Inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s generative scores from the 1960s, their repetitive, everyday actions synthesise chance and structure, reflecting control, autonomy, and emotional resonance.

Continuum (2017, 8 minutes, black and white, sound)
Continuum was shot within a digital environment made with the Unity game engine. This was Timofeev’s first attempt at making a cinematic work using this process. The video cuts between first-person perspectives of two groups of entities that occupy a desert-like landscape—a group of bugs that live on the ground and a swarm of drones that fly around them. The entities act out their interdependent relationship as they observe, pursue, and escape each other in what is meant to feel like a tense and ritualistic, endless loop, all without coming into proximity or contact. The first-person view serves as the common, overlapping shot between both sets of characters in the video to emphasize its basic empathic potential, allowing viewers to “occupy” both entities’ positions.

Proxyah (2015, 8 minutes, color, sound)
Proxyah is a collage-based game originally made for a site-specific installation at kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga in 2015, where it was played by touching an egg-shaped joystick. The basic premise of the game is a struggle to simply exit a room, made difficult by various obstacles that interfere with the player’s agency: a two-dimensional snake game in the main field of view, random collage-based cuts to another world, reconfiguration of assigned controls, and more. The game was developed during a period of chronic physical pain. Game engines became a means of engaging rule-making as an artistic strategy, and games, as understood here, served as a medium for working with agency itself.

Artificial Life and Death (2020, 3 minutes, black and white, sound)
Video collaboration with Jaakko Pallasvuo, music by Viktor Timofeev.
A music video for a song by Timofeev. The video is a timelapse of a collaborative online drawing made with Jaakko Pallasvuo. During the COVID pandemic, while based in New York and Helsinki respectively, the two artists began exploring how to continue collaborating across distance. Using newly emerging remote-work brainstorming platforms, they would speak and draw together, likening the process to doodling during telephone conversations. Timofeev began recording these sessions, eventually editing a few of them to a track from his 2020 EP Exocursion, released by Futura Resistenza in Brussels. The result became the music video for the track.

Hexbugs (2016, 4 minutes, color, sound)
A studio documentation of Timofeev’s experiments with making soft boundaries for electronic toy bugs that were featured in an exhibition at Cordova project space in Vienna. The bugs follow a simple rule: they move forward until they hit a wall, at which point they turn left or right. The artist played with making “soft” walls that would confuse this rule set, then placed multiple bugs into an enclosed system and recorded the results. The process led to a projection of personality and narrative onto the bugs’ interactions.

Chat (2021, 4 minutes, color, sound)
Chat was part of an exhibition at Interstate Projects, NY (2021). Originally part of a three-channel installation that included an invented writing system—an alphabet based in time—this version is a single-channel edit. The alphabet is generative: it takes the standard pool of English letters and systematically abstracts them by cutting and rearranging their parts. The resulting twenty-six abstracted letters form an animated key. A corresponding text is continuously updated to reflect these permutations. The process reorients familiar components and mutates them to appear foreign, recalling fictional languages and asemic writing systems. The result is a continuous defamiliarization of the alphabet from itself—an algorithmic language without a national identity.

Bios

Viktor Timofeev is a multidisciplinary artist from Riga, Latvia living in New York. Drawing from personal and societal perspectives, his work examines themes of identity, migration, and communication across borders. Timofeev creates fantastical environments through drawing, painting, video, and installation, often addressing the tension between integration and rebellion in structured systems. His semi-autobiographical works reflect on the cognitive dissonance between inner and outer worlds, exploring cross-cultural values and shared symbols. Recent solo exhibitions include Other Passengers at the Latvian National Museum of Art (2025), Pedagogical Games 1 at 427 Gallery in Riga (2024), DOG at Interstate Projects in New York (2021), God Objects at Karlin Studios / Futura in Prague (2020), God Room at Alyssa Davis Gallery in New York (2018) and Stairway to Melon at Kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Breaking The Joints at Sapieha Palace in Vilnius (2025), Tallinn Photomonth in Tallinn (2023), Digital Intimacy at the National Gallery Prague in Prague (2021), the 14th Baltic Triennial at Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius (2021) and Somewhere in Between at Bozar in Brussels (2018).

Ericka Beckman has been an acclaimed filmmaker since being named the Village Voice Vanguard artist of 1979. Energetic pacing, simple, special effects, and chanted, percussive soundtracks distinguish the artist’s films. Beckman has been the subject of monographic exhibitions: Super-8 Trilogy (2018), Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Game Mechanics (2017) Le Secession, Vienna; and Double Reverse (2019), List Gallery MIT, Cambridge. Her films are held within the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Anthology Film Archives in New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, The High Museum, Atlanta; the British Film Institute, London; and Light Cone, Paris.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.