Lit Up Like Arseny

I like to imagine that Arseny Avraamov viewed the world through a lens that was cleaner than yours or mine; that the blemishes of stale tradition did not exist in the vision of a man who turned factory sirens and live artillery fire into an actual symphony. His bombastic 'Symphony of the Factory Sirens' actually feels less like a symphony and more like a living, breathing machine meant to represent a unified front of human beings. The conductor and the engineer, the musician and the factory worker, the performer and the pedestrian - these things all became his machine.

I like to imagine that Arseny Avraamov viewed life as a massive experiment - a tangled web of sentient and mechanical beings, together striving to find clarity and build a practical existence yielding nonstop creative output. A world where envelopes, instead of being pushed back and forth between anonymous desktops, are pushed from the insides out by myriad manmade curiosities. Science and art would be woven into a fabric under which our fiery dreams would be nurtured. In my head, his world was full of brooks babbling about stories they'd read from littering passersby and rivers raging like mad drunks about the weird characters met on their ambitious travels.

I like to imagine these things because Arseny Avraamov left little else by which to remember him. For now I'll close my eyes while the factory sirens wipe my lens a little bit cleaner.

*More on Arseny Avraamov at 99% Invisible