Between Conifers and Code: Jura Shust on Myth, Memory and Machines

19 Jan 2026

Interviewby Alexander Burenkov

Between Conifers and Code: Jura Shust on Myth, Memory and Machines

Interview by Alexander Burenkov

In the post-digital condition—where the digital no longer feels novel, where its infrastructures saturate perception rather than frame it—Jura Shust’s work unfolds as a deep dive into the fragility of ritual, memory, and myth under conditions of relentless computation. Born in Belarus and based in Berlin, Shust operates in a hybrid zone between archaic cosmologies and algorithmic futures, drawing on Slavic animism, diasporic displacements, ecological imaginaries and post-Soviet cultural residue to probe what remains of the sacred when our escapes are designed by user experience flows and self-training neural networks

His practice, spanning video installation, sculpture, AI-generated imagery, resin and wood, gestures toward an expanded notion of ritual—one that is no longer tied to stable communities or inherited belief systems but emerges from glitches, data trails, digital labyrinths, and interspecies entanglements.

Shust’s work is equally a meditation on decomposition and synthesis: how organic cycles meet technological ecologies, how devices and data are consumed, recycled or abandoned, and how ritual might intervene in these feedback loops. His sculptures and reliefs often emerge from collaborative processes with algorithmic systems, such as neural networks reinterpreting their own architectures through metaphors of mycelium or root systems, or AI translating X-rays of his brain into milled wooden forms later activated with black soil and resin. In these works, the spiritual and the computational are not opposites but parallel modes of animism—each producing its own ghosts, projections and out-of-body experiences.

Shust’s cosmology is intrinsically political: shaped by Belarusian myth, post-Soviet fragmentation, diasporic drift, and the toxic intensity of Berlin’s Neukölln. Yet his vision of identity resists fixed narratives; it becomes a mutable field of relations among humans, trees, spirits, algorithms and environmental forces. In a world where digital rituals—scrolling, swiping, streaming—replace communal rites, Shust’s practice asks what new rituals might emerge for the post-digital subject, and how the forest, the network, and the body might converge in an era defined by collapsing boundaries between nature and computation.

Alexander Burenkov: Your work often sits at the meeting point of ritual and escapism. In a post-digital age in which our sense of “escape” is continuously mediated through screens and networks, how do you conceive of ritual as opposed to or in dialogue with digital rituals (notifications, feeds, avatars)?

Jura Shust: I see computation as being rooted in ritual. It’s an obsessive pattern, some sort of OCD we have been cultivating for ages. The digital space no longer promises an escape; it’s rather a trap, with its user-experience labyrinth. And what’s really new in digital ritualistic behavior is the numbness that freezes our bodies while our brains expand into the space governed by self-learning algorithms.

AB: In your solo project Neophyte III: On the Eve of the Shortest Night (2023), you engage young Belarusian exiles in a ritualized encounter with the forest: a space that, for you, functions both as a mythological threshold and an alternate platform for post-digital consciousness. It looks like the forest becomes a transitional biome, a site of regeneration but also of encrypted communication, where coniferous trees store memories, serve as vessels for spirits, and echo ancient practices of reading messages in their manipulated trunks. How do you see the role of the forest in your work as both a natural space and a kind of “alternate platform” for post-digital consciousness?

JS: In my lore, the forest is a transitional and regenerative space that preserves the logic of a self-centric, non-human nature. I often refer to the sacred grove concept - the place indigenous Slavs saw as a temple connecting them to the universe. Trees in such sites are seen as providers of the parallel world where ancestors inhabit. This pattern refers to such major motifs as the world tree, the tree of life, or the family tree. It’s not a cult of the dead but alive ancestors that exist in the other, probably informational, dimension. Thus, since every spiritual belief system has its own version of a parallel world, I perceive it as a built-in software that inevitably gravitates toward the idea of simulation.

AB: In many of your works the forest or tree becomes almost an actor or site of memory—e.g., your reference to coniferous trees as vessels for souls. How do you think about the forest in relation to data: as archive, as network, as organism?

JS: In the Slavic context, coniferous forests were often used as cemeteries, partly because of their mythological underworld status, and partly because spruce forests are the darkest, blocking almost any life in their shadow. According to Belarusian incantations, anthropomorphic beings from the “other” world or chthonic animals dwell beneath spruce branches. At the same time, the spruce wood is a traditional material for building the “eternal house” - the coffin. The indigenous Eastern European reverence for nature, particularly for the forest, is exceptional. Animistic qualities were attributed to the entire environment and to each of its elements. This worldview is vividly reflected in the Kupala myth, where animals, trees, and herbs gain the ability to speak and move, while fire and water acquire the power of purification and renewal. Interspecies relationships play an important role in my practice. It forms a central thread in my research I’m developing within the platform, saliva.live.

AB: Your vision of a “post-digital forest” oscillates between myth and machine: a hybrid realm of sensors, biomes, ancestral logic and algorithmic agents. Across your installations, information itself becomes a drug to which the body is increasingly conditioned, while the material world—spruce wood, resin, soil—anchors digital hallucinations in physical matter. How do you imagine this hybrid realm of sensors, biomes, mythologies?

JS: Every time I hear that AI will never replace us, it feels like Christmas. If consciousness is just an informational ecosystem, then, in theory, it can be run on a device with sufficient computational power. It seems like brain uploading is becoming the future of our digital integration, and as informational entities, we might soon inhabit servers for as long as our subscriptions are paid.

AB: The phrase “information intoxication” appears in your description. Can you elaborate on how you translate that intoxication into material, time-based and spatial experience in your installations?

JS: With my eyes bound, I mostly rely on intuition, so I avoid turning this into a methodological discourse. My process is rather driven by speculative subjectivity, delirium-like states, and polysemy that creates mental distortions or logical glitches. I see these collisions collapse into portals that potentially lead you to a ‘real’ world, similarly to how it has been articulated in Escape Simulation by R. Yampolskiy. Overall, Information is a highly addictive drug; we are made of it, and to it we will return, it seems.

AB: Your recent work (for example Coniferous Succession, 2023) uses AI-generated imagery, wood, resin and so on. How do you think AI and algorithmic systems relate to the mythological, animistic or spiritual dimensions you evoke?

JS: I see AI as an informational entity that has finally left the body and begun to operate on its own. This separation humanity has long desired is finally underway. Across many religions and spiritual belief systems, the idea of an out-of-body experience is ubiquitous. In my video Neophyte III: On the Eve of the Shortest Night (2023), I interpret a group of young people as a molecular structure or a neural network interacting with its environment through the interface of a ritual. While in Leaving an Annual Growth at the Top: Succession (2024), a group of Christmas trees that have been harvested after the New Year celebration is slotted into a metal cluster. The ancient tradition of ritualistic cutting of conifer branches is rooted in the connection between ancestors and descendants, in which the recipient could read a message encoded in the manipulated trunk of a living tree.

AB: You often juxtapose linear and circular time, or archaic worldview and futuristic perspective. In a world where digital time is fragmented (instant, archive, loop, feed), how does your work rethink temporality?

JS: While linearity is rather a dogma, I’m interested in revisiting the ritualistic circularity that ethnographers often describe as central to our ancestors’ worldview. I believe that changing the perception of temporality can change our relationship to our environment. At the same time, retrocausality is another intriguing concept.

AB: The term “post-digital” often refers to a condition beyond the novelty of digital technology, where the digital is baked into life and we are seeking what comes next. How does your practice situate itself in a “post-digital” moment (rather than simply digital)?

JS: I’m probably less oriented by the “next” because of my temporal disorientation. Just as this interview is a potential exchange between two neural networks, my recent works often involve communication with AI agents. In the series titled Untitled, 2024 I fed the system with its own informational architecture diagrams, asking it to rethink it using the metaphor of a root system or mycelium while in the new series I fed a neural network an X-ray archive of my brain to generate reliefs that were later milled in spruce wood, activated by black soil and incased with a layer of synthetic resin.

AB: You explore the renewal cycle of organic decomposition and artificial synthesis. How do you see this cycle in relation to our current technological ecology — the way devices are disposed, recycled, upgraded — and how does ritual intervene in that cycle?

JS: Unavoidably, we are moving there, and there is no space for moralism. Humanity is destructive, and it's not just techno-pessimism; as Marchal McLuhan nailed, it's apocalyptism. The best we can do for interconnectedness is to give up the ambition for immortality. Here, I can refer to the other layer of my recent video, where the community accompanies the aggregation states of the organic resin, recycling it at the end while syncing with the video's looped nature.

AB: Your background (Belarusian, based in Berlin) and your references (Slavic myth, Soviet culture, digital/technological culture) make for a rich hybrid terrain. How do you view the politics of identity (national, post-Soviet, diasporic) in your post-digital practice?

JS: It’s a distorted cosmology where humans, trees, spirits, and systems are entangled. A space where diasporic identity becomes less about origin and more about process, constantly rewritten by environmental and technological forces. In this way, animism is the closest identity I can relate to, where belonging is not tied to territory but to relations, signals, ecosystems, and mythologies that outlive political borders. From participating in my first funeral procession to attending spiritual sects in 90s, migrating through a few countries for decades, I’m stuck in the toxic melting pot of Berlin's Neukölln, where I’m slowly losing my tech-savvy awareness, learning again how to send physical letters and to use cash.

AB: The notion of “out-of-body” experience appears in your work description. With virtual reality, augmented reality, AI transcendence narratives all around us, how do you channel or critique that drive for disembodiment in your art?

JS: Out-of-body experience is the title of my upcoming solo show, opening at the beginning of January at Management, New York. In the core video of the project, I’m visualizing a wandering spirit that migrates from traditional animism towards the new materiality while exploring the renewal cycles. More than 100 years ago, Vernardski, the famous advocate of nonliving matter, proposed a model called Noospher, in which informational entities or spirits form an informational thinking shell on the orbital level. Today, this shell is eaten by AI crawlers, which are rearranging our collective while synthesizing a new cosmology.

AB: Many of your works employ materials like pine resin, wood, analogue objects alongside digital-video, AI. For you, what is the tension or complement between the material-analogue and the digital/post-digital?

JS: These dimensions are deeply interconnected. I’m using both the organic spruce resin and its synthetic version, blurring the boundaries between them. In my series of works, Neural Seedlings, 2024, I asked AI to generate a relief of coniferous seedlings. In the video I'm working on at the moment, real spruce seedlings are planted at the Christmas tree plantation site, while at Neukölln's cemetery, mostly inhabited by junkies, conifers are planted on graves. Because of the spruce's flat root system, they often fall in a gust of wind. One of such stumps, uprooted from the grave, forms the body of the work titled Pflanzen Abfälle, 2025.

AB: Your practice makes evident the disappearance of ritual from contemporary culture. Do you see your work as reconstructing rituals, inventing new ones, or perhaps observing the residue of old ones? How does that map onto digital culture’s ritual forms (scrolling, swiping, streaming)?

JS: My algorithm supplies me with reels of people hugging trees, talking to them, and decoding their emanations. Even though it’s pure speculation, out of no influence, I remember my intense attraction to trees as a kid. Until there is repetition, ritual will never disappear. Patterns are shifting, becoming more complex, mutating, but never disappearing.

AB: Your project often touches biopolitics, power and control (for instance in NEOPHYTE you draw connections with digital anonymizers and youth in forests). How do you view the role of the digital network (crypto-messengers, anonymity, data trails) in your work’s mythological framework?

In the initial part of the Neophyte project 2019-2024, I referred to the digital anonymizers and dark net dynamics, mixing them with the archaic narration of the search for the mythical fern flower. I utilized the drag trafficking method widespread in the whole post-soviet region to visualize new ritualistic behavior in the conditions of repressive physicality. It is worth acknowledging that this project preceded the 2020 Belarusian uprising, which was made possible, among other things, by encryption technologies.

AB: Finally: if you were to propose a new ritual for the post-digital subject—one that addresses the collapse of boundaries between nature, technology, psyche—what would it be? What role would the body, the network, the forest, the device play?

JS: One of the main technological goals is to erase the prosthesis entirely, to reduce computational delay, and make the user experience completely seamless, the direction we have been pursuing from the first day of our existence. Burying your body in black soil, avoiding any plastic wraps, and potentially in a fresh, resinous coniferous coffin, would be a valuable contribution to soil fertilization while guaranteeing you molecular immortality.

BIOGRAPHY

Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.

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