ROMA SOYEROV
'Hey DJ'
Year: 2026 Medium: Acrylic on canvas, plexiglass, electric motors, Arduino; mechanical kineticism Series: PROPAGANDA Dimensions: 110 × 82 cm First shown: We Speak 2.0, Cultura, Tashkent, 2026 Availability: Unique work, available on request
Overview
A complete picture of the world exists. It is almost never visible in its entirety. Hey DJ is a kinetic installation built from 22 blades, each painted on both sides, each turning on its own motor, all timed by the same small piece of code. Left alone, plugged into a wall, it never stops. The blades spin at random, two or three at a time, cutting one painted world into another and back again. What you see is never finished, and never quite gone either. It is being reshuffled, not destroyed.
There is nothing to do but watch. Not passively, with the specific attention of someone who knows the picture keeps changing and cannot look away.
As far as Soyerov knows the local scene firsthand, Hey DJ is currently the only kinetic art installation being made in Uzbekistan.
How it moves
Hey DJ runs on its own. Plug it in, and every two to five minutes an Arduino wakes two or three of the 22 blades and turns them, on a random pattern, never in sync, never predictable from one cycle to the next. No visitor action is needed. The motors make a low mechanical sound while they turn. That sound wasn't part of the design. It arrived on its own and stayed, because it fits.
A moment exists, in theory, when every blade lands on the same face at once and the full image resolves. The odds of it happening are close to zero. With only a couple of blades moving at any given time out of 22, most of what a visitor sees is fragments, never the whole. That doesn't mean the whole isn't there. It means finding it is close to a matter of luck.
Hey DJ runs on its own. Plug it in, and every two to five minutes an Arduino wakes two or three of the 22 blades and turns them, on a random pattern, never in sync, never predictable from one cycle to the next. No visitor action is needed. The motors make a low mechanical sound while they turn. That sound wasn't part of the design. It arrived on its own and stayed, because it fits.
A moment exists, in theory, when every blade lands on the same face at once and the full image resolves. The odds of it happening are close to zero. With only a couple of blades moving at any given time out of 22, most of what a visitor sees is fragments, never the whole. That doesn't mean the whole isn't there. It means finding it is close to a matter of luck.
What you're looking at
Two painted worlds sit across the same 22 blades, one per face. Geese, crayfish, and pike surface throughout. Lions, bears, crabs, whales, and an elephant move through the same surface. An elephant's silhouette bends into the shape of a goose. The goose itself hangs upside down, legs in the air, a bird diving toward the ground rather than lifting off it. Houses sit balanced on its back, an old cosmology (the world resting on the back of some vast animal) folded into a single painted body.
Elsewhere, predatory animals give way to weapons: a grenade, a pistol, an AK-47, drawn with the same hand and the same paint as the animals they emerge from.
The surface carries the drips and smudges of graffiti, a density that owes something to Bosch, and the flatness of street advertising, three visual languages that don't usually share a wall, layered into one. The same suspicion of a polished surface that runs through Soyerov's other work shows up here in the material itself: myth and advertising, sitting on the same wall, hard to tell apart.
Two painted worlds sit across the same 22 blades, one per face. Geese, crayfish, and pike surface throughout. Lions, bears, crabs, whales, and an elephant move through the same surface. An elephant's silhouette bends into the shape of a goose. The goose itself hangs upside down, legs in the air, a bird diving toward the ground rather than lifting off it. Houses sit balanced on its back, an old cosmology (the world resting on the back of some vast animal) folded into a single painted body.
Elsewhere, predatory animals give way to weapons: a grenade, a pistol, an AK-47, drawn with the same hand and the same paint as the animals they emerge from.
The surface carries the drips and smudges of graffiti, a density that owes something to Bosch, and the flatness of street advertising, three visual languages that don't usually share a wall, layered into one. The same suspicion of a polished surface that runs through Soyerov's other work shows up here in the material itself: myth and advertising, sitting on the same wall, hard to tell apart.
Readings
Submitted to Barcelona Contemporary 9 alongside Hit and Run and Immortal, under a shared curatorial question about identity under pressure, Hey DJ was framed there as a piece about the self fragmenting under a constant flow of information: no single viewer able to hold a coherent picture of the world they're standing in.
Soyerov has also described the piece in broader terms, closer to a question about the many than the one: how a shared, constantly shifting picture of the present gets assembled out of small, disconnected, mostly random actions.
One reading connects the goose, the crayfish, and the pike to the old fable of the swan, the crayfish, and the pike pulling in three directions at once, with a goose standing in for the swan. It's a reading Soyerov recognizes in the work, even if it wasn't the starting point.
Visitors bring their own readings too, and that's by design. Some see the fable. Some see the myth. Some hear a DJ in the title itself, someone mixing and scrambling images the way a DJ mixes sound. Some see something else entirely. All of it stays open.
Submitted to Barcelona Contemporary 9 alongside Hit and Run and Immortal, under a shared curatorial question about identity under pressure, Hey DJ was framed there as a piece about the self fragmenting under a constant flow of information: no single viewer able to hold a coherent picture of the world they're standing in.
Soyerov has also described the piece in broader terms, closer to a question about the many than the one: how a shared, constantly shifting picture of the present gets assembled out of small, disconnected, mostly random actions.
One reading connects the goose, the crayfish, and the pike to the old fable of the swan, the crayfish, and the pike pulling in three directions at once, with a goose standing in for the swan. It's a reading Soyerov recognizes in the work, even if it wasn't the starting point.
Visitors bring their own readings too, and that's by design. Some see the fable. Some see the myth. Some hear a DJ in the title itself, someone mixing and scrambling images the way a DJ mixes sound. Some see something else entirely. All of it stays open.
FAQ
- How do you turn it on?Plug it in. No phone, app, or QR code needed. Every two to five minutes, a few blades turn on their own, on a random pattern set by an onboard Arduino. A separate, QR-triggered interactive edition has also been shown, where a visitor's scan sets off the rotation instead, but that's a variant, not the standard setup.
- Can you ever see the whole picture?Technically yes. There's a configuration where all 22 blades align and the image resolves completely. In practice, close to never: treating each blade as a coin flip between the two paintings, the odds of all 22 landing on the same side at once work out to roughly 1 in 2 million, in the same range as the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year. With only two or three blades moving every few minutes, actually catching that moment is close to impossible.
- Is there sound?Yes, the motors make a mechanical hum while turning. It wasn't part of the original design. It stayed because it belongs.
- Is there video of it in motion?Yes. A still photo only shows one frozen configuration and misses the point of the piece.
- Is it for sale?Yes. It's a unique work, one of one.
- How does it relate to Soyerov's other AR work, like Soft Skill?Same series, PROPAGANDA, same method (a complete image hidden and only partly recoverable), different tool: augmented reality there, a mechanical, Arduino-driven system here.