The illusion of watching a video, repeated movements over and over again; it’s just hypnotizing to me.

Russia is a multinational country with different cultures and languages. I was born in the Udmurt republic and lived there for twenty years. It's a place with strong pagan beliefs and Kalashnikov manufacturers. I spent all my childhood in the atelier where my mother worked at the time as a fashion designer. I have projects about it, but I think I made my private experiences a part of my job.

I prefer to be titled as a visual artist. Depending on the project’s needs I choose one tool or another. It gives me great freedom to mix and use different techniques and work between fashion, art and design.

Some years ago I discovered Excel as an artistic tool by myself. I coloured the cells and it reminded me of early computer graphics with tumbler-style GIFs. It was before the Facebook–GIPHY, Instagram–Boomerang era. If we like something, we want to repeat it over and over again. GIF is ‘the magic moment’ that never ends; it's a mix between film and photography, and does a really good job catching one's attention in the Internet era.

Definitely, social media are the driving force of GIFs. I think that the popularization of GIFs came with Facebook and Instagram. The easier a tool, the more popular it becomes. It attracts one’s attention better then pictures. But I think that Tumblr saved GIFs life! This is one of the very few places on the Internet with such a strong and old GIF tradition.

I like to discover different disciplines of design, as well as using multiple tools. Fashion is the most common subject in my projects because of my background, but I always connect it to other genres. A perfect photo to use in a GIF for me has many details: prints on fabrics, textures, windows, logos, lines etc. I used to embroider beads a lot, so GIF making is very similar. I just play like making a patchwork. By working with my own photos I can choose the best one to fit my animation. What I like about commission work is the challenge to show a product or idea in a smart way.

Yes, I work for theatres and partake in special projects in Poland. As fifty per cent of HIGH Studio, together with Dawid Zalesky (Frol-Zalesky art direction’s duo) we work between art and design. My latest collaboration with Alba1913 Cosmetics is an InstaArt project; I’m an Instagram Artist in Residence, for example.

We live in the era of digital revolution. Internet opened a completely different space for art and design, and it changed our society like nothing else before. It is another wave of social evolution. I think both the Internet and the new digital forms of art will be more and more popular. We can travel with Google maps or build an alternative life by buying clothes and a new hairstyle for our avatars in Second Life, or spend money in apps to make our selfies perfect. Only two things are missing online: touch and smell. And I think that this opens a pretty wide unscented space for artists and their future projects.