Hi, I am Victor Lander, a UK-based creative director and researcher into evolutionary storytelling.
I tell stories through screens, spaces and technology.
At the age of 4 I learned to read and began reading just about everything I could get my hands on. I started with our home library where the regular intelligentsia classic literature selection would share the shelf with textbooks on pneumatic automation — written by my granddad. Then came the era of science fiction and philosophy. Then I started writing sci-fi myself.
My parents anticipated yet another professor in the family, but I swerved midway, becoming a copywriter instead. First, at the Art. Lebedev studio, Russia’s leading web design company, then at global ad agencies. After 10 years at Leo Burnett and BBDO, science fiction, futurology and philosophy started to bulge from within — again. I realized that I got bored of shooting commercials. I started to look for the future of communications and left for Sila Sveta, Russia’s most prominent multimedia design studio. It is there that I met my partners that we started my first company with, called Avocado Toast. Later on, I founded Landerlander, a communications boutique, this time with my life partner, my wife Anastasia.
What I love doing above all things is creating something no one has ever done before. News about scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs make me feel ecstatic. At the same time, I am as much excited about the fact that about half of all possible storylines were described by Aristotle in the first volume of his Poetics (the other half is lost with the Volume II).
In my stories I like mixing the old and the new, recognisable and surprising, frightful and soothing — in every possible combination. I tell these stories through any kind of media I can find around me: a wall, a museum, a screen, a show, a dance performance, a tree, a Rube Goldberg machine made of old electronic parts and even through cannabis leaves (please refer to the portfolio part of this site).
I also research the evolution of storytelling in order to find out how to make stories even more interesting and captivating. Sometimes I make public talks about my findings. Other times I just silently employ them in my stories.