If Disrupted

Curatorial text:

Aleksei Borisionok & Antonina Stebur

If disrupted, It becomes tangible

Infrastructures and solidarities beyond post-Soviet condition

Artists: Tekla Aslanishvili & Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Mariyam Medet*, Yevgenia Belorusets, eeefff, Anna Engelhardt, fantastic little splash, Uladzimir Hramovich *, The Museum of Stones editorial collective *, Oleksiy Radynski *, Alicja Rogalska, Sabīne Šnē *, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, XYANA *

Curators: Aleksei Borisionok, Antonina Stebur

* Star marks presentation of new works, co-commissioned by The National Gallery of Art

The exhibition If Disrupted, It Becomes Tangible at the National Gallery of Art explores the political context of extractivist and logistical infrastructures, digital and information technologies (IT), affected by wars and political uprisings in the geography and temporality that goes beyond the post-Soviet condition.

Based on the ruins of the Soviet system of technical education, research and production—lately deregulated and mainly privatised — the development of IT introduced ex-Soviet countries to the global economic and labour market with its geographical unevenness. This process could be described as a specific form of IT colonialism that operates through the exploitation of a highly qualified and inexpensive labour force. However, the material base that we refer to as ‘cybernetic ruins’ was not neutral: historically, scientific knowledge and IT were developed as a part of the military-industrial complex, extractivist logistics and transportation, as well as the development of post-Soviet fossil capitalism with its neo-imperialist infrastructures.

The exhibition derives from the notion of infrastructure, which is understood as a way of distributing and organising power relations. Networks of infrastructure such as railways, gas pipelines, internet fibre optics, Telegram channels, video monitoring systems and so on remain intangible in everyday functioning. At the same time, their breakdown, disabling and interruption exposes the work of the whole infrastructure and their interconnectedness. In a literal sense, power and its materiality become visible, mundane and embodied through breakdown and interruption.

The geography and temporality of various artistic practices presented at the exhibition stretch far beyond the post-Soviet condition. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and recent political protests in various ex-Soviet countries—Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Armenia among others—demonstrate the activist and voluntaristic potential of the technologies themselves. Digital activism and militancy such as hacking, disruption of automated cybernetic systems and leaking of databases became a crucial part of social movements during the protests and an essential characteristic of warfare in Ukraine.

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine can be seen through the lens of cyberwarfare. Ukrainian scholar Svitlana Matviyenko states: ‘The war tension oscillates between two poles […] — AI and nuclear.’. Entangling digital technologies and the kinetic use of weapons, cyberwar becomes one of the most important notions that comprises complexities and infrastructures of contemporary imperialism and warfare. The imperialist configuration of war with its logistics, seizure of nuclear power plants, cyberwar and AI technologies should be addressed from the decolonial perspective and set new configurations as a process of ‘exodus’ from the post-Soviet condition, as proposed by Olexii Kuchanskyi. The exhibition highlights various forms of resistance towards invasive military infrastructures and the creation of new spaces and temporalities of solidarity. The exhibition presents practices that not only represent current developments in tech warfare but also produce various tools that can perform and embody current resistance.

If Disrupted, It Becomes Tangible is divided into 4 sections:

The Ruins of Infrastructures reveals ideas of power relations behind infrastructures and features of the IT sphere in ex-Soviet countries as having been built on the ruins of Soviet military institutions, as well as the connection between digital and industrial production, detected through the ideas of resourcification, colonialism outsourcing and externalities.

Cyberwar and Imperial Imaginations shows the digital ‘frontline’ of the war and how kinetic and cyber weapons are interconnected. It delves into the history of Soviet cybernetics and cyberweapons, the growth of the game development industry and its connection to imperial and post-colonial imaginations.

Disruption as Method analyses how the rupture of infrastructures manifests by exposing the work of power, ultimately highlighting its fragility and vulnerability. This chapter covers various gestures of disruption—hacking, cutting off internet access, cyberattacks—as a method of resistance.

Algorithmic Spaces of Control and Resistance explores the creation of the ‘data subject’, increasing algorithmization and their political effects. It also investigates how new alliances and political mobilisations can be both facilitated and controlled by the use of contemporary technologies.

The disruption of infrastructure as a subversive mechanism of resistance and solidarity has been embodied in the architecture of the exhibition through a discontinuous metal structure that runs across the entire exhibition. On one hand, it exposes gaps in the infrastructure but on the other hand, it links artworks and contexts together. The exhibition is also supplemented by a glossary generated by the curators and artists that can be used as an orientational tool in this complex and layered configuration of technologies, infrastructures and cyberwars.

The Ruins of Infrastructures

The section ‘The Ruins of Infrastructures’ comprehends how various types of infrastructures—transport, logistics, information, military, Internet and so on— establish particular configurations of power, forms of economic exploitation and social exclusion.

This section centres on the acknowledgement that infrastructures of modernisation, primarily related to high technologies, are based on existing or ruined Soviet industrial and post-industrial heritage, research and education, production and the military-industrial complex. Consequently, they have certain logic embedded in them originating from the time of the Soviet Union (Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas; Oleksiy Radynski ). The capitalist organisation of new institutions based in abandoned or ruined facilities stimulated the development of unequal relations and processes associated with IT colonialism and resourcification in ex-Soviet countries (Tekla Aslanishvili and Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze ).

This section also reflects the connection between contemporary high technologies and the externalities in the region (Sabīne Šnē ). Traditionally, industrial and post-industrial spheres are portrayed as fundamentally different models of economic and labour organisation. However, IT technologies turn out to be as rooted in the material world as heavy industries, where outsourcing is one of the variant forms of ‘pumping out’ resources, material or intellectual, from a certain territory.

Cyberwar and Imperial Imaginations

According to scholars Nick Dyer-Whithford and Svitlana Matviyenko, the notion of cyberwar ‘emphasises the new centrality to war of digital technologies, thus pointing back historically to origins in Second World War and Cold War cybernetics and forward to the new levels of networking and automation likely to characterise all social relations, including war making, in the twenty-first century.’.[1] The crucial comment on the character of cyberwarfare is delivered by the same scholars—they refuse to oppose ‘cyber’ and ‘kinetic’ weaponry in times of complex asymmetrical warfare. Instead, they stress ‘the ways in which they [cyber and kinetic weaponry] cross over and complement each other until it is difficult, if at all possible, to distinguish between them.’.[2]

‘Cyberwar and Imperial Imaginations’ untangles the history of Soviet cybernetics and cyberweapons (Anna Engelhardt ) and the way they are connected to the development of machine vision, automatisation of data processing and their use in Russian/Soviet colonial wars. The section also traces how imperialism constructs and represents historical and digital space/landscape through examples of the game development industry, academic drawing and GPS systems (Uladzimir Hramovich ). Lastly, one side of cyberwarfare—information war as part of a media apparatus—is investigated through the fake news, multiple conspiracy discourses, propaganda and counterpropaganda that emerged after the annexation of Crimea and occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk by Russia in 2014 (Yevgenia Belorusets ).

Disruption as Method

Etymologically, the term ‘infrastructure’ has the prefix ‘infra’, meaning ‘sub’ or ‘under’, standing for an invisible and stealthy characteristic. This invisibility and even the feeling of dematerialisation are particularly essential for IT infrastructure. Breakdown, disabling and interruption exposes the work of the infrastructure. Power and its materiality, in a literal sense, turn out to be visible, mundane and embodied through destruction and interruption (eeefff ).

The section ‘Disruption as Method’ highlights multiple tactics to resist the totality of infrastructure and its invisible power. Such disruption can manifest as an accidental breakdown (Alicja Rogalska ) or through a series of planned sabotages, hacks, disruptions and suspensions (fantastic little splash ). For example, during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the sabotage of railways by the Belarusian Railway Guerrillas or the demolishing of navigation systems by Ukrainians impeded or partially blocked the Russian army’s locomotion. Digital hacking and physical attacks of elements of cybernetic systems blur the division between cyber and kinetic, digital and material, visible and concealed.

Algorithmic Spaces of Control and Resistance

The original concept of the exhibition derived from the specific context of Belarus where the vast and rapid creation of solidarity and resistance networks was launched in the course of the popular uprising in 2020. Even though social upheaval is being gradually suppressed through state and police violence, various social and political initiatives—including those mediated by digital interfaces—are active and adjusting to current events: Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine through the use of Belarusian territories and infrastructures.

The section ‘Algorithmic Spaces of Control and Resistance’ explores various conceptual and speculative topographies that are clinched in the violence and emancipation of algorithmic calculations. The artistic works refer to imaginary and real spaces that show the contradictions between political agency and control such as the High Technology Park in Minsk, an important location on the map of protests in Belarus directly connected to IT labour and digital resistance (XYANA ).

The anonymous editorial collective of cultural workers The Museum of Stones has been publishing digital newspapers through a Telegram chatbot . For the exhibition, they present a new issue on anti-war resistance in Belarus and beyond. Mariyam Medet subverts John Searle’s algorithmic thought experiment ‘Chinese room’ from 1980 and questions the racist implications of the thought experiment by referring to facial recognition systems and re-education camps for Uighurs in China. In general, this section investigates how new alliances and political mobilisations can be both facilitated and controlled by the use of contemporary technologies.

About the Exhibition

This website is part of the exhibition “If Disrupted, It Becomes Tangible Infrastructures and Solidarities beyond the post-Soviet Condition”. Organized by The National Gallery of Art and Lithuanian National Museum of Art.

The exhibition is open 2023 03 31 – 06 18

Curators of the exhibition: Antonina Stebur, Aleksei Borisionok

Glossary contributors: Antonina Stebur, Aleksei Borisionok, Alicja Rogalska, Anna Engelhardt, XYANA, The Museum of Stones Editorial Collective, fantastic little splash, Uladzimir Hramovich, eeefff group, Sabīne Šnē

Exhibition artists: Tekla Aslanishvili & Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Mariyam Medet*, Yevgenia Belorusets, eeefff, Anna Engelhardt, fantastic little splash, Uladzimir Hramovich *, The Museum of Stones editorial collective*, Oleksiy Radynski *, Alicja Rogalska, Sabīne Šnē *, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, XYANA*
* Star marks presentation of new works, co-commissioned by The National Gallery of Art

Graphic designer Valentin Duduk

Programming by Nicolay Spesivtsev

Exhibition architect Gabrielė Černiavskaja

Project coordinators: Austėja Tavoraitė, Kotryna Markevičiūtė

Translators: Paulius Balčytis, Aušra Karsokienė

Copy editors: Dovydas Laurinaitis, Laura Patiomkinaitė-Čeikė

Thank you: Lolita Jablonskienė, Eglė Juocevičiūtė, Vytautas Narbutas, Mindaugas Reklaitis, Marijus Okockis, Laura Grigaliūnaitė, Asia Bazdyreva, Noah Brehmer, Valentinas Klimašauskas, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Svitlana Matviyenko & Nick Dyer-Witheford, Almira Ousmanova, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Natalia Sielewicz, Olia Sosnovskaya, Masha Svyatogor, Darya Tsymbalyuk, RUPERT, SODAS 2123

The project is financed by
The Lithuanian Council for Culture

Partner
European Humanities University

Sponsors:
Goethe-Institut*
Hostinger
Exterus
Fundermax

Media sponsor Artnews.lt

* The project is incorporated into a comprehensive package of measures for which the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany provides funding from the 2022 Supplementary Budget to mitigate the effects of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

Public program:

Symposium

Infrastructures and solidarities after post-Soviet condition

NGA Audotorium / 2023 04 01 / 11:00 - 16:00

This symposium aims to discuss the political context of extractivist and logistical infrastructures, and information and digital technologies affected by Russia’s imperialist wars and political uprisings in the geographies and temporalities that go beyond the post-Soviet condition.

The event will be held in English and is free of charge.

P R O G R A M M E (April 1, 2023)

11:00-11:15 Introduction by Aleksei Borisionok and Antonina Stebur, curators of If Disrupted, It Becomes Tangible. Infrastructures and Solidarities beyond the post-Soviet Condition.

11:15-12:15 Keynote lecture by Olexii Kuchanskyi ‘Abandoned Imaginaries: Approaching Scientific Film beyond the post-Soviet Condition’

What if left-behind futures can serve as an operator to shift us out of the current state of affairs? By questioning two predominant geographies of the post-Soviet, the lecture pays special attention to some of the unrealised projects of Kyivnaukfilm (Kyiv Science Film Studio). These mostly neglected and abandoned practices store potentialities of revising the relations between knowledge and aesthetics, gaze and sociability, as well as moving image and its environment. Destruction of cultural storages-besides attempts of territorial reversion by Russian imperialism-add an existential vibrancy to considering forgotten archives, as well as ties between trauma and speculative historiography. Thus, approaching these abandoned imaginaries may be surprisingly timely as a way of thinking beyond the temporality of the war-dependent post-Soviet condition.

12:15-12:45 Coffee Break

12:45-14:45 Discussion ‘Why do you see so many stars in the sky?’

Participants: Tekla Aslanishvili, Medina Bazarğali, Anna Engelhardt, fantastic little splash Moderated by Aleksei Borisionok and Antonina Stebur

The title of this discussion, ‘Why do we see so many stars in the sky?’ (a line from a poem by Federico García Lorca), was inspired by the work of the Ukrainian art group fantastic little splash. Their work reflects on the mediatisation of war, the interconnection between kinetic and cyber weapons, and potential tactics for disruption of infrastructures as a form of resistance. Deriving from artistic works presented at the exhibition, the discussion will explore various contexts that stretch beyond the post-Soviet Condition and become entangled in the complex colonial interdependencies that underlie them. The conversation centres on different forms of resistance against invasive military infrastructures and the creation of new spaces and temporalities for solidarity.

15:00-16:00 Keynote lecture by Almira Ousmanova ‘Digital Multitude against Analogue Dictatorship’

The political crisis in Belarus that unfolded in 2020 uncovered a deep divide within Belarusian society. Two years later, the division between an archaic regime and a large part of the society seeking political changes became even more acute. In this lecture, I will reflect on the ideological and informational gap between the supporters of the authoritarian regime and the adherents of changes in Belarus through the prism of a conceptual pairing of ‘analogue dictatorship’ and ‘digital multitude’. The two main features of an analogue dictatorship are the use of outdated technologies for state governance and methods of ideological indoctrination that rely on ‘old media’. The concept of ‘multitude’ is considered in the context of the development of digital technologies and new communication tools which fostered the formation of horizontal ties, non-hierarchical modes of communication and the creation of infrastructures of solidarity, thus playing a crucial role in the unfolding of the Belarusian revolution. The tactics applied by the authoritarian regime in Belarus to retain its power represent a clear example of how ‘analogue dictatorship’ attempts to hinder the emergence of digital democracy.

Olexii Kuchanskyi is an independent film programmer and art writer whose main interests lie in experimental moving-image practices, Soviet para-avant-garde cinema, situated geographies, and critical cultures of nature. His/her works have been published in Prostory, Your Art, TransitoryWhite, Political Critique, East-European Film Bulletin, Moscow Art Magazine, Theory on Demand, Soniakh Digest, and others. S/he curated film programs and shows for Kyiv Biennial, Perverting The Power Vertical (PPV) (London), “Sunflower” Solidary Community Centre (Warsaw), Coalmine - Raum Für Fotografie (Winterthur, Switzerland), among others.

Almira Ousmanova is a philosopher, cultural theorist and gender scholar. She is a professor at the Department of Social Sciences and head of the Laboratory for Studies of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania). Her research interests include the genealogy and methodology of visual studies, semiotics, gender representations in cinema and visual arts, art and politics. She is the author of Umberto Eco: Paradoxes of Interpretation (2000) and editor of several collective volumes: Gender and Transgression in Visual Arts (2007), Visual (as) Violence (2008), Belarusian Format: Invisible Reality (2008.), ‘Après Simone de Beauvoir: Feminism and Philosophy’ (a special volume of the journal Topos, 2010), ‘TechnoLogos: Social Effects of Contemporary Bio- and Informational Technologies’ (with Tatyana Shchyttsova, Topos, 2014), ‘E-Effect: Digital Turn in Social Sciences and Humanities’ (with Galina Orlova, Topos, 2017), ‘Roland Barthes’s Time’ (with Veronika Furs, Topos, 2019) and others.

Tekla Aslanishvili is an artist, filmmaker and essayist based between Berlin and Tbilisi. Her works emerge at the intersection of infrastructural design, history and geopolitics. Tekla’s films have been screened and exhibited internationally at the Tbilisi International Film Festival; Loop Video Art Festival, Barcelona; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial; Neue Berliner Kunstverein; Baltic Triennial 14, Vilnius; Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Kunsthalle Münster; Videonale 18, Bonn. She is the nominee for Ars-Viva Art prize 2021 and the recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation - Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award 2020.

Medina Bazarğali is a Kazak transdisciplinary contemporary artist, fem- and queer-folk politics activist, steppe cyber-warrior, coder and researcher. Born in 2001 in independent Kazakstan, Bazarğali operates at the intersection of decolonisation, feminism and political activism, practically experimenting with AR, video, 3D graphics, installation, web development, visual programming, cyber-physical systems, computer vision and neural networks. In their artistic practice, Bazarğali finds themselves in the process of researching ironic and exaggerated political realities where the Internet, new algorithmic superstructures and (post-)totalitarian regimes swirl in a whirlpool of glocalization; where Soviet stiffness, digital revolution and the revival of national identity go together like a 3-in-1 product sold at the supermarket. Through their artworks and research, Bazarğali wishes to find a sustainable frequency

Anna Engelhardt is an alias of a research-based media artist and writer. Her practice examines post-Soviet cyberspace through a decolonial lens, with an overarching aim of dismantling Russian imperialism. These investigations take on multiple forms of media, including video, software and hardware interfaces. In tandem, she pursues lecturing and publishing to situate digital conflicts within a broader colonial matrix. Her works and activities have been featured at transmediale festival, Venice Biennale Architettura, Ars Electronica, Digital War journal, Funambulist magazine, and Kyiv Biennial.

fantastic little splash is a collective based in Ukraine, comprising journalist/artist Lera Malchenko and artist/director Oleksandr Hants. The collective combines art practice and media studies and is interested in utopias, dystopia, the collective imagination and its incarnations, projections, delusions and uncertainties. Established in 2016, their projects have been exhibited at transmediale, post.MoMA, Plokta TV, Ars Electronica, Liste Art Fair Basel, Construction festival VI x CYNETART, KISFF, MUHI and Docudays among others. They also participated in the transmediale x Pro Helvetia Residency 2022.

The event will be filmed.

The project is financed by Lithuanian Culture Council

Partner European Humanities University (EHU)

Sponsors: Goethe-Institut*, EU programme ‘Creative Europe’, Exterus, Fundermax, Hostinger

* The project is incorporated into a comprehensive package of measures for which the Federal Foreign Office provides funding from the 2022 Supplementary Budget to mitigate the effects of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

Image credits: images from artwork ‘see also: a set of compressed images and feelings’ by fantastic little splash (2023)

Artwork:

Alicja Rogalska

Dark Fibres

2015–2021, video, 5’17”

Polish artist Alicja Rogalska’s artwork Dark Fibres focuses on the story of Hayastan Shakarian from the Georgian village of Armazi. In 2011, she allegedly cut the internet cable connecting Georgia and Armenia while looking for scrap metal to earn her living. The visceral yet powerful gesture turned the Internet off for several hours in the largest parts of Armenia and Georgia. While in detention, she was rumoured to have said ‘I have no idea what the Internet is’. In other words, the operational infrastructure of the Internet was invisible and hidden until the moment of its disruption. Rogalska’s work grasps the invisible and intangible character of infrastructures as well as their materiality, fragility and vulnerability. The name of the work refers to the fibre-optic cables installed in anticipation of exponential data transmission growth. The video comprises spectacular footage of the fibre-optic cable production process filmed in Germany, overdubbed with Chakrulo, a traditional polyphonic song performed by a Georgian choir. The lyrics of this mediaeval song about peasants’ armed rebellion against feudal domination have been adopted by the artist for the ‘new dark age’ of IT capitalism, referencing poverty, the global economy, the digital divide and material infrastructures.

The song was commissioned by Arts Territory for the Myth exhibition, part of the Artisterium 2015 Festival in Tbilisi. The video production was supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme and filmed at Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering in Jena, Germany.

Alicja Rogalska’s practice is research-led and focuses on social structures and the political subtext of the everyday. She mostly works in specific contexts making situations, videos, performances and installations in collaboration with other people to collectively search for emancipatory ideas for the future. Recent solo exhibitions include Arsenał Gallery (Białystok, 2022-23), Scherben/Berlin Art Prize (2022), Manifesta 14 (Prishtina, 2022), Temporary Gallery (Cologne, 2021-22), OFF Biennale (Budapest, 2020-21) and Škuc Gallery (Ljubljana, 2019). Her works have also been shown at: Kunsthalle Bratislava, Kunsthalle Wien, Tabakalera, VBKÖ, Art Encounters Biennale, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Biennale Warszawa, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Kyoto Art Centre and Muzeum Sztuki. Rogalska is currently a PhD researcher in the Art Department at Goldsmiths College.

Artwork:

Anna Engelhardt

Death Under Computation

2022, textile diagram, 110 × 450 cm; holograms; website, text

In her research-based practice that includes texts, videos, websites and other mediums, Anna Engelhardt investigates war as a technology. Looking into the hardware and software behind Russian invasions, Death Under Computation imagines how decolonial movements can resist lethal weapons developed in the age of algorithmic control.

The installation incorporates archival imagery and contemporary visualisations of a battlefield, starting with Soviet drone research from the 1950s. The artist follows their development as the first attempts to automate military command, breaking open the logic hardwired in this complex mechanism. She presents the colonial bias and prejudice at the heart of the Soviet military as an algorithm of the Soviet war machine, embedded into its sensory apparatus.

The textile diagram explores the relations of power and vision, opacity and visibility, evoking the notion of ‘hollow space’: a flawed representation of a landscape through machine vision that is empty of meaning. Engelhardt invites visitors to delve into hollow space through holograms floating over the textile diagram and reflect on the reproduction of Russian colonial violence in its invasions of Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and other sovereign countries.

The project exists simultaneously as an installation and a website, available here.

Anna Engelhardt is an alias of a research-based media artist and writer. Her practice examines post-Soviet cyberspace through a decolonial lens, with an overarching aim of dismantling Russian imperialism. These investigations take on multiple forms of media, including video, software and hardware interfaces. In tandem, she pursues lecturing and publishing to situate digital conflicts within a broader colonial matrix. Her works and activities have been featured at transmediale festival, Venice Biennale Architettura, Ars Electronica, Digital War journal, Funambulist magazine, and Kyiv Biennial.

Artwork:

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas

Druzhba

2003–, installation, high-performance plastic, UV print, archival footage

The Druzhba project is an installation that explores the cultural, political and geographical territories that unfold in a fictional journey along the world’s longest crude oil pipeline, stretching 4,000 kilometres from Siberia, through the Baltic States and into Eastern and Central Europe. The name Druzhba means ‘friendship’ in Russian, and the pipeline is a master signifier, a grand-narrating imperial structure meant, at its inception in 1960, to ‘lead the world into a new dawn’. The project’s psycho-geographic readings reveal mechanisms of power and submission that rightfully belong to the past but persist even today.

During the Soviet times, the Druzhba pipeline represented the immense machinery of infrastructure and capital, ideology and sentiments, labour and leisure, and was meant to tie together regions that were under intense political pressure and mutual suspicion through the idea of friendship. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the newly founded companies of the former Eastern bloc began to use their old networks of influence to steal from the oil-rich fields of Siberia and the Ural region. The privatisation of the pipeline infrastructure was seen as a symbol of the new liberal and democracy-oriented political direction. Power and colonisation had moved from one compass point to another.

The Druzhba project is an archive of the Druzhba pipeline’s metabolism. We know of the pipeline from images of maps that show its branching, media reports celebrating its new instalments, proposed expansions, refinery openings and closings, pumping stations and oil industry settlements. This evidence connects narrative threads about the Druzhba pipeline and the ambiguous areas of exchange between economics and culture. The installation highlights the flows and energies produced by a disintegrating infrastructure of power and links the distorted and pressurised story of the Druzhba pipeline to personal anxiety and the idea of friendship.

Graphic design in collaboration with Gaile Pranckūnaitė and Marek Voida (2018).

Architecture in collaboration with Jurga Daubaraitė and Jonas Žukauskas.

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas are artists, educators and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. They have exhibited internationally including in São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, Gwangju, Busan and Taipei Biennales, Folkestone

Triennial, Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions, as well as in solo shows at the Venice Biennale and MACBA in Barcelona. Their writing on artistic research as a form of intervention was published in the books Devices for Action (2008), Villa Lituania (2008), and Public Space? Lost and Found (2017). The duo curated the Swamp School at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018. They have also edited the book Swamps and the New Imagination: On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture and Philosophy which will be released in 2023 (Sternberg, MIT Press). Gediminas is an Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Programme in Art, Culture and Technology and Nomeda is Research Affiliate at MIT.

Artwork:

Xyana

Excursion Around High Technology Park

2020–now, multimedia installation

In the multimedia installation Excursion around High Technology Park, XYANA summarises her research on particular topographies of Minsk, which nowadays mostly belong to a High Technology Park (HTP). Besides offices of various IT companies and start-ups, this location includes the Museum of Stones, an open-air geological museum and recreation zone, and the Academy of Sciences facilities, some of which were abandoned and have been used for raves and punk concerts since the early 2000s. Since 2005, these facilities have been partly redeveloped into the HTP, a state project that generates tax revenue and a legal structure for the development of IT technologies in Belarus. Initially based on the idea of outsourcing highly professionalised IT labour to a much cheaper workforce in Belarus, it became a cluster of several hundred companies operating extraterritorially and performing research on AI, software, gaming and apps for health and finance sectors, including cryptocurrency and blockchain research.

At the same time, it also remains under strict ideological control and its administration is subordinated to the state. In 2020, the site became one of the key spaces in the topography of protests. Many IT workers took part in the protests and developed various tech solutions for alternative voting systems, political mobilisation and solidarity actions. Mixing various visual artefacts, 3D renders, IT work, political protests and stories of protagonists who were involved in the punk and rave subcultures, XYANA leads a guided tour through the history of the HTP, trapped in the historical and contemporary contradictions of emancipation and control.

XYANA is a multimedia artist and researcher, based in Minsk and London. Their work is a collage of personal stories and histories, video footage, physical devices and biomatter. This is usually assembled into installations using different software and hardware. Their current research interests are nuclear technologies, chemical pollution and the effects of radioactivity on living systems. They are fascinated by exclusion zones, fungi, technological infrastructures and interfaces.

Artwork:

Sabīne Šnē

Grey Gold, Black Lakes, White Latex

2022, 3 prints of digital drawings on paper

In Grey Gold, Black Lakes, White Latex, artist Sabīne Šnē shows how initially intangible IT technologies are deeply rooted in the extractive economy and linked to the resourcification of the Earth. As Šnē herself notes: ‘Everyone should be informed that there is a piece of the Earth in their hands while using their phone.’. The main material resources for technological development are the so-called rare-earth elements. There are only seventeen of these in the periodic table. They are metallic minerals that can be found in the Earth’s crust and are widely used in the manufacturing of various technologies; for example, computers, phones, hybrid cars, internet cables and so on.

Everyone who uses technology also uses minerals—they provide the basis for communication, cloud accounts and support the movement and progress towards more eco-friendly industries. They are also the reason why this artwork exists. The extraction of rare-earth minerals for manufacturing technologies is an infrastructure that transforms the Earth, shapes the economy, changes lifestyles and exploits resources. In her work, Šnē reveals a deep connection between industrial and post-industrial production, as well as the dependence of innovative technologies on the exploitation of natural resources.

Sabīne Šnē lives and works in Riga. In her creative practice, she constructs visual stories to explore the intersections between culture and nature, informed by historical and contemporary ideas. She is interested in the relationships and the interconnectedness between humans and nature. In her art, Šnē reflects on human habits, desires, traces of actions and their impact on the environment. In terms of mediums, the content of the work determines the result, but she usually works in digital media. She has participated in various group exhibitions and art projects in Latvia and abroad. In Winter 2022, she had her first solo show Partner, Parasite at KIM? Contemporary Art Centre, Rīga.

Artwork:

Sabīne Šnē

Resource to Consume

2023, video, 3D and 2D animation, 4’ 00”

Continuing with the theme of the rootedness of new technologies and the digital world in the material sphere, which is associated with the tactics of the extractive economy, and the exploitation and resourcification of the planet, Sabīne Šnē refers to a phrase from the mathematician Clive Humby: ‘Data is the new oil’. This phrase can be reflected in two dimensions: like oil, data underpins the modern economy and power structures; at the same time, this phrase suggests a picture of data as a crude material for extraction. All stages of producing data flow are related to indentured labour, geopolitical conflicts, depletion of resources and consequences stretching beyond human timescales.

Sabīne Šnē lives and works in Riga. In her creative practice, she constructs visual stories to explore the intersections between culture and nature, informed by historical and contemporary ideas. She is interested in the relationships and the interconnectedness between humans and nature. In her art, Šnē reflects on human habits, desires, traces of actions and their impact on the environment. In terms of mediums, the content of the work determines the result, but she usually works in digital media. She has participated in various group exhibitions and art projects in Latvia and abroad. In Winter 2022, she had her first solo show Partner, Parasite at KIM? Contemporary Art Centre, Rīga.

Artwork:

Fantastic Little Splash

see also: a set of compressed images and feelings

2023, installation, interactive program, video

The project see also: a set of compressed images and feelings is an interactive archive of pixelated, blurred and distorted war images of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. During shelling and bombing, Ukrainians do not publish photographs and videos showing the places of damage or any material that would make it possible to determine the geographical position of these sites. However, people spread uninformative images that contain flashes, explosion sounds and emotional comments. Telegram channels publish these types of images (blurring, cropping and pixelating them) to increase the level of affective engagement from Ukrainian users. This disruption of images becomes a tool of resistance and solidarity. Like camouflage, such visual material hides information from the Russian military and creates additional protection for Ukrainians. Through emotional and visual compression, those who create the images consider the emotional and affective labour that is required from Ukrainians to engage with this kind of content and maintain solidarity, as well as their own engagement in emotional exploitation.

This archive (with limited control) reveals how the mechanics of cyber warfare and the mediatisation of warfare functions through algorithms, the emotional engagement of users, anxiety and information. The virtual space of the archive is divided into 4 sections. For instance, in one section, the user goes through ‘Hellish Starfall’, which is evidence of the use of phosphorus bombs by Russia. This Hellish Starfall is pixelated, translating the theatre of weapons into a theatre of perception as a metaphor. see also: a set of compressed images and feelings analyses how these collective experiences are distorted by digital infrastructures, policies and cyberwar, enduring despite their close proximity to the scaling and synchronising effects of technology.

fantastic little splash is a collective based in Ukraine, comprising journalist/artist Lera Malchenko and artist/director Oleksandr Hants. The collective combines art practice and media studies and is interested in utopias, dystopia, the collective imagination and its incarnations, projections, delusions and uncertainties. Established in 2016, their projects have been exhibited at transmediale, post.MoMA, Plokta TV, Ars Electronica, Liste Art Fair Basel, Construction festival VI x CYNETART, KISFF, MUHI and Docudays among others. They also participated in the transmediale x Pro Helvetia Residency 2022.

Artwork:

Tekla Aslanishvili and Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

Stone of Hell

2021, video, 24’ 00”; coal mural, dimensions variable

Comprising documentary materials and on-site footage, Stone of Hell—an experimental documentary film—derives its name from the mines of Chiatura in western Georgia. The film narrates the extraction and processing of raw Manganese, a compound that strengthens steel and makes it stainless. The mines of Chiatura have existed since the 19th century and have continued to operate throughout various political regimes and economic models of governance and wealth accumulation. Now exhausted, the mines have been poisoning the surrounding environment, earning its local name: Stone of Hell.

Following the material of stone, Tekla Aslanishvili and Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze show how factories, appliances, industrial labour and the exhaustion of landscapes are interdependent, and how they have been represented over the course of history. Manganese has been found in an early prehistoric wall painting and as the artists suggest, stone continues to be a medium of storytelling in modern times. The film shows how the material travels through different political perturbations and wars. The new post-transition regime employs malfunction as an integral element of industrial production. Both tanks and walking excavators are produced out of the same material—stainless steel. As Aslanishvili and Gagoshidze proclaim in their video, the extraction of minerals and the moulding of metal bodies is a political act; it can be used both in the construction and destruction of natural and living spaces. The story folds onto itself: during the protests against the notorious state plan to construct a dam in Pankisi, southeast Georgia, local people sabotaged the work of an excavator, set it aflame and allowed it to be washed away by the river.

Supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Salzburg Art Association and Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Tekla Aslanishvili is an artist, filmmaker and essayist based between Berlin and Tbilisi. Her works emerge at the intersection of infrastructural design, history and geopolitics. Tekla’s films have been screened and exhibited internationally at the Tbilisi International Film Festival; Loop Video Art Festival, Barcelona; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial; Neue Berliner Kunstverein; Baltic Triennial 14, Vilnius; Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Kunsthalle Münster; Videonale 18, Bonn. She is the nominee for Ars-Viva Art prize 2021 and the recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation - Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award 2020.

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze lives and works in Berlin. In his works, Gagoshidze deals with the moving image, the political background to its production and distribution, and its socio-political significance. Group exhibitions (selection): Vienna, Kunsthalle Wien; steirischer herbst, Graz; Wharf 10 | Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf; Harun Farocki Institute, Berlin; Acud Power New, Berlin; Contemporary Art Gallery, Leipzig; Museum of Photography, Berlin; Folkwang Museum, Essen; f/stop – Festival for Photography, Leipzig; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.

Artwork:

Oleksiy Radynski

Studies for Chornobyl 22

2023, video, 20’ 00”

Filmmaker and artist Oleksiy Radynski has been researching the historical and contemporary contexts of Soviet modernist architecture, art and cybernetics, as well as the political frames of Russian imperialism, logistics and extraction of natural resources. As a fierce critic of fossil fascism — a form of capitalist and imperialist domination based on fossil fuel extraction and distribution—Radynski closely followed one of the darkest moments in Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in 2022: the occupation of Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, which became a base for Russia’s weaponisation of energy and nuclear terror.

During the Russian occupation of the exclusion zone in early 2022, an anonymous local informant filmed the movement of Russian military vehicles clandestinely. In Studies for Chornobyl 22, Radynski follows the workers of the nearby Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant who discuss their experiences during Russia’s military takeover of their facility; an act of nuclear terror which threatened another global disaster at this site. Past and present catastrophic scenarios intertwine in this macabre episode of the Russian invasion. This work-in-progress has been developed as part of the Reckoning Project, a media and forensic effort aimed at investigating and prosecuting Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was raised on the ruins of the Documentary Film Studio in Kyiv. After studying film theory at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he took part in several film education experiments including the Home Workspace Program (Ashkal Alwan, Beirut) and Labor in a Single Shot by Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann. His films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, e-flux (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Krakow IFF, DOK Leipzig, DoсAviv, Sheffield Doc Fest, Docudays IFF, S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin), International Studio & Curatorial Program (New York), among other places, and received a number of festival awards.

Artwork:

eeefff

Tactical Forgetting

2021–2023, computer-supported exercises in the environment

Forgetting is not only the process of psychological displacement of traumatic or unpleasant experiences but can also be read as a strategy of resistance against and disruption of surveillance infrastructures, governmental repression and military action. Transparency, which is partly described as a great advantage of the digital environment, can also represent the danger and permeability of protesters/users to the gaze of repressive power. New protest infrastructures use ‘forgetting’ as one of their tactics of resistance; for example, the automatic deletion of all messages in neighbourhood Telegram chats is a principle of concern for the safety of its participants.

Tactical Forgetting is a series of computer-supported exercises that revolve around digital memory and distributed events that need to be forgotten because of their sensitive content or rather, for the safety of the community. At the same time, the work is also an algorithmically interactive archive of narratives that unfold within different temporalities and spaces: documentary footage of a labour inspection within a large company in Minsk that develops military computer games; content that has disappeared from the servers of Internet portals; the recent usage of Belarusian infrastructure by the Russian Federation in its war against Ukraine; railway partisans sabotaging railroads in Belarus to disrupt the movement of Russian troops; the distributed memory of bodies participating in revolutionary and partisan actions; fictional desired economic strikes.

The installation alludes to IT office and computer club aesthetics, inviting the viewer to complete a training program. By navigating through the ‘remember’, ‘blink’ and ‘forget’ buttons, users define how much they want to remember or instead, forget, the materials they’ve just watched and listened to.

eeefff is an artistic cooperation currently based in Minsk and Berlin. It is a made-up institution/cybernetic political brigade/poetic computation/hacking unit/queer time. It is neither one of these, nor all together. Active since 2013, eeefff makes software-based projects, publications, networks and platforms that critically explore digital labour, value extraction and community formation in Eastern Europe. Its methods include public actions, online interventions, performative seminars, software and hardware hacking, framing environments and choreographing social situations.

Artwork:

The Museum of Stones Editorial Collective

The Museum of Stones

2021–, installation, 10 issues of Museum of Stones and Telegram bot @stones_museum_bot

The Museum of Stones was created as a reflection and speculative extension of the self-publishing practices that appeared during the protests in Belarus and continue today. As a hybrid infrastructure, such publications, also known as neighbourhood newspapers, are created through grassroots initiatives and distributed via digital platforms and streets. Everybody can download the issues from Telegram channels, print them out at home and put them in mailboxes, cafés or other public places. Protest neighbourhood newspapers create common solidarity structures that disseminate essential political information, in light of the majority of independent media in Belarus having been closed down and deemed ‘extremist’.

By utilising political imagination, The Museum of Stones provides opportunities for more voices to be heard, creating alternative or additional ramifications in the existing infrastructure of neighbourhood newspapers. The newspaper issues are devoted to the possibilities of organising care infrastructures in a particular neighbourhood, with the practices of the ‘cybernetics of the poor’ serving as an antithesis to ‘high technology’ through multiple interviews with anarchists, representatives of the LGBTQ+ community and militants, among others.

For the exhibition, the Museum of Stones editorial collective has created a reading environment and an underground printing department where everyone can not only read all issues of the newspaper but also make copies of the latest issue dedicated to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to continue the distribution network in residential buildings and public places.

The name ‘Museum of Stones’ is borrowed from a museum of the same name in Minsk, where stones from all over the country have been collected. This museum was initiated in 1985 by the Research Institute of Geochemistry and Geophysics. It is symbolic that today the open-air museum finds itself between the High Technology Park, large Soviet housing estates and the Minsk ring road (MKAD), thus exposing the ruins of infrastructure.

The Museum of Stones editorial collective is an experimental cooperative that brought together nine artists, cultural workers and social workers. It was formed in 2021 and is based on collective reflections on residential neighbourhood protest activities and alternative support infrastructures in Belarus.

Artwork:

Uladzimir Hramovich

Усё забыта, што зямлей зарыта (All that is forgotten is buried in the ground)

2023, installation, print on a banner, dimensions variable

In his artistic practice, Hramovich draws on the history of modernist art and architecture, the history of ideology and political movements and transformations of urban space. Trained as a professional graphic artist at the Belarusian State Academy of Arts, Hramovich’s work alludes to an increased demand for realist drawing skills in the 3D modelling and CGI market. Before 2020, one of the main employers in the IT sector was Wargaming, a company that developed the online game World of Tanks. Within a historical framework, the game recreates tank battles through an online multiplayer structure and is highly popular in Eastern Europe. This game is part of what Hramovich calls a spectral temporality, where various historical narratives are mixed with the imperialist perception of space, 3D modelling and elements of contemporary cyber warfare. His installation Усё забыта, што зямлей зарыта (Eng. All that is forgotten is buried in the ground), borrows its name from a Belarusian folk proverb. In it, he uses various fragments of 3D models (in collaboration with Andrii Akhtyrskyi) of the borderland landscapes between Belarus and Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Latvia. Over the last 3 years, the Belarusian border has become a place of crossing and historical ‘rifts’. Political refugees from Belarus, refugees from other countries (instrumentalised by the Belarusian government) and Russian troops that attacked Ukraine from Belarus on February 24th all crossed the border. The digital, speculative and real maps and compasses follow the logic of disorientation, where the political frameworks of sovereignty and agency are obsolete. The border has now become a kind of ‘rampart’, as Ukrainian forces have blown up roads and bridges, and EU countries have fortified their borders. The rolled scrolls refer to the dialectics of the visible and opaque in the ongoing cyberwar, and its imperial and post-colonial production of space.

Uladzimir Hramovich is a Belarus-born artist, who currently lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from the Gymnasium-College of Arts named I. O. Akhremchik in Minsk, Belarus (2009) and the graphics arts department of the Belarusian State Academy of Arts in Minsk, Belarus (2015). Member of the Problem Collective since 2016. Uladzimir works with installations, graphics and video. In his artistic practice, Uladzimir draws on the history of modernist art and architecture, the history of ideology and political movements, and the transformation of the urban space in Minsk. He is interested in the tension between the past and the present and studies monuments and rituals of memory that are overloaded with ideological meanings and embodied in material objects. Uladzimir has been presenting his work at various international venues, including Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, Austria; Gallery of Contemporary Art «Ў», Minsk, Belarus; Brno House of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic; Mysteckiy Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine; ABF, Stockholm, Sweden; Galerie Intershop, Leipzig, Germany and more.

Artwork:

Mariyam Medet

Қытай бөлмесі (Eng. Chinese room)

2023, installation, video essay, 10’ 00”

The ‘Chinese room’ is a thought experiment by the American philosopher John Searle that was designed to demonstrate the incompatibility of human consciousness and machine algorithms. Based on this experiment, Mariyam Medet uses the metaphor of the Chinese Room as a repressive machine for the production of a necropolitical data subject through a face recognition system with the function of race recognition, practices of oppression of the Uyghur language, informational terror and the infrastructure of the so-called Chinese ‘re-education camps’ that oppress the Uyghurs—the Turkic-Muslim people of East Turkestan. 11 million Uyghurs live in China and are subject to ongoing repression through technological and disciplinary practices.

Just as in the Chinese room thought experiment, where there is a division into syntactic operations and their semantic indefinability, evidence of torture and repression is hidden and encrypted. As a metaphor, Mariyam Medet creates a wallpaper pattern of Chinese propagandistic slogans blurred with binary code. Through the hieroglyphs, images from Google Maps of places where the re-education camps are located are visible. The system of re-education camps and repression against the Uyghurs is a branching network of digital, logistical and informational infrastructures, producing genocide of a particular ethnical group. This system is similar to the ‘filtration camps’ that the Russian authorities build for the forcibly displaced residents of Ukraine. Examining the complex nodes of repressive practices and colonial contexts, Mariyam Medet reflects on the possible networks of solidarity and resistance that are associated with organising an escape from China and publishing data on the Uyghur genocide.

Turning to the topic of language, which played a crucial role in John Searle’s experiment, the artist recalls the importance of poetry as one of the ways of algorithmizing language and disrupting prose speech to unite people in the struggle against oppression. Mariyam Medet gives an example of how poetry can be a tool of solidarity, referencing the Kazakh poet Mirjaqip Dulatuli’s poem Oyan! Qazaq (Eng. Wake up! Kazakh) from 1909. Lines from this poem are regularly heard during protests, strikes and street processions, connecting different waves of resistance.

Materials and evidence for video-essay were provided by Zarina Mukanova and Rune Steenberg.

Mariyam Medet is a Kazak born in independent Kazakstan transdisciplinary contemporary artist, fem- and queer-folk politics activist, steppe cyber-warrior, coder and researcher. Mariyam Medet operates at the intersection of decolonisation, feminism and political activism, practically experimenting with AR, video, 3D graphics, installation, web development, visual programming, cyber-physical systems, computer vision and neural networks.

In their artistic practice, Mariyam Medet finds themselves in the process of researching ironic and exaggerated political realities where the Internet, new algorithmic superstructures and (post-)totalitarian regimes swirl in a whirlpool of glocalization; where Soviet stiffness, digital revolution and the revival of national identity go together like a 3-in-1 product sold at the supermarket. Through their artworks and research, Mariyam Medet wishes to find a sustainable frequency of oscillation between these terminals.

Artwork:

Yevgenia Belorusets

‘Please don't take my picture! Or they'll shoot me tomorrow.’

2014–2015, installation

In the project ‘Please don’t take my picture! Or they’ll shoot me tomorrow.’, Yevgenia Belorusets focuses on the problem of media and fake news instrumentalising people during times of war. In 2014, the artist spent several months inside a zone of conflict in eastern Ukraine, portraying miners whose place of life and work is neither within the controlled territories of the separatists nor that of the Ukrainian government.

Enlarged to the size of a billboard, a fictitious newspaper reveals the mechanisms of cyber warfare. The work produced by the propaganda media is not just disinformation; it becomes part of info- and cyber-weapons. Through visual content from scenes of action, media makes society more transparent and vulnerable, as one of the newspaper headlines states ‘Today’s Photo-Story Is Tomorrow’s Artillery Target’. In addition, the work of the media becomes part of the production of terror through alienation, instrumentalisation, fatigue and dehumanisation.

In this artwork, Belorusets raises the substantial question: how can the voices of those from the border areas, whose stories are written by the defeated, be heard? On the other side of the installation is a monumental portrait of a woman—a former mine worker who is now engaged in human rights activism. This photograph emerges as if through a fog and provides an opportunity to restore empathy toward those communities and people in eastern Ukraine who are excluded, depersonalised and instrumentalised.

Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian artist, writer and photographer. She is a co-founder of the literary-artistic-political journal Prostory, member of the interdisciplinary curatorial group Hudrada and author of the photo series Victories of the Defeated and the photo-illustrated books Lucky Breaks (recipient of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt International Literature Award in 2020) and A Series of Lectures on the Modern Life of Animals. Her work has been presented in the Ukrainian programme at the Venice Biennale twice—Victories of the Defeated in 2015 and A Wartime Diary in 2022. Her work meets at the intersection of visual art, literature, journalism and social activism, between document and artistic language. She lives and works in Kyiv and Berlin.

Glossary

Algorithmics Solidarity

Algorithmic solidarity is more of a question (or a bunch of questions) than an answer or stable term. Here are some of them:

  • does the politics of the street intersect with the politics of digital materiality?
  • are the socio-political effects of algorithmization?
  • we redefine algorithmization in socio-political terms?
  • are the new forms of digital communalisation that can emerge?
  • which public places can the interfaces for social interaction be discussed?
  • can we play around with algorithms as tools for the social imagination?
  • does it mean to define ourselves through computing-based processes when computing overlaps with conventional cartographies?
  • we work from the network and communicate using the network, why can’t we use it as a tool for experimenting with new models of solidarity?
  • does it mean to be part of statistical fiction?
  • was the last time you felt the brutality of mathematical models… their affection… their ignorance?
  • asked to act against digital materiality, which action will you choose: settling, parasitism, hacking, ignoring, crossing or violence?

Please draw here the relation between algorithms and solidarity (we’d be very glad if could share this drawing with us.
 
 
 
 
 
// space left for drawing //  
 
 
 
 

  • /your question here/ ____________________
  • ________________________________________
  • ________________________________________

(eeefff)

Artists
eeefff
fantastic little splash
Mariyam Medet
Museum of Stones
XYANA

Digital Devide

The term digital divide refers to unequal access to modern information and communications technologies (ICT), including hardware, software and the internet. This term originally emerged in the US in the 1990s to initially describe physical access to computers and later, the internet. A digital divide is usually related to demographics such as education level, socio-economic conditions and geographical location: mainly the differences in access between urban and rural areas and globally, between developed and developing countries (although there are also many exceptions). Other factors and correlations include gender, racial, (physical and mental) disability and age gaps. Education levels, especially primary illiteracy and financial abilities/poverty remain the most significant determinants of a digital divide.

In contemporary meaning, a digital divide describes not only the difficulties of accessing infrastructure (broadband internet connection, 4G/3G) and equipment (smartphones, computers, laptops, tablets) but also the varying levels of skill and digital literacy. Lack of technical knowledge on how to use a computer (or the internet) and how to find and use information and resources are some of the most important factors in the digital divide, as is the quality of information accessed and its interpretation and understanding. The digital divide disadvantages people affected by it in terms of their ability to participate in education, work, the economy and social connections.

According to the UN, in 2021, only about half of the world’s population had access to the Internet, with developing countries and women being the majority of the digitally excluded. For instance, 22% of Africans have internet access compared to 80% of Europeans and globally, internet users are 62% men and 57% women. (Alicja Rogalska)

Artists
Alicja Rogalska
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
Sabīne Šnē
Yevgenia Belorusets

Externalities

Externalities are costs created by a company that do not appear on its balance sheet. Externalities aren’t ‘priced in’ to products—their costs show up elsewhere, including far in the future. The term is not new and one of the first people to describe it was economist Arthur C. Pigou in the 1920s. A modern example of an externality is the global, yearly 50 million tons of toxic e-waste from people regularly upgrading to the latest smartphone. Another example is the overload of information and fake news that appears if one person’s TikTok, filled with disinformation, can be seen by millions. One of the most significant examples of an externality is the consequences of extraction that occur when a company removes resources from an environment quicker than they can be replenished.

The abilities of humans to build tools allow us to have more power to extract from the Earth than any other species. It is happening right now with the mining of rare-earth elements such as lithium to produce parts for technologies that are necessary to sustain the comfort of our daily lives. This leads to multi-polar traps: situations in which everyone engages in harmful behaviour not because they want to but because they don’t have any other choice in the current moment. Technology is extremely profitable so it usually develops faster than our ability to regulate it or understand its long-term effects. Often the best way to escape a multi-polar trap is through collaboration and regulation. It strengthens digital open societies instead of weakening them, giving us the capacity to collaboratively solve the problems citizens and communities face. (Sabīne Šnē)

Artists
Alicja Rogalska
​​Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
Oleksiy Radynski
Sabīne Šnē
Tekla Aslanishvili & Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze
Uladzimir Hramovich

High Technology Park

The development of the technological ecosystem known as the High Technology Park (HTP) has been in progress for the last 100 years. In the fertile farmlands of the Bay Area, the paddy fields of Penang, and Paliessie in Ukraine and Belarus, HTPs are establishing alienation zones where human science and technology are taking over the memory of stones and the processing power of bogs.

Akademharadoks (academic cities) are satellite cities of Soviet science; special zones where knowledge is produced on the outskirts of Minsk, next to the Berlin-Minsk-Moscow railway track. Their economy is outsourced through communication lines under the ocean and they are comprised of infrastructures that trade labour in high-tech value chains and economies of scale. A special economic zone in a nature reserve. Great stone. Minsk has its labour and science potential.

Providing research for cybernetic systems of command and control, HTPs are points of international military infrastructure. (XYANA)

Artists
eeefff
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
Museum of Stones
Uladzimir Hramovich
XYANA

Insurgent Computing

Insurgency is a military term usually used by imperial powers as a synonym for guerrilla rebellion or anti-colonial struggle. It was developed by US military scholars in the 1970s, in the context of America’s unsuccessful colonial invasions. Insurgency, as a term, was coined to reflect the critical advantages that made anti-colonial resistance so successful. One such key strength was the asymmetry of information.

In colonial wars, the entire environment is hostile towards data extraction by invaders: locals do their best not to disclose information, maps of the territory are lacking or outdated, routes for communication are scarce and less developed than those operated by the resistance forces and so on. This asymmetry of information and communication is the core of what I call insurgent computing. From the friendly fire intentionally staged by the resistance to ambush attacks, insurgent computing has been a key cause of losses among the Soviet and later, Russian soldiers in its colonial wars after the Second World War.

This asymmetry of information was a key concern for American military thinkers in the 1990s who developed the very concept of cyberwar as it is used today. According to the core cyberwar experts of that time, information, revolution and the rise of networks exacerbated the pre-existing potential of highly-coordinated insurgencies. Around the same time (and on the opposite side of the political spectrum), the second issue of the anarchist journal Tiqqun came out with the article ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis’, arguably one of the most well-known texts of this generation of thought. This text foresaw the immense power in the cybernetic diffusion of guerrilla warfare, invisible to the eyes of the Empire.

To explain the conceptual grounds of ‘computing’ in insurgent computing, I would like to recall the ‘cyber’ of ‘cyberattack’, as I imagine these terms to be directly related. The cyber in cyberattack refers to networks; computing in insurgent computing should also be understood with a network at its core—an information-rich network, to be precise. The difference comes from the active agency implied in the term: rather than an environment (cyber) where something takes place, it refers to a performed action (computing). Computing, understood as an action against a network, aligns well with conventional practices of insurgency such as the sabotage of transport networks. Indeed, computing builds upon the close relationship between insurgencies and networks. It highlights information as an operational quality of such a network, leaving the potential to both sabotage existing networks and create novel ones. (Anna Engelhardt)

Artists
Anna Engelhardt
Oleksiy Radynski
Uladzimir Hramovich
Yevgenia Belorusets

Integral Accident

In his writings, Paul Virilio ontologised the correlation between substance and accident, coming up with the idea of the integral accident: a landscape of events that becomes the environment. Unlike the case of instantaneous contagion, this theory of event employs the idea that every technology includes the potential of negativity; for example, the invention of the locomotive entailing the act of derailment. We would like to detach the term from Virilio’s museum of accidents and with its help, see new operational and strategic levels of modern warfare.

However, as there are direct precursors of this notion in the fields of velocity, vision machines and logistics of perception, we feel the urge to dislocate the term from its original context and see it in the tension that ‘oscillates between two poles—AI and nuclear’, as Svitlana Matviyenko pointed out in the first weeks of Russia’s destructive, imperialist war against Ukraine.

From this perspective, we can instead refer to the imminence of the event, where the war becomes an integral element of the extractivist and imperialist regime. The logic of extraction leads to military invasion, as it has transpired with various militaristic and expansionist forms of cybernetics; in the same way, automated systems and computation originating in the Soviet Union are shaping the current state of warfare. The integrality of the event becomes a necropolitical environment. At the same time, an integral accident could be seen as ‘a malfunction intrinsic to and inevitable for viral cyberweapons’, when the technical specificity of malware becomes ungoverned by sovereign power and methodologically infects other systems. (Aleksei Borisionok)

Artists
eeefff
fantastic little splash
Oleksiy Radynski
Uladzimir Hramovich
Yevgenia Belorusets

It Colonialism

IT colonialism is a political-economic system of distributing resources, profits and exploitation in the information technology (IT) sphere. The geography and lines of IT colonialism are integrated into the global post-colonial logic. According to its structure, it’s comprised of outsourcing colonialism and investment colonialism.

Outsourcing colonialism is associated with the structural inequality of IT workers in the global production system. To reduce costs, a crucial part of the production involved in the developing, coding and moderation of content is distributed to developing countries. Outsourcing reinforces the dependence of developing countries’ economies on developed countries across economic and labour levels, factoring in cultural assimilation since it requires a single-sided involvement in emotional labour. Outsourced IT economies are characterised by a low level of independence and a high level of political apathy since de facto outsourcing companies depend on the corporate culture of the customer. At the same time, outsourcing colonialism uses existing IT infrastructures or their ruins for the development on which it builds its economy. The unequal distribution of IT labour and their specification worldwide is also related to this.

Investment colonialism is also associated with unequal access to resources. If companies try to develop their product and are not based in a developed country with funding and resource possibilities, in many cases they move there. In such cases, Westernisation of the management personnel occurs, that is, the replacement of local specialists by highly-paid specialists from developed countries in the fields of management and marketing. The most innovative products/start-ups are thus moving to developed countries at the management and corporate levels. In contrast, product development and support continue to benefit from the cheap power of the local, developing world context. (Antonina Stebur)

Artists
​​Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
Mariyam Medet
Oleksiy Radynski
Sabīne Šnē
Tekla Aslanishvili & Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

Museum of Stones

The Museum of Stones is an imaginary topography that connects deep time, post-socialist immediacy, mineralogical research, extraction, computation and self-organised resistance. In the form of an anonymous Telegram newspaper, it is collectively edited by a group of cultural workers, taking its title from an open-air museum in the suburban district of Uručča in Minsk, Belarus. Located between concrete-panelled apartment blocks, the Institute of Geochemistry and Geophysics of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus and the High Technology Park, the area presents a highly manipulated natural landscape that features a collection of stones from various regions of Belarus and mimics the shape of the Belarusian map to scale.

We walk the path through the mini-Belarusian landscape. Through pagan stones, ravers' parties, parking lots of wealthy programmers and cheap cafeterias. What is it saying about its belonging to a certain state? I hear the noise of a helicopter. ‘This happens from time to time after the escalation of the war’ says S. There is an airfield not far from here. Belarusian troops must be training the Russian military. I try to scan the landscape with my eyes, noticing these gaps of still alive but hidden revolution, reminders of people’s desire to change the political structure, colourful slogans on top of the stones, insects flying around, gazes and smells. The crystal structure of stones allows them to store and exchange memories.

The Museum of Stones refers to various tensions of ideological control and economic extraction, the strikes of AI and computation, deep mineralogical time and synthetic landscape, forms of neighbourhood self-organisations and resistance. (Museum of Stones Editorial Collective)

Artists
Museum of Stones
Uladzimir Hramovich
XYANA

Screensaver Effect

The screensaver effect describes the production, distribution and role of some of the non-informative war images of Russian rocket attacks during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They are usually published on Ukrainian Telegram channels during times of shelling. In most cases, they are rather abstract images of the sky, clouds, smoke and rocket tracks, sometimes with blurred or pixelated elements.

The Ukrainian authorities and Ministry of Defence are strongly urging Ukrainian media outlets not to publish images of missile impact sites, at least during the air raid alert. According to the official statement, this is necessary to avoid correction by Russia through repeated blows. Presumably, this is also done to protect the population from uncontrollable panic.

In turn, Telegram channel administrators try to attract as big of an audience as possible. Against the backdrop of a lack of official commentary during times of shelling, such images and short emotional comments are sometimes the only information available and people readily consume it. Thus channels can increase their number of subscribers with this content and as a result, up the costs to advertisers. From the administrator’s side, the affectivity that provokes engagement in those channels is the main planned purpose of these images.

The screensaver effect is formed at the intersection of authority and commercial interests. It produces temporary invisibility as an additional layer of protection, crucial at moments of intensified hostilities. At the same time, these periods become so-called prime time slots, where the frightened audience has to consume image sets of the sky, clouds, smoke and rocket tracks, watermarked with the names of popular Telegram channels, in an attempt to figure out the extent of the damage.

In a sense, the whole system is more like a traditional screensaver, assembled from abstract, non-informative and affective images of the war. Originally, a screensaver was a computer program that blanked the display screen or filled it with moving images to prevent phosphor burn-in on monitors. Nowadays, screensavers are mostly used for decorative/entertainment purposes or password protection. (fantastic little splash)

Artists
fantastic little splash
eeefff
Yevgenia Belorusets

Spectral Temporality

Ernst Bloch coined the term Ungleichzeitigkeit which can be translated as non-simultaneity or non-synchrony. Bloch explained it by saying that not all people exist in the same temporality. Even though we can observe each other simultaneously, it does not mean that we live at the same time. Today, different layers of time can operate, although in different sequences. Most often, they work ‘from behind’.

Existence in non-simultaneity reminds me of the last 30 years of independent Belarus, which also corresponds to the development of computer games during the same period.

The Middle Ages, modernity, various historical plots and never-ending war still exist with us in one place and at one time. Soviet tanks can drive around the post-war city and monuments to fallen soldiers can be more alive than all the living.

Bloch speaks of such spectres of history: ‘Over and above a great deal of false nonsynchronism [non-simultaneity] there is this one in particular: Nature, and more than that, the ghost of history comes very easily to the desperate peasant, to the bankrupt petty bourgeois; the depression which releases the ghost takes place in a country with a particularly large amount of pre-capitalist material.’.

For me, these ghosts are like computer ‘holograms’ from different times, superimposed on each other and still arguing their version of history. That is to say that there are actually more ghosts than just simply the ‘spectres of communism’. Perhaps, we need to now talk not about different temporalities but about the many spectres of our current time. (Uladzimir Hramovich)

Artists
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
Museum of Stones
Oleksiy Radynski
Uladzimir Hramovich

Tactical Forgetting

The bot cleans up information after users, tactically covering traces in a neighbourhood chat. These chats appeared as a response to the impossibility of centralised resistance during the revolutionary situation in Belarus in 2020–2021. Using the map, you can find your yard—a place of meeting and struggle, between several open residential blocks that can easily be walked through—and join the discussion on collective actions with other chat participants just like you. Here, the information is temporary; this is not a place for archiving. If you do not make it in time, you will not see it. The temporality that emerges from neighbourhood chats continually re-actualises the present, offering participation in the here and now.

I open a chat that I haven’t looked at for a week and think about how to quickly scroll through all these messages and avoid getting get stuck in past conflicts and logistical arrangements of the day before yesterday. A moment, and the chat interface will refresh on its own. Messages are automatically deleted. Parts of the chat interface that you ‘fly through’ while moving between locations begin to move at an inhuman speed, rushing past me like blurred spots in 3D photograms. April 14th. Then May 18th. And between them there is emptiness. Only dates are stuck in the interface. This is automated tactical forgetting. All that remains are the unsynchronised bodies that only remember a few messages; cached memories in the bodies of those who look, read, observe, write and act based on this unsynchronised thin layer of the present.

The technical impossibility of being led by the fear of missing out is a liberating impossibility. An archive interface that cannot be viewed is scrolled through as a transit zone. At that moment, there is a pleasure to be found in the fact that there are many interesting things ahead and there is no need to rake over past troubles. All you need now is inside pinned messages. (eeefff)

Artists
eeefff
fantastic little splash
Yevgenia Belorusets