About — Anna Engelhardt

Forthcoming

On Space and Territory in Cyberwar: The Case of Electronic Terraforming

Death under Logistical Computation: Soviet Cybernetics and Reconnaissance

Circuits of Truth: Process-oriented approach to digital fakes and authenticity

“For he will kill you with his horrible sight” Compiling Belarus Political Book of Beasts

Augmented Infrastructures at War

In her talk, Engelhardt will elaborate on her practice that engages technical infrastructures that cast information in projectiles. Weaving together her work on cyber warfare, propaganda backends, and smart weapons, she will lay out the logistics of perception that supplies Russian colonial wars. If there is a relationship between production and destruction, as Harun Farocki suggested, how do production and destruction relate in information structures? To explore this connection further, Engelhardt will examine web-based methods that make her infrastructures co-exist, clash, and infiltrate the networks under investigation.

The University of Chicago, 2023
Goldsmiths MFA, 2022
HFG Karlsruhe, 2022
Henie Onstad, Oslo, Norway, 2022
Counter-Futuring Symposium at the ICI Berlin, 2022
The World I/As The Image Symposium at DECK Singapore, 2022
RadicalxChange Warsaw, 2022

Hardwired Obsolescence of Russian Colonialism

Although the Russian military claims to use high-tech weaponry that ushers in a future of remotely controlled digital battles, these weapons often malfunction in the material world. Tanks get stuck in the mud; military phones have no reception; ‘precision’ weapons are guided by pen and paper. These weapons are obsolete as soon as they are deployed – yet Russian colonial violence persists. These intergenerational wars subject their targets to repeated cycles of fear and violence. As the dead of one war haunt the dead of another, Engelhardt considers how to further the hardwired obsolescence of the Russian war machine.

Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, 2023
Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2023
Winchester School of Art, 2023
Akademie Schloss Solitude Fragile Solidarity festival, 2022
Teatro San Leonardo, Bologna, Italy, 2022
The Cost Of Neutrality, Goldsmiths, 2022

Onset ⊹ Applied Demonology

‘Applied demonology’ is a method developed by Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich for interrogating the spectre of colonial violence. Beginning with the deployment of Russian troops, the artists explore the horrors of colonialism through the processes of possession, those gradual impositions of control over organisms that lead to their destruction from within. To scrutinise Russian military strategy as possession, they create an unholy alliance between demonology and open-source intelligence tools. Engelhardt and Cinkevich invite the audience to apply these investigative tools in practice. The demo will conclude with a session in which participants will learn to search for the vulnerabilities of the demon. Participants will be provided with the GPS coordinates of Russian military infrastructure. Classified until now, these structures are open for attack.

transmediale, 2023
Aksioma, 2023
nGBK, 2023

Infrastructural Horror: Soaring, Sprawling, Vast

In the 19th century, a ruin was a landscape for gothic horror. Today, monsters pervade infrastructure. With sprawling limbs and hulking frames made beyond comprehension, towering oil platforms, writhing wires and bottomless mines are omens of contemporary dread. Ill adapted to our faculty of representation, they make us radically vulnerable.
This performance lecture by Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich will present the genre of infrastructural horror. The artists define this new genre as a way to work through the infrastructure of Russian expansion and its inherent monstrosity. Infrastructural horror, developed for their new film Onset, summarises their findings on terror, the sublime and scale.

Aksioma - Kino Šiška, 2023

𝔈𝔩𝔢𝔠𝔱𝔯𝔬𝔫𝔦𝔠 𝔗𝔢𝔯𝔯𝔞𝔣𝔬𝔯𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔤 ⊹
How to unfold cyberwar

This performance treats the web as a sticky matter, showing space as a weapon of capture in cyberwar. Enacting the topology of a cyber domain, her work-in-progress invites a user to sneak into the folds of cyber territories, warped and fictionalised by cyberwarfare. Engelhardt theorises these violent disturbances in space as a powerful military capability that she calls 'electronic terraforming', used in the Russian invasion of Ukraine through electronic guns, fake cellular towers, and GPS jammers.

Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2022

From Anti-Colonial Hacking to Decolonial Cyberwar

Since the inception of “cyberwarfare”, the threat of anti-colonial hacking has haunted military strategists. From cyberwarfare to drone swarms, high-end technologies have been instrumental in anti-colonial resistance—the liberation of South Africa, the Chechen wars for independence, and the ongoing Syrian war, among many. Sophie Toupin, a postdoctoral researcher of anti-colonial communication technologies, will explore the potential of cyber insurgency in conversation with Anna Engelhardt.

Trust x 0xsalon, 2022

𝔖(𝔚𝔞𝔯)𝔪 𝔐𝔞𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔢: The Military Techno-Episteme from Cybernetics to Chaoplexity

Although the Russian military inhabits a digital imaginary, its weapons often malfunction in the material world. Looking into the history of high-tech weapons, one can see why military phones have no reception, and 'precision' weapons are guided by pen and paper. Antoine Bousquet, philosopher of military science and technology, will explore the 'cyber' of 'cyber warfare', its scientific foundations, and its hardwired flaws in conversation with Anna Engelhardt.

Trust x 0xsalon, 2022

𝔗𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔪𝔬𝔫𝔲𝔠𝔩𝔢𝔞𝔯 ℭ𝔶𝔟𝔢𝔯𝔴𝔞𝔯:
Nuclear and cyber dystopias of the live broadcast.

The age of cyberwar, conceived with an attack on a nuclear facility, brought about the types of violence 'particularly complimentary' to those of nuclear threat. Nuclear and cyber dystopias culminated this year with the live broadcast of the Russian army shelling a nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Svitlana Matviyneko, cyberwar philosopher whose most recent research project concerns the nuclear politics of Chernobyl NPP, will explore the reality of ongoing thermonuclear cyberwar in conversation with Anna Engelhardt.

Trust x 0xsalon, 2022

Beginnings and Ends of Colonialism
Undoing Imperial Temporalities

Like a thread, colonialism twists and coils in multiple directions rather than moving forwards in time. As the dead of one war haunt the dead of another, Anna Engelhardt and Sasha Shestakova think about how to welcome the finitude and amplify the obsolescence of colonial regimes.

transmediale 2022, Berlin, Germany
Foto Collectania, Barcelona, Spain, 2022

Perspectives on Russia's Imperialism in Eastern Europe

The full-scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine on February 24 have shaken the whole world. All of a sudden, previously marginalized discourses about the neocolonial and imperial Russian politics in Eastern Europe gained stronger meaning. What is the history behind these politics?

Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany, 2022

Circuits of Truth

Lecture as a part of the Digital Arts, a third-year undergraduate unit offered at the University of Sydney; School of Literature, Art and Media; Department of Media and Communications. 09/2021

Reputation Volatility
The political economy of cyberwar

Anna Engelhardt invites Emily Rosamond to elaborate on the key economic principles of cyberwar in general and reputation warfare in particular.

Digital Workers’ Conference

Co-organised with Sara Culmann and eeefff group at Garage Museum of Contemporary art. 03/2021

Full conference page

Couriers Are Never Late
Racialised Algorithms of Russian Logistics

Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence & Speculative Computation Symposium. 11/2020

Solidarity, History, Resistance

Symposium organised in commemoration of the genocide against Crimean Tatars. Centre of Contemporary Art ‘Typorgaphy’. 05/2021.

Spectral Volumes of Russian Cyber Warfare

Paper presented at Digital Democracies Institute. 04/2021. Link

Caring for the Shaky Ground: Colonial ‘Weather’ and Decolonial ‘Weathering’ in the Crimean Peninsula

Paper presented at “Violence, Aesthetics, Anthropocenes: Colonialism, Racism, Extractivism”. LSE, 04/2021

Postcolonial Knowledge and Art

A free course given as a part of DCC for ‘Educational Environment’. 10/2020 - 12/2020: Link

Looking from where? Decolonial Image Production

Lecture given as a part of DCC for Moscow International Experimental Film Festival. Moscow, Russia, 10/2020

Volumetric Spectrums of Russian Cyber Warfare

Conference ‘Conceptualizing a ‘Post-American’ Internet: Technology, Governance, and Geopolitics.’ Zhejiang, China, 10/2020