Project

Anna Engelhardt (b. 1996) is a media artist, researcher, and writer based in London. Her main interests are the (de)colonial politics of algorithmic and logistical infrastructures in post-Soviet space. Being concerned with the notion of infrastructure as a form of politics, she develops her practice through writing and manufacturing digital infrastructures. Anna engages her background in critical theory to provide conceptual frameworks for her projects, conducting the investigations through the construction of virtual landscapes, materialised as online platforms and 3D computer graphics.

Music

Grown up on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, in the Russian port city of Nakhodka, east of Vladivostok, Ivan Olegovich aka Regular Citizen has been describing his life through music since his early childhood, when his father bought him an old piano. His unique sensitivity has been refined through his youth - playing drums in punk bands and city parades, working as a DJ and studio engineer at the local Radio. Now in his early 30s, his attitude toward composition is an exercise of concentration, or as he describes: “a movement towars a inner target.” His last album “Patsy Hangdog” was released on the label Presto!?

Facial Filters

Medina Bazargali was born in 2001 in independent Kazakhstan. In their artistic practice Medina finds themselves in the process of exploring ironic and exaggerated political realities where Internet, new algorithmic superstructures and (post)-totalitarian regimes are swirling in a whirlpool of glocalization; where soviet stiffness, digital revolution and the revival of national identity are going together like a 3 in 1 product sold at the supermarket. Through their artworks and research Medina wish to find a sustainable frequency of oscillation between these 3 poles. Medina works as an emerging digital artist/dev at the intersection of decolonization, feminism and folk politics activism. Right now is studying complex systems and philosophy, living and working in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. Medina works with AR face-filters, video, 2D animation, 3D graphics, installation, web-developing, visual coding, cyber-physical systems, computer vision and neural networks.

Interviews

Lisa Parks is Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is a media scholar whose research focuses on multiple areas: satellite technologies and media globalization; critical studies of media infrastructures; media, militarization and surveillance; and environmental media. Parks is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018) and Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke U Press, 2005). She is co-editor of Life in the Age of Drone Warfare(Duke U Press, 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois Press, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers U Press, 2012), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2002). She is currently working on two new books, On Media: Twenty-one Lessons for the Twenty-first Century, and the co-edited volume, Media Backends: Digital Infrastructure and the Politics of Knowing.

Parks is Director of UCSB’s Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, which she initiated at MIT. Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has held other fellowships and visiting appointments at the International Research Center for Cultural Techniques & Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a Principal Investigator on major grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department, and has collaborated with artists and computer scientists. She is committed to exploring how greater understanding of media systems can inform and assist citizens, scholars and policymakers in the US and abroad to advance campaigns for technological literacy, creative expression, social justice, and human rights. Before returning to UCSB, Parks was Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.


Svitlana Matviyenko is Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where she is also Associate Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. Her research and teaching are focused on information and cyberwar, political economy, media and environment, infrastructure studies, STS. She writes about practices of resistance and mobilization; digital militarism, dis- and misinformation; Internet history; cybernetics; psychoanalysis; posthumanism; the Soviet and the post-Soviet techno-politics; nuclear cultures, including the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion. She is a co-editor of two collections, The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019), a winner of the 2019 book award of the Science Technology and Art in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association and of the Canadian Communication Association 2020 Gertrude J. Robinson book prize. She is currently working on the co-edited volume Cyberwar Topologies: In Struggle for a Post-American Internet.


Chief’s Trap

Translation

Kuchabskaya Anna, Artem Morozov

Editing

Artem Morozov, Lisa Mikhailova, Medina Bazargali, Alex Anikina

Fonts in use

Dyade by Stefanie Vogl, Base & Bloom by NAUM Type, Space Grotesk by Florian Karsten, Didact Gothic by Daniel Johnson

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to eeefff collective and Bahar Noorizadeh for their influence that goes beyond our conversations as it helped this project take its current form 💕

Commissioned by Garage Digital 2020

Curators: Nikita Nechaev, Ekaterina Valetova, Anastasia Chebotareva
Manager: Olya Lisagor

Amoore, Louise. 2019. ‘Doubt and the Algorithm: On the Partial Accounts of Machine Learning.’ Theory, Culture & Society. 36 (6): 147-169.

Doctorow, Cory. ‘Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies.’ EEF, June 7, 2019. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Doctorow, Cory. ‘Adblocking: How About Nah?’ EEF, July 25, 2019. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Doctorow, Cory. ‘Adversarial Interoperability.’ EEF, October 2, 2019. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability 

Engelhardt, Anna. ‘The Crimean Bridge and Infrastructural Deepfake.’ The International Journal of Creative Media Research. 5: October 2020. https://www.creativemediaresearch.org/post/the-crimean-bridge-and-infrastructural-deepfake

Gray, Jonathan, Liliana Bounegru, and Tommaso Venturini. ‘“Fake News” as Infrastructural Uncanny’. New Media & Society 22, no. 2 (February 2020): 317–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819856912.

Harcourt, Bernard E. 2007. Against prediction: profiling, policing, and punishing in an actuarial age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lupton, Deborah. ‘Swimming or drowning in the data ocean? Thoughts on the metaphors of big data.’ October 29, 2013. https://simplysociology.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/swimming-or-drowning-in-the-data-ocean-thoughts-on-the-metaphors-of-big-data/

Matviyenko, Svitlana, and Nick Dyer-Witheford. 2019. Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism.

Metahaven. ‘Captives of the Cloud: Part I.’ E-flux Journal #37 (September, 2012). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/37/61232/captives-of-the-cloud-part-i/

Omernick, E. and Sood, S. O. (2013) The impact of anonymity in online communities. Proceedings of 2013 International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), IEEE. as quoted in Wang, Shuting, Min-Seok Pang, and Paul A. Pavlou. ‘“Cure or Poison?” Identity Verification and the Spread of Fake News on Social Media’. SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3249479.

Ochigame, Rodrigo. ‘The Long History of Algorithmic Fairness’. Phenomenal World. January 30th, 2020. https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/long-history-algorithmic-fairness

Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski. 2017. Signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures. https://doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039362.001.0001.

Pasquinelli, Matteo. ‘Arcana Mathematica Imperii: The Evolution of Western Computational Norms.’ in Maria Hlavajova et al. (eds) Former West. MIT Press, 2017.

Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, Paul N Edwards, and Christian Sandvig. ‘Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook’. New Media & Society 20, no. 1 (January 2018): 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553.

Rosamond, Emily. ‘From Reputation Capital to Reputation Warfare: Online Ratings, Trolling, and the Logic of Volatility’. Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 2 (March 2020): 105–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419872530.

Rouvroy, Antoinette. (2011). Technology, virtuality and utopia: governmentality in an age of autonomic computing. In Mireille Hildebrt ; Antoinette Rouvroy. (Eds.), Law, human agency and autonomic computing : the philosophy of law meets the philosophy of technology (pp. 119-140). Routledge. http://www.crid.be/pdf/public/6242.pdf

Sanovich, Sergey. ‘Computational Propaganda in Russia: The Origins of Digital Misinformation.’ Oxford Internet Institute, 2017.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. "The Ethnography of Infrastructure". American Behavioral Scientist. 43 (3): 377-391.

Tommaso Venturini. From Fake to Junk News, the Data Politics of Online Virality. Didier Bigo, Engin Isin, Evelyn Ruppert. Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights, Routledge, 2019, 9781138053250. hal-02003893

Wang, Shuting, Min-Seok Pang, and Paul A. Pavlou. ‘“Cure or Poison?” Identity Verification and the Spread of Fake News on Social Media’. SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3249479.

Woolley, Samuel C., and Philip N. Howard. Computational propaganda: political parties, politicians, and political manipulation on social media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.