Category Blog

I’m back in Europe after some much-needed escapism and the exciting process of setting up a new home in Tokyo. It feels great to reconnect and revitalize this feed with moments from my recent participation in a panel at the STRP Eindhoven Festival. A huge thank you goes to Baltan Laboratories for their impeccable organization and for bringing together such a thoughtful community. I was also honored to share the stage with the brilliant Ramon Amaro and Ianis Dobrev — their insights made the discussion truly inspiring. Looking forward to more journeys, conversations, and creative exchanges ahead.

Traditionally, approximately 15 minutes before landing in Tokyo, I take a picture of Mt. Fuji from my aircraft window. Here’s a fresh one and a handful of others from past trips. Kon’nichiwa to my favourite city on earth. make a heading.

If you’re in Brussels, join us tonight for the opening of the exhibition CODE & ALGORITHMS. WISDOM IN A CALCULATED WORLD at iMAL, Brussels. Curated by Manuela Nuveau, the exhibition brings together an outstanding group of artists exploring the socio-political and aesthetic dimensions of algorithms and coded systems. Featuring works by:Kyriaki Goni, Clara Boj & Diego Diaz, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Trevor Paglen, Manu Luksch, Shinseungback Kimyonghun, Danja Vasiliev, Egor Kraft, Ahmed Jamal Abdelkader & Simon Weckert, and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Come by, if algorithmically permitted.

I’m genuinely honoured to receive the Lumen Prize this year and I couldn’t be more grateful to everyone I collaborated with on this series of works. I’m saddened and perhaps even devastated I wasn’t given a chance to attend the ceremony. The UK Immigration bureaucracy considered my visa application to not be straightforward, which leads to undefined duration in processing time. As a holder of a Russian passport, for the past 14 years, I have been wrestling with the western immigration bureaucracy, while living, studying, and working in England, Austria, Sweden, and Japan. I was on this escapist train, looking for a place, where I could be inspired and focus on my work, running away from unjustness and limits on what I could possibly do, should I have chosen to remain in my home country. I think many of us agree that art and culture can and should operate across borders as a humanist project in the first place. And what are borders anyway? What are international policies that regulate them? A set of very old political ideas that emerged as a result of decades—long wars, famously formulated in a Peace of Westphalia treaty? A seriously old doctrine from the seventeenth century, still serving as a model for running the world? Although perhaps we have more novel ideas and models of organising, dividing, scaling and addressing it, one of which is the internet. As a planetary infrastructure, it suggests a very different political model of participation to what was derived from the nation states. I naturally became native to it, being able to operate across borders and limits posed by the dark bureaucratic aspect of my life. Evidently, to this date, the nation state relationships keep producing a lot of distress and sorrow. It’s an honour to receive my award…

Hot off the press: the newest issue of the brilliant Neural magazine is out – and I’m incredibly honoured (and humbled, and honoured, and humbled, and h…) to be featured in its pages. Among many excellent contributions, this issue includes an in-depth conversation exploring synthetic cognition, emerging memory architectures, and a deep dive into a wide arc of my recent and ongoing work. It’s not often that one gets the space and attention to reflect on such themes in such depth, and I’m deeply grateful to the Neural team for the thoughtful dialogue and editorial care. If you’re interested in critical perspectives at the intersection of media, art, and technology, this issue is definitely worth a read.

A few sneak peeks into what occupied me mostly after February 2022 and what it brought upon us. Hashd0x — our collaborative open source and hacktivist software project and my recent work Proof Of War based on this tech stack. The work has been presented at this year’s Ars Electronica festival and received S+T+ARTS Prize Honorary mention, an award initiated by the European Commission that honours projects that demonstrate the successful integration of science, technology, and art to contribute to social and economic innovation. Hashd0x & Proof of war Raspberry Pi based camera, custom-built software, mobile app, smart contract, web platform, LED screen, smartphone, server rack. Hashd0x (spelled [hæʃdɑːks]) is a tactical software, designed to combat disinformation by enabling instant and spoof-proof on-chain evidence capture and forensics tools through hashing content and data and storing it on blockchains. Proof of War showcases a 3D model of the remnants of a house in Borodyanka, the most destroyed city in the Kyiv region during the ongoing war in Ukraine. The images used to produce the photogrammetry based 3D-scan are captured via the hashd0x software on mobile and drone operated cameras. They will remain forever stored on the blockchain uncorrupted, uncensored and dated. Thereby, creating an on-chain memorial to the atrocities of war crimes and a prototype for an alternative methodology of documenting and archiving records of historical significance. The project was supported by IDSA x @arselectronica FOUNDING LAB, Polycular, European Federal Ministry, Republic of Austria Education Science and Research, European Media and Information Fund, Creative Europe programme of the European Union, @wkowien & the Austrian Blockchain Award.

Content-aware-fill the gaps within historical records, like one fills a selected area of pixels in common image editing software. Or do not. Augmentation of any knowledge with synthetic epistemics of computed automations is inevitable. Or is it? Content Aware Studies is currently on view at Charim Galerie, Dorotheergasse, Vienna, as part of the curated by_ Vienna festival, actually curated by @julesandaet. Marble, polyamide, machine learning algorithms, 3D scanning, 3D printing, video installation; Began in 2017, the series of works is an inquiry into reverse-archeology via technologies of artificial neural networks & machine learning systems to reconstruct missing fragments within the sculptures of classical antiquity as well as to exercise speculative object-oriented historicism of never-existed, yet algorithmically genuine, documents of synthetic histories. As always I remain beyond thankful to everyone who worked with me on this series over the years.

While I’m coping with a terrible seasonal burn out after Ars Electronica and multiple other shows in a row. (more on which hopefully soon) Traditionally, here is an annual pic from Venezia.

Content Aware Studies is now on view at Charim Galerie, Dorotheergasse in Vienna, as part of the Сurated by_ Vienna festival – this year curated by Jules & Aët. Marble, polyamide, machine learning algorithms, 3D scanning, 3D printing, and video installation Begun in 2017, this ongoing series is an inquiry into reverse-archeology using artificial neural networks and machine learning systems to reconstruct missing fragments within sculptures of classical antiquity. It also explores speculative object-oriented historicism, proposing algorithmically generated, yet historically plausible, documents of synthetic pasts that never existed. As always, I remain deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed to this series over the years.

As I’ve admittedly been falling behind on the usual social media rhythms, perhaps for a reason, I wanted to finally share a few stills from the Public Spaces Conference 2023: For a Collective Internet, held this year in my beloved Amsterdam. I was honored to participate in person and engage with a vibrant community of thinkers, artists, and technologists who are all committed to reimagining the internet as a truly collective and just space. One of the highlights was co-hosting the S+T+ARTS Panel: Making Collective Datasets for Justice alongside some brilliant colleagues – fellow recipients of this year’s S+T+ARTS Prize, who, like me, are deeply invested in exploring how art and technology intersect to address social equity through data and algorithmic justice. It was inspiring to witness such rigorous, creative, and heartfelt discussions that push boundaries and open new possibilities for collaboration. Looking forward to continuing these conversations and collective efforts.