Studio George Egor Kraft
Studio George Egor Kraft
← Previous
Next →

UNCENSORSHIP ARCHITECTURE


↕ Expand Full Text

2022;
Electronic Ink screens, Plexiglass, Swarm Blockchain and Swarm Nodes, Fragments of films of investigative journalists. Could be discounted in case of diptych, triptych, etc

'Uncensorship Architecture', that provides an infrastructural proposal to protect journalistic data & investigative work from censorship & blocking. Using decentralized blockchain storage infrastructures, simultaneously stored on thousands of nodes, previously banned journalistic archives become safe from censorship and IP-blocking.

‘Uncensorship Architecture’ provides an infrastructure proposal to protect journalistic data and investigative work from censorship and geopolitical blocks. Using decentralised blockchain storage infrastructures, journalistic archives become safe from censorship and IP-blocking. Displaying content hosted in a decentralised storage network: 6 E-ink screens feature excerpts of banned media in Russia, uploaded to a decentralised archive to protect them from repeated censorship. The data is distributed through Swarm nodes across the planet-wide infrastructure. Russia’s contested relationship with the free press has a long, ongoing history.

The Committee to Protect Journalists states that Russia was the country with the 10th largest number of journalists killed since 1992, 26 of them since the beginning of 2000, including four from the outlet ’Novaya Gazeta’. 

After the 24th of February 2022, this difficult relationship with independent journalism had come to a climax with the criminalization of any news and information which deviated from the state line. With the passing of the ‘fake-news’- law, multiple news outlets were forced to shut down as they refused to report under such state-imposed censorship, among these was the outlet ‘TVRain’, which was the only independent live-breaking news source left operating from within Russia. Mere hours after journalists and employees aired their goodbye to their audience, their data archive was seized by government employees. Still, more shockingly, their online archive which was uploaded on YouTube after many years of live coverage was also deleted, upon a request from the Russian Censorship Agency. Informational warfare was waged by the Russian government on its own people by restricting their access to information.

Studio George Egor Kraft
Studio George Egor Kraft
Studio George Egor Kraft
Studio George Egor Kraft
Studio George Egor Kraft

'Uncernsorship Architecture' on view at 'Lies, Half-Truths & Propaganda [The Bad, the Worse, and the Worst]' in alexanderlevy Gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2022.