Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich
Investigation as a Medium: Open-Source Intelligence for Artists
Workshop
8 March 2023, 2–5 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana
What to bring: a laptop installed with Google Earth Pro
Part of Tactics & Practice #14: Scale
In the framework of konSequences realised by konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art
Since contemporary methods of control and violence are concealed, embedded in vast infrastructural and logistical networks, they can only be confronted with new practices and tools. Elaborating on the making of their essay film Onset, Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich will break down open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools and ways those techniques could inform an artistic practice. They will also discuss the convergence of fact and fiction, where they will explain how to search for classified information and turn it into something more than just discrete numbers of transmitted megawatts.
In their practice, Cinkevich and Engelhardt fuse OSINT tools with demonology to scrutinise Russian military strategy. They determine the sequence of events in a manner similar to the reconstruction of a transnational crime scene and thereby inform the parafiction narrative in their work. While primary reliance on open-source data allows them to look at such highly measured and controlled segments as energy and military infrastructures, demonology opens paths for engagements across cases and disciplines, key for an artistic practice.
After the conceptual overview, the audience will be invited to apply the new investigative method in practice. Attendants will be provided with the GPS coordinates of Russian military infrastructures and will conduct their own investigation in a guided manner.
THE AUTHORS
Anna Engelhardt is the alias of a media artist, researcher 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. Engelhardt also pursues lecturing and publishing to situate digital conflicts within a broader colonial matrix. Her works and activities have been featured at the transmediale festival, Venice Architecture Biennial, Ars Electronica and the Kyiv Biennial, as well as in Digital War and The Funambulist.
Mark Cinkevich (1994, Lahoysk) is a Belarus-born interdisciplinary researcher and artist based in Warsaw. Having received his master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Helsinki, he now pursues a PhD at the Department of Anthropology, University of Warsaw. In his practice, he is interested in critical, speculative and experimental aspects of art that operate at the intersection of fact and fiction. His work focuses on the post-Soviet infrastructural and social landscape, through which he explores in particular the concepts of nuclear colonialism, infrastructural colonialism, extractivism and monstrosity.
EXHIBITION
Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich
Onset
7–24 March 2023
Aksioma | Project Space
ARTIST TALK
Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich
Infrastructural Horror: Soaring, Sprawling, Vast
6 March 2023
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
CREDITS
Authors: Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich
Production:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2023
Partner:
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana
Part of the series:
Tactics & Practice
In the framework of konSequences realised by
konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art
The project konS:: Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.