Kirill Savchenkov

Dystopias that describe clashes between humanity and autonomous machines are often based on questions about what the machines would be like, who created them, and how any war would be waged. Unable to conceive the essence and the actions of these radically different creatures, both fiction and scientific research depict them through comparison with the intelligible: the laws of nature, human or animal organisms, and observed modes of social relationships. Failing to see their bodies, they track what artist and theoretician Hito Steyerl called the already existing “shadows” of these machines. Kirill Savchenkov’s practice explores the emergence of such shadows in the media, politics, power structures, and military systems, particularly within models of informational autocracies. Flat Tiger, Paper Node, Dead Hand, and Tightened Knot examines how conflicts take place in the age of digital media and models a situation in which one such conflict has suddenly run out of human control.

This type of dystopia is described in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 science fiction short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which is set on Earth after the Third World War, a conflict delegated to super computers. Having developed independent intelligence, they have merged into a single entity and exterminated all of humanity other than five individuals who are kept captive, their minds and bodies controlled. Savchenkov sees in today’s technological and social developments the possibility of such a scenario.

The blurring of the boundaries between public and private in a highly digitized society has created the conditions for the weaponization of the media, which Savchenkov understands as the development of hybrid warfare in the digital space, where everyone is both a viewer and a participant in the conflict and the difference between war and peace has dissolved. The strategy of this type of war involves the production of psychological wounds (the result of which may be depression, anxiety or stress) through hidden content manipulation. According to philosopher Catherine Malabou, in humans this type of non-physical wound causes frustration and indifference, lowering their ability to resist. In informational autocracies such hybrid methods can be used as instruments of political repression. What happens if the waging of this war is delegated to artificial intelligence? What would a crash in the control system create?