The emergence and spreading of the electronic communication media during XX century had a huge impact on societies all over the world, completely changing the ways of information exchange. But in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, these technologies evolved in a specific socioeconomical climate, from the very beginning affected by Marxist-Leninist ideology, military communism, and red terror, which influenced attitudes towards them in the post-Soviet states to the present day.
The “infra” artistic research project by Boris Shershenkov uses the applied media archaeology toolkits to unravel the design patterns, technomythologies and governmental social engineering methods used for the exploitation of any civil scientific, cultural, and technological developments as total propaganda and mass surveillance tools for the sake of the “state security”.
The talk will focus on the dystopian symbiosis of the authoritarian “secret police state” and Western electronic media technologies, fueling the cold civil war and governmental terrorism, which was predicted by Evgeny Zamyatin in 1920, and implemented almost 100 years later in contemporary Russia.