Yeah, I think, at the moment, you are wondering why I named this post in German and what it means. This is the way Immanuel Kant called the “thing as it is”, objectively, without any perception filter we all have got. Have you ever thought about the way you see the world around you and whether it is the real representation of it? Have you ever wanted to have a chance to get that red pill? Either yes or no, neuroscientists now can say for sure that we do not see reality as it is and that is because of how our brain works,… More

Surveillance and monitoring became parts of our everyday life and integrated into all the spheres of it. Talking about privacy I have got that idea to make surveillance and monitoring evident. X-ray is a well-known metaphor for seeing something through and revealing the true hidden nature of things, but there is another technology which has the same meaning and could be used in an artwork without harming anyone — infrared thermography. Here is a good example of real-time thermography using small addition to a smartphone Flir One: Also, I have found interesting experiment with this… More

I find it very compelling how people’s feeling of security and space perception change by using simple psychological tricks. I started thinking about that when, while our LCC Studio overtake, Zhiguo Zeng build his prototype of the future apartment by using only tape outlines on the floor. When you step into it, your mind immediately changes the way you perceive the space around you. You feel like you are actually inside a structure, which fences you off from the outside world and can protect you. Like in Gestalt principle of closure our mind tends to complete everything to get a familiar structure and that completion… More

Back in 2011, I was lucky enough to visit a solo exhibition by Olafur Eliasson in Kyiv. It is not a regular thing in Ukraine to hold art exhibitions of such high-quality level. At that period I used to be considerably sceptic to contemporary art because most of the artists trying to be spotted by audience provoking strong emotional feedback, and the easiest way to do so is to shock and arouse disgust, fear and depress. That is why I was fairly surprised by the Olafur’s artworks as they are playful and aesthetically pleasing, though deep and thought-provoking. I love the way he manipulates… More

As I mentioned in my previous blog entries, when we got to the LCC Studio at the Elephant&Castle Shopping Centre, I was surprised by the number of surveillance cameras in that place, but I noticed them mostly because I had already had a focus on people’s privacy and monitoring. When I asked others in the room no one paid any attention to the cameras before I pointed on them. So that is why I decided to make invisible visible and make surveillance tangible and noticeable. For me, surveillance creates something like a net above our heads and makes me feel that… More

When we have got to the LCC Studio at Elephant&Castle Shopping Centre I was surprised by the huge amount of cameras for the one open space. There are 9 (nine!) cameras. So are there at least one place where you can hide from the cameras. Let’s figure it out. I have made the photos from the points of view of each camera to map the coverage: #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 25%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode()… More

“Only the paranoid survive.” — Andy Grove Andy Grove was a Hungarian refugee who escaped communism, studied engineering, and ultimately led the personal computer revolution as the CEO of Intel. He died earlier this year in Silicon Valley after a long fight with Parkinson’s disease. Browsing the web I came across the story which is a bit disturbing: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again. Neither should you. If you bother closing your door to keep your possessions safe, mind your data safety: How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour Cover… More

What is the privacy? privacy ˈprɪvəsi,ˈprʌɪvəsi/ noun a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. the state of being free from public attention. Great explanation of the subject we can find on the Privacy International’s website: https://www.privacyinternational.org/node/54 But what exactly could be considered as private information? For everyone, there are personal understanding of the boundaries. There are also some classifications, such as ISO: http://www.iso27001security.com/ISO27k_Model_policy_on_information_classification.pdf or custom policies of particular organisations: http://www.weber.edu/iso/dataclassification.html A nice video by Privacy International could explain a bit more about privacy: https://media.privacyinternational.org/webm/Privacy101-low.webm… More

So where would you like to place yourself?Every day, we produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (according to IBM). That’s a lot on anyone’s scale. Most of that data is being stored and processed. It could say about us much more than we know about ourselves. The exhibition in the Science Museum “Our Lives in Data” pinpoints lots of the opportunities and threats of big data. All the data shows patterns which reveal things no-one could see before. The world is changing much faster than ever before. It creates tremendous possibilities to make life better and easier: dating apps… More

The term “Hypernormalisation” was coined by the professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, Alexei Yurchak in his book “Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation”. He was talking about the reality which was created in the last 20 years of the USSR when it was clear that the system is failing, but no one had any understanding of what could be next and, after being brainwashed, people did not have even dreams about another society structure. So they maintained the pretence of the functioning society, over the time the “fakeness” was accepted… More