Virtual Tour and Expert Talk: vertical synchronisation

The event will be held in English. No registration is required. The participation link will be published here.

Fibre-optic cables are part of digital infrastructures and underpin global participation, economic communication, and civic exchange. Yet when deployed for surveillance and control, this very function can be turned against those it was meant to serve. Cables, networks, intelligence services, software: in Mark Cinkevich’s research, these elements cannot be separated from one another. Digital infrastructures are physically anchored through surveillance, state access, and imperial interests of control.

As part of their artistic research for Prater Digital, the collective eeefff invites audiences to a series of Expert Talks and virtual Tours. Their focus lies on the entanglement of industrial, military, and ecological infrastructures. The series brings together artists, researchers, and thinkers whose work resonates thematically or methodologically with this inquiry.

For the third event, we welcome the artist and researcher Mark Cinkevich. His work examines how state power and imperial reach become inscribed into the hardware of digital networks: fibre-optic cables, data centers, software stacks. He focuses in particular on how one state asserts control over the digital infrastructures and data of neighboring countries.

Since the escalation of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2022, the territory of Belarus has been used to station Russian troops and to launch attacks on Ukraine. At the same time, Russia has been taking control of Belarus’s digital infrastructure. Databases on criminal records, migration, and traffic violations are being synchronized with their Russian counterparts. Belarusian citizens are subjected to large-scale profiling according to Russian risk metrics, amounting to a digital colonization of Belarus by Russia.

Prater Digital