Virtual Tour and Expert Talk: 87000 km

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

The fiber optic cables distributed across Kazakhstan span 87,000 km, with their Internet EXchange Points (IXPs) centralized. On the one hand, this highly efficient network is managed and controlled by state-affiliated companies; on the other, the digital infrastructure offers possibilities for global exchange open to all. What happens when this fragile system is instrumentalized in the course of its production and maintenance?

As part of their artistic research for Prater Digital, the collective eeefff is hosting a series of Expert Talks with virtue tours. Their focus is the entanglement of industrial, military, and ecological infrastructures. The series brings together artists, scholars, and thinkers whose work and reflections connect to these concerns thematically or methodologically.

In the second event, 87000 km, we welcome artist Medina Bazargali. She examines the material connections between resource extraction, digital infrastructure, and state control in Kazakhstan, and shows how these connections manifest in bodies, signals, and political resistance.

Bazargali focuses on the materials oil and lead. Both carry negative and positive charges: oil is a part of energetical and chemical infrastructures that support internet and, through its state-controlled export in Kazakhstan, that is crucial for current political regime in the country.

Lead, in turn, appears as a material in both infrastructures of internet and bullets. Its use can bring lethal violence, yet it is also employed in the Kazakh ritual қорғасын құю (lead pouring): molten lead is poured into water, and the resulting forms serve to interpret fear and the extent of harm — an alternative infrastructure that translates matter into meaning.

Oil, cables, bodies, signals, protest: in Bazargali’s work, these are not separate aspects but parts of a material entanglement. The conversation thus connects to central motifs in the work of eeefff: how industrial, military, and digital infrastructures condition one another.

Prater Digital