KIRILL MAKAROV / Unveiled

The digital sculptures and video sequences presented at the exhibition are part of the archive of testimonies of military action, based on documentation of affairs taken from public media, footage filmed by direct eyewitnesses and participants and processed by computer modelling programs so as to restore/reconstruct in digital form the physical space in which this event took place, and assembled as a virtual interactive space. The visual material for the project consists of a range of evidence in the public/open access, it is broken down into a sequence of frames, which is then processed by 3D modelling methods. The space is reconstructed with varying degrees of accuracy, depending on the quality of the footage, the amount of material, and the circumstances in which the individual was at the time of filming. The title of each fragment refers to the date it was filmed or published in the media. Somehow it is the production of the presence of the acts of violence and destruction, but equally, an attempt to affect the way how the reality of the war is mediated.

This method is made possible by the fact that these military operations, due to the widespread availability of personal means of photography and communication, are very well documented when compared to previous similar occasions, incomparably more viral and available live – both because of technological advances and the biased view of global media.

“Virtuality makes it possible to prototype social relationships and interactions, a kind of training for the real. At the same time, it immerses the user in the space of the imaginary, which they can perceive as safe, but this safety is illusory,” says Kirill Makarov. “ […]  the virtual environment is limited by the written code, the will and imagination of the one who is responsible for its code. But the illusion of limitless physical possibilities emerges. One of the distinguishing characteristics of humans is their ability to radically empower and manipulate their environment with technical objects.”

Within warfare, the soldier becomes a system of weaponry in which organic and inorganic, man and machine, are integrated to the point of complete interdependence, aiming to strengthen itself in order to unleash a contained inner malevolence, and project power in the form of domination. Violence, as Michel Wieviorka (2009) argues, tends to be the opposite of conflict; it closes the debate and “encourages rupture”.

As Kirill Makarov claims, the media, in a kind of reverse engineering, transforms bodies within warfare into technically reproducible objects, to quote Guy Debord, “appeasing people with spectacle” and thereby depriving them of the ability to see. Not seeing one’s place in the structure creates an alluring comfort zone, making this reassuring alienation a desirable state, not validating one’s presence, not validating one’s ability to be affected. This is an important property of technology, a necessary part of modern alienation: to pretend to be absent in order to deny the consequences of one’s presence, actual and potential, and to consider only the desired consequences.