Office for Comparative Reality

Sabotage, the first exhibition project of Office for Comparative Reality, is an unsettling environment exploiting the manipulative nature of media flows, hypertext aesthetics and artificially generated imagery to reflect on the incessant persistence of decentralised militarist propaganda.

The installation brings together a number of elements, including a looped video piece, a wallpaper consisting of map-like glitched textures and metadata, a flag designed by a neural network, ink portraits of the dead bodies of Russian troops abandoned by the Russian military commanders in Ukraine, as well as the sounds of a grand piano in the process of tuning. The resulting setting reveals that distortion, fakes and mimicry constitute dominant features of aggressive media landscapes, which aim to suppress our awareness and shape our perceptions. In the course of the intervention the space of the Pushkin House Bar is adorned with the flora typical of swamps and marshes.

Collaborative design-research laboratory
Installation (wallpaper, 2 graphic works, 12 min. video with sound, flag, plants)
Dimensions variable

Concept, project lead, creative direction: Katya Sivers
Motion design: Danya Orlovsky
Sound: Boris Shershenkov
Contributors to the project also include those who have chosen to remain anonymous

The installation was showcased at the Pushkin House in London, UK