small size reducer

Informational autocracy augmented by hybrid and cyber warfare creates a contemporary reality based on an orchestrated play of accents and silent breaks, that blend out the noise of war. In his audio installation, Kirill Savchenkov reflects this phenomenon in an immersive way by using sound and heat as a political medium. The shifting of the temperature and the sound becomes a pattern of medial behaviours and conditions in dictatorships now.

The installation tries to remain as invisible as possible. Apart from heat strips and floor bar grilles, it doesn’t include any visual elements. This visual minimalism steers the attention toward the noises we hear, and embedded in them slow piano music and a weak voice repeatedly trying to make an ontological statement: “I’m your dream from last night”. A sentence that seems to be a product of a moment, when the subject’s complete dissolution in an illusion occurs. The reasons may be manifold, though Savchenkov clearly relates it to the current Russian government’s actions that turned the country into a manipulative dictatorship currently invading Ukraine. 

In his essay Debilitating Air. Authoritarian algorithmic governance and politics of barely audible voices the artist elaborates on the background of his artwork, in which he tries “to map a chunk of the landscape of authoritarian means of control within the techno-social milieu; how the imposter institutions shape the political system and gain control by dimming the agency of citizens, tuning it as if the climate control.”