Yerba BuenaCenter for theArts December 18, 2015–April 3,2016 Metahaven that examinesthat theeffect of new networked communi the film underscores theebbsandflows underscores the film of affect in strengthen thosebonds.Thereference to thistext in expressive act isto provoke feelings create that and aimof the insharedhumanity theprimary emotion; Tolstoybook. Init, joins theactivity that of argues art historian Monalisa Gharavi, shereflects on this1897 andinaninterview withtheliterary during asegment, Leo Tolstoy’s are constructedsnippets to Excerpts from goviral. Aided by punch,thesemesmerizing theiremotional by screens. figures intheseclipswield swords transfixed orstand the screen. 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However,space, amajorthemeof theproject. theinter forever.” inthisgreat Propaganda wide-open operates A text proclaims: canbehidden inthefilm “nothing Yerba inSanFrancisco. BuenaCenter for theArts at Ceci Moss Curatorof VisualArts isAssistant Black Transparency: TheRighttoKnow intheAge of signals not only the mutation of influ state onlythemutation signals not , as well, as exhibitions past as Future at ------

Written and directed by Metahaven (Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden)Metahaven would like to thank Juha van ’t Zelfde, Sian Habell-Aili, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is one of the nation’s most Produced by Lighthouse, Metahaven Lighthouse, Ceci Moss, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Lucy Chinen, innovative contemporary arts centers. Founded in 1993, YBCA’s mission is Commissioned byLighthouse, The Space Femke Herregraven, Joowon Park, Paul Fuller and Vesper van der Veldento generate culture that moves people. Through powerful art experiences, thoughtful and provocative content, and deep opportunities for participation, Camera Remko Schnorr, Metahaven The moving image project YBCA is committed to creating an inclusive culture that awakens personal Interviews Benjamin H. Bratton, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, The Sprawl is co-produced and societal transformation. Peter Pomerantsev by Lighthouse and commissioned by Lighthouseand The Space. CastGwen Pol, Georgina David, Annabel Reid YBCA presents a wide variety of programming year-round, including Screen gazers Georgina David, Xuanhong Huang, Astrit Ismaili, performing arts, visual arts, film/video and civic engagement. YBCA venues Kees de Klein, Annabel Reid, Sofija Stankovic, Xiaoyao Pippa Xu include the Forum, Screening Room, Galleries and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. For tickets and information, Lighthouse Senior Producer Call 415.978.ARTS (2787). Emily Kyriakides Development Producer Sian Habell-Aili Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Artistic DirectorJuha van ’t Zelfde 701 Mission Street Executive Director Miriam Randall Made possible with the support of San Francisco, CA 94103 Communications ManagerAleida Strowger Transmedia a collaboration of the Dutch Mediafund, Filmfund and 415–978–ARTS Creative Industries fund NL. ybca.org Director of PhotographyRemko Schnorr Additional PhotographyMetahaven YBCA Exhibitions 2015–2016 are made possible, in part, by Production Sound MixerFerry de Pater, Tim van Peppen Mike Wilkins and Sheila Duignan, Meridee Moore and Kevin King, and the Creative Ventures Council. Edited byMetahaven Editing ConsultantDaniel Goddard YBCA Programs 2015–2016 are made possible, in part, by Original MusicComposed by Kuedo The James Irvine Foundation. Sound DesignerJamie Kuedo Camera & Lighting Assistant Elisa Grasso Additional Funding for YBCA Programs 2015–2016 Production Manager (NL)Anna Spierings, Lucy Chinen National Endowment for the Arts, Adobe, Gaia Fund, Grosvenor, and Production Manager (UK)Fiona Fletcher members of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Free First Tuesdays underwritten by Directors Forum Members. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is grateful to the City of San Francisco for its ongoing support. Metahaven Design AssistantKees de Klein Design by Metahaven After Effects Benedikt “Mad Max” Wöppel Research AssistantLucy Chinen Web Jonas Lund InternsSolveig Suess, Yee Jin Sha, Raf Rennie, Chloe Scheffe, Joeri Woudstra, Anastasia Kubrak, Barron Webster

GradingFono (Tobias Corba), Metahaven Hair and Make-up DesignerAga Urbanowicz VoiceoversMasha Pruss, Henrietta Meire Camera/Lighting Equipment provided Camera by Rentals, Schram Studios Studios Schram Studios, NL Studios Insurances provided Aonby Risk Solutions

Excerpts from: Leo Tolstoy,What is Art?, 1897 Anna Akhmatova,Requiem , 1935–1940 Nikolai Berdyaev,Truth and Revelation, 1953

Translations Russian: Anastasia Kubrak, Ekaterina Kholyapina Translations Arabic:Selim Helmi, Remke Kruk

The producers would like to thank Charlie McGough, Bas Schram, Suzan Breedveld / NL Studios, Syb Groeneveld, Anthony Lilley, Maria Bota, Ingrid Kopp, Ruth Mackenzie 5 challenging its every move. Putin’s “ownership” of the narrative is confirmed by RT host Peter Lavelle, who calls the Russian president Eating Glass: “the face of global resistance against Western hegemony.”7 The crucial element of this story is that propaganda has The New transformed from a repetitive, monotonous drone of easily- discern ible falsehoods into a theater of endless questioning. Chameleonic Propaganda criticality, skillful provocation, and incessant subversion have taken the place of the singular narrative of the despotic OneState.8 Dmitry Kiselyov, a Russian spin-doctor and state television boss, proposed Metahaven that “objectivity does not exist.” He told the RIA Novosti news agency that “there’s not one publication in the world that’s objective. Imagine a Louis Vuitton pattern. Now imagine the shapes of theIs CNN objective? No. Is the BBC objective? No. Objectivity is a pattern, each of them, slowly curling into question marks. Imaginemyth, which they propose to us and impose on us.” that pattern being printed across reality. Everything occurring in spacetime becomes a luxury handbag of question marks. ThereTimothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, compares the Russian wasn’t enough of a budget to visualize this in After Effects, so you’llstrategy to “applied postmodernism.” Events are unpredictable and unstructured, and can be considered in various ways. But there is have to use your imagination. no way they can be fully accounted for by a single interpretation. The philosopher Jacques Ellul once wrote that “nothing is worsePostmodernism becomes pragmatism in the concept of in times of danger than to live in a dream world.” But he added that maskirovka “propaganda is a good deal less the political weapon of a regimeor ...“masking”—plausible deniability, something essential for Moscow’s than the effect of a technological society that embraces the entirehidden-yet-obvious involvement in the conflict in Ukraine. man.” Propaganda overlays reality with an interface that dominatesPropaganda is an art that undermines through a process of and kills what it was supposed to mediate. endless seeking. It is an extreme sport, like bungee jumping off the high-rises of reality itself, and pursued for its own sake. The quest The emergence of a global communications grid in which we areisn’t linked to a wish for clarity. On the contrary, it aspires to- a spiri all broadcasting mirrors the decline of an order in which we mighttual admission of the human condition. People with power first act agree on what to say. At least for a brief part of modern history,- asgeo gods, hiding some facts and exaggerating others. Then they retreat politics were organized around systems of multilateral collaboration.to their mere humanity and claim that no one can know. These systems tried to work with the many realities that feed into In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1980 psycho-philosophical science-fiction complex problems. But this approach is disintegrating. dramaStalker , the character known as the “Writer,” after arrival in As the billionaire philanthropist George Soros assertsThe in the “Room” at the heart of the sentient, post-apocalyptic “Zone,” New York Review of Books, “international cooperation is in decline concedes that “There’s no such thing as facts, especially here.” In a both in the political and financial spheres.” Pankaj Mishra writesscene that was eventually dropped from Tarkovsky’sNostalgia 1983 , in the Guardian that a “world organized for the play of individualthe protagonist tells two Italian women a story over lunch about self-interest looks more and more prone to manic tribalism.” PopeRussians eating glass, to prove their “ability to do anything and Francis is currently fighting climate change more compellingly thaneverything.” There’s a similar plot at work in the new propaganda. any international organization in recent history. That’s also a signInstead of of in the literary and cinematic imagination, it is playing out the deterioration of an international order that ought to take actionin a war. The Russian soul was hijacked by a Schmittian endgame. but can’t anymore. The return of the quasi-medieval agency of the In an obscure Russian video available on YouTube, two papacy (granted, for a progressive cause) casts light on a creepingmiddle-aged men sit at an office table discussing the state of play in feudalism to which we concede to ourselves more and more openly,Ukraine. They agree that Putin has taken a cowardly turn from the great war he ought to have launched there. He should have pushed saying that “this is the way the world works.” for , a pixelated retro-accelerationist motherland with The post-1945 European ideal of interstate compromise its own YouTube channel, comprised of the and 6 has declined into stale protocol, algorithmic governance, robotic decision making, and technocratic dead stares. An attempt to oblasts in eastern Ukraine. But he didn’t. The men concur that dramatically reduce the unpredictability of politics has resulted Ukrainian citizens are being exposed to a brainwashing experiment in near-complete standardization, giving way to the technocrat asby the state television, and as a result are turning into zombies. the posthuman Ghost Rider of permanent austerity. 1 This is the One of the men admits that while watching Ukrainian television approach by which the European project has been brought to itshe began to exhibit signs of zombification, involving such feelings knees. Not by Russia or ISIS, but by the EU’s own financial clerksas regret and sorrow. He then switched off the television set and felt much better. and clerics. That man is Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, former commander-in-chief The recent and ongoing drama around Greece, Germany, andof the armed forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic, an unrec Europe is a good example of the state of propaganda today. In - this drama there are multiple narratives that lay claim to the sameognized territorial entity that formed as part of the pro-Russian events, places, and people. The narratives do not share the sameuprising in Ukraine’s industrial east. Strelkov, who has been- pho explanations; they could well be conceived on different planets.tographed in medieval battle attire and whose hairstyle resembles But they lay claim to the same things, like “filter bubbles,” insidethat of of a nineteenth century cavalry officer, was already involved in which everything is a coherent narrative—just please don’t leave setting up Transdnistria, a semi-official mini-state in Moldova that the bubble.2 is covered in Soviet insignia. Strelkov was quietly removed from Donetsk command after a Malaysian Airlines commercial airliner In the saga, Germany did everything right; its “moralizing was downed by a missile over eastern Ukraine last July, killing all sermons” and “obsession with rules”The Economist( ) amount to a 298 passengers and crew. universe where everything can be explained according to regulationsIn a letter to Slavoj that only Germany can live up to. This logic may have devastating Žižek, Pussy Riot member Nadya consequences when followed to its ends, where it is imposed- toTolokonnikova, dis writing while incarcerated in a labor camp in cipline and punish disobedient fellow eurozone members. SuchMordovia, was cites the Russian political and religious philosopher the Draconian surrender package demanded of Greece on the Nikolaieve Berdyaev: of July 12, 2015, which amounted to a declaration of financial war by Europe’s most powerful economy—in Merkel’s words, to restore Truth as an object which intrudes itself and wields authority “the most important currency: trust.” over me—an object in the name of which it is demanded that I should renounce freedom—is a figment: truth is no extraneous Months earlier, German satiricists seamlessly after-effected and thing; it is the way and the life. Truth is spiritual conquest; it is post-produced former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis known in and through freedom. giving the finger to Germany in a video that had been originally 9 broadcast on the country’s public television channel. Explained as satire, this hoax was allegedly intended as a liberal provocation In hisTruth and Revelation, Berdyaev wrote that “truth is not of right-wingBild columnists, yet it was also remarkably suited to something given objectively, but rather a creative achievement. It is Germany’s own ideological Oculus Rift. Superior control of digitalcreative discovery, rather than the reflected knowledge of an object tools could present an “as such” technological, even “technocratic,”or of being. Truth ... is the creative transfiguration of10 reality.” augmented reality to Varoufakis and Greece, in which the GermansIn applied postmodernism, this psycho-philosophical quest assumed total control over the Greek image: a colonial gesture comesof to be appropriated as a geopolitical technique at a- particu software superiority, by wealthy hipsters, at the expense of a strug - larly perilous and seductive intersection of politics and- aesthet gling edge of the eurozone. Also, the middle finger would excuseics. the Geopolitics, once determined, but perhaps never predictably, audience to forget Varoufakis’ arguments about the EU’s austerityby a “rulebook” written by the division of planetary surface into policies. After the manipulated video went viral, Varoufakis had nation-states,to seems now torn by a not-unprecedented, but never so publicly deny he did it. He was forced to say “It’s fake.” And it was.intensely experienced, steadily escalating regime in which the image A case in point in the overthrowing of the multilateral order iswas the fight and the image is also art.

7 the 2003 US- and UK-led invasion of Iraq. The campaign was legiti - Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in early 2014. mized with fabricated evidence of Saddam Hussein’s non-existentWhile RT had so far directed its attention to events in the United weapons of mass destruction.3 Presented to the United Nations as aStates, it now had to turn its gaze to Russia. A sprawl of stories no-brainer, the invasion abused and ravaged the very idea -of “coopabout the ensuing conflict was mixed with explosive viral videos eration.” The future leadership of ISIS was forged in a US prisonsuch in as Enjoykin’s Iraq, where jihadist insurgents and former Iraqi Baath Party officials Nyash Myash, a massive YouTube hit featuring the were detained together. A White House aide told a journalist thatRussia-appointed Crimea prosecutor general Natalya Poklonskaya “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. rendered in Japanese manga.Nyash Myash is built around an agoniz- And while you are studying that reality we’ll act again, creating other ing turbo pop track of the type that in post-Soviet Russia could be new realities, which you can study, too.” heard in shopping malls, swimming pools, and even parks. Shot If ever more entities in the geopolitical realm refuse to take offthrough with bullet holes and splattering blood, the video always their augmented reality mediashades, how do their dream worldsreturns get to the same fragment where Natalya smiles and says a inscribed into other people’s realities, physical spaces, and polititeeny-weeny diminutive of her name: “Nyash Myash.” RT reported - that the prosecutor had become an internet sensation in Japan. cal geographies? The political theorist James Der Derian hintedNatalya’s attire transformed into a boarding school uniform; her at such questions when he predicted the emergence of “temporal,eyes grew to saucers while her chin and mouth shrank to those of a perceptual wars,” exploring “not just the traditional boundaries ofyoung child. She wielded her sword at monsters. international relations but also the inadequately mapped -boundar ies between self and other, inside and outside, war and peace.”

The internet began to fill in for the multilateral world order. 1 In multilateral technocracy, the unelected finance expert has emerged as an ideal-type politician, binding each and every part of the system—including fiscal and monetary governance—to strictly-obeyed standards Information technology was seen as a distributor of freedom, and and rules. Technocratic governance, as a political model, can only with great difficulty hold out against the its programming language was written by the West. It wasn’t about Schmittian lure of the friend-enemy construction exploited by the right-wing populists. Worse, it can, as the Greece-Germany example demonstrates, itself become the vehicle of such a dynamic: financial rules negotiating with authoritarian countries anymore, but about the and regulations are then used to “mentally waterboard” ( spontaneous conversion of their populations into liberals. For the Guardian) the disobedient country, crossing a line from conditions to sanctions. For all its obsession with protocol, technocratic governance can’t offer its example, in 2009 the US State Department asked the microblog members a spiritual and ideological unity which binds them to unwritten rules of mutual ethics, care, and - 2 loyalty. In the end, technocracy is a dream world without anything to dream of. Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, reported of his confrontations with the Eurogroup that ging platform Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance, so was handling the Greek loans. When Varoufakis tried to present his and Greece’s ideas about austerity and that Iranian political protests could keep relying on the4 service. debt restructuring, he was “faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is indepen 3 - A 2010 speech by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became dent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem.” A set of counterfeit documents, purportedly belonging to the government of Niger, were key.- These docu the official false start of the internet’s takeover of internationalism.4 ments, which suggested that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium in the African country, were faked so Stone-faced, Clinton professed that censors around the world werebadly that CNN said about them that they could not have been produced by a Western intelligence agency. Concurrently the US and Israel created an advanced digital weapon against Iran that did the exact opposite furiously erasing her words from the historical record. of “civil society activism.” Stuxnet traversed the web from a set of spoof football domains, delivering its lethal piece of code to the computers controlling Iran’s Natanz nuclear reactor (which was, thankfully, pro The political changes aided by information technology 5 - tected by anti-aircraft guns). The last leg of Stuxnet’s journey from the web to the reactor’s control panel was were assumed to fall well within the scope of international by USB key. - Planetary-scale computation does not discriminate according to intent or content. Its usage does not reveal anything of the like. This lack of discrimination is emphasized in digital tools like Dark Wallet, an anony ism. Revolutions were named after (usually vivid) colors, or after - Facebook and Twitter. With McLuhanian automation, the com mized and encrypted “wallet” for the Bitcoin crypto-currency. Dark Wallet takes encryption and privacy - as the default zero-point of online and offline existence. Inventions like Dark Wallet, and the even more munication tools used during uprisings were regarded not merely asambitious system Ethereum, draw on a rigorously objectivized idea of technology as embodied in the block chain, a transaction registry central to Bitcoin which eliminates intermediaries like banks. This disrupts further claims of nation-states, or geopolitics, on the ultimate objective or aim of technology. Dark Wallet’s the medium but also as themessage of these events. The technology 6 5 Amir Taaki defended this principle convincingly, after Dark Wallet became flagged in an ISIS-related blog as was mistaken for political content. As the Egyptian journalist Lina 7 a potential instrument for the terrorist caliphate to hide its finances. Taaki explained that, though he didn’t 8 like ISIS, the technology is for everyone. Attalah explains, Lina Attalah, email to the authors, March 8, 2015. 9 See “Putin answering Peter Lavelle,” RT excerpt. The OneState is a fictional sovereign entity in Evgeny Zamyatin’s 1928 science-fiction novel, 10 In the rare instance where content is addressed, it is to mark We. It is an your political identity. So you find maps showing how many all-knowing authoritarian government led by an all-seeing “Benefactor.” Nadeshda Tolokonnikova,Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj, Islamists, versus how many liberals, versus how many leftists are(London: Verso, 2014), 40. Nikolai Berdyaev, 8 in a given country. We also make fun about how we have been Truth and Revelation: Prolegomena to the Critique of Revelation (Istina i otkrovenie. turned into dots on these maps and how there is no interest in Prolegomeny k kritike otkroveniya), trans. R. M. French (New York: Harper and Bros., 1953), 14. understanding more deeply what these dots are, because that’s not the work of techies but probably that of the humanities, Metahaven was founded in 2007 by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden. They began their collaboration with a speculative visual identity they designed for the Principality of Sealand, an unrecognized mini-state which are not as integrated in the study of the internet as they on a former military structure in the North Sea that tried to reinvent itself as an internet hosting platform. The Sealand case study led the way into Metahaven’s Uncorporate Identity (Lars Müller Publishers, 2010), should be.6 a book that, accordingNew to York Timescritic Alice Rawsthorn, “questions the purpose and value of design in a neurotic and treacherous era of geopolitical instability.” Its Cansuccessor Jokes Bring Down Governments? (Strelka Press, 2013) examines internet memes as a contemporary tactics of political protest. In 2005, the German synth-pop band Propaganda reformed. In theMetahaven notably hit the press in 2011 and 2012 when they created a collection of scarves and T-shirts in support of WikiLeaks. Their new publication,Black Transparency (Sternberg Press, 2015), includes essays on same year, the Kremlin-owned news channel RT started broadcast- political transparency and planetary-scale computation, while also including a selection of their visual work from 2010 through 2013. Metahaven’s sustained interest in the cutting blade between politics- and aesthet ing. YouTube, the world’s largest online video platform, was foundedics brought it to collaborate with Independent Diplomat, a New York City–based organization, and IMMI, in 2005. It was purchased by Google a year later. an Icelandic NGO for progressive politics and the Internet and to extensively collaborate with progressive EDM superstar Holly Herndon, producing music videosHome for (2014) andInterference (2015). In 2014

Orange Revolution,Orange 2004 Ukraine, By 2005 Russia’s frozen conflicts around former Soviet states Metahaven’s short filmCity Rising (2014) included the futuristic city models of Constant’s New Babylon. had already created semi-permanent geopolitical black holes. PlacesIn 2013 Metahaven was awarded the Cobra Art Prize and named Design Studio ofICON the Year by magazine. Their work has been featured in publications 032Csuch, friezeas , e-flux journal, New York like Transdnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia prowled into the Times Magazine, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Libération, andPaper . Their work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, world map. Expulsions of delinquent oligarchs and power plays NY, the V&A, London, Gwangju Design Biennial, Artists Space, NY and Museum of Modern Art in with fossil energy were in progress. In an address to the Russian Warsaw, among others. Federal Assembly, called Russia a “major European power.” More recently, the idea has emerged that Russia should be considered a superpower. The 2014 annexation of Crimea and the pro-Russian uprising and civil war in eastern Ukraine are seen as

litmus tests for the new order that Putin wants. Western scrutiny of this order involves a narrow band of key words, repeated at each verdict. Terms like “corruption,” “mafia,” and “psychological warfare” may be useful catch-all epithets to describe Putin’s regime, but their frequent usage can also prove to be counterproductive. For example, the RT news channel, formerly called Russia Today, has started to pride itself on being labeled a propaganda machine, intent to shatter what it considers to be illusory beliefs about objective, fact-based news media. But how did RT get there? Its self-explanation hinges on the 2003 Iraq invasion, when Western politicians who lied to the public were endorsed by a fawning press corps. This calls for a Russian-controlled mainstream medium that can act as an adversary to Western power, incessantly