To access TikTok from Russia today, you need to install a special APK. It's very strange - observing the phenomenon of ghosted TikToks (where TikTok videos don't exist for you on a computer but do on a phone). This strange reality in which we've existed for two years: banned social networks, semi-banned social networks - essentially, the prohibition of these social networks is expressed only in how they are publicly discussed; everyone watches reels, and everyone knows it.
performance documentation on YouTube (by Anna Erina)
The performance took place in the multimedia department of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, and of course, besides the curators, no one really understood even approximately what a TikTok performance could be. But then again, neither did we. We didn't rehearse our performance; we synchronized during the process.
We selected around 200 reels, from which we later combined and reassembled visual and auditory patterns. The beginning - a bold and non-gradual alternation of images referred to as the "war of images" - the current state of the Internet core age (referring to this text by Twee Whistler). We denote the skyrocketing BPM of images with the rhythm of machine gun fire. We are just girls who still live in Russia; we don't want any of this, yet we still suffer from insomnia-inducing epileptic visual flashbacks in which war and social networks are organically intertwined entities.
The top layer (literally the only unchanging layer in the sequence of dozens of reels) consisted of local (rides in police vans ‘avtozaks’, swinging on a swing against the backdrop of explosions) and universal (cutification of military attributes) reels. This layer permeated the entire performance and unfolded later in a part we linked to the representation of governmental control through restrictions and data leaks on the internet.
The second layer is soft, bow-tied, angelic, and glittering layer of girlhood as a spectrum. We included components from our childhood and teenage years, online artifacts, fragmented formations of girlhood identity, Heideggerian flickers from states of percolating realities.
The third layer is all about dancing. What's TikTok without dances, after all? The more diverse (ghost dances, dances in the backyard shovelling snow, choreography of folding military uniforms in North Korea) - enough or never enough, even if continuously leaping from one movement to another. A multiplication of images and their disruptions makes us feel more real then a wholesome of self.
The fourth layer is control. Political control over global social networks, control over data and dynamics of our attempts to circumvent this control. We are in a war of images. Closing information circulation paths on the network, processing and transmitting user data to sub-governmental organizations - we all know about this, but what are we doing, what can we do to resist this, even at the level of in-platform criticism?
** A day before the performance, Alexei Navalny passed away. We included his last video in the performance. We weren't sure if we would do it, but at that moment, it seemed right.
In the final part, we return to the top layer of reels. Kaleidoscopes of elusive sequences of images and meanings are grasped epileptically, like asphyxia - what if we lingered in them for more than a few seconds? Undesirable documentation, penetrating into each layer, enough for us to be imprisoned for it in Russia? More than anxiety but still less than inaction.
links:
video art by Daria Ivans
sound art by Anna Morskaya (aka Digitonica)
video and sound library also collected by Polina Orlikova (aka Popo) and Alexander Kovalev