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Sabotage, the first 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.
Contributors to the project include Danya Orlovsky (motion design), Boris Shershenkov (sound), and Katya Sivers (concept, project lead, creative direction), along with those who have chosen to remain anonymous. The installation was showcased at the Pushkin House Bar in London, UK.