Photo: Mitja Lorenčič

A grilled cheese sandwich is sometimes used as a metaphor for an algorithm. Making a grilled cheese is so easy! Only a few simple steps, just like a basic algorithm. Dasha’s kitchen: My Magical Grilled Cheese Sandwich Recipe is a response to the recently adopted machine learning-based surveillance technology in France. In light of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic games happening across France, the government has put in place an algorithmic video surveillance which automatically detects “abnormal activity” – a category defined by the various private startups and tech firms providing this technology to the state. This new and automatised form of surveillance puts in danger already marginalised groups, while limiting their access to the public space.

This video work, inspired by the online trend of reviewing everything and everyone, gives an insight into the questionable processes behind algorithmic surveillance, as well as highlighting the issues behind implementing machine-learning systems on a large-scale through the humorous lens of review-based Youtube videos.

Supported by Mains d’Oeuvres, The Couch (Het Hem) and Institut Français de la Roumanie. Thanks to Nicolas Gourault and Ahnjili Zhuparris

The installation at IMPAKT. Photo: Dasha Ilina

Advice well taken: Folk tales of digital salvation intends to create an ethnography of folk strategies around the uses of technology. Focusing on saving damaged or dying devices, and the sharing of mythologies to explain the obfuscated workings of algorithms used in social media applications, Ilina documents what she calls techlore – ‘folk knowledge’ on the complex and opaque functionalities of the modern technologies that surround us. The artist touches on issues affecting our data and privacy, the shortcuts we use to fix our devices and the explanations we find for technological mysteries. For this project, Ilina collected folk tales of digital salvation: everyday stories of anthropomorphisation, hacking and corner-cutting. They show how ordinary people are doing what they can to assert control over technology.

Dasha Ilina developed Advice well taken during her EMAP residency at IMPAKT (NL) in 2023, in collaboration with Supisara Burapachaisri, and the publication features contributions by Teresa Dillon and Geert Lovink.

Video excerpt, courtesy of the artist

ASMR as a rising form of online content reduces the body to a gamable center of pleasure to be derived from sensory stimuli, it betrays a willingness to perceive the human form as merely a loosely bound collection of mechanical systems vulnerable to exploitation. The subsection of ASMR videos specialized in “robot-repair” perhaps even more so.

Focusing thematically on concerns surrounding the rise of robotic carers, this work draws attention to the decreased humanism in care, ethical boundaries regarding who is cared for and how, as well as to whom the responsibility to repair and maintain falls. Traditionally regarded as a female field, care and maintenance (spaces with limited growth potential) have been disregarded in portrayals of possible futures, preferring rather to dream of leaving behind a crumbling status quo to explore imagined vistas with space for endless expansion.

Let me fix you asks us to reassess our relationship to that which requires care and maintenance, and to attend to what is present as holistically valuable rather than divisible and exploitable.

Text by Niklas Ayris. This project was kindly supported by Mains d’Œuvres, Réseau Diagonal, and the French Ministry of Culture

Courtesy of the aritst

Do humans dream of online connection? questions our everyday intimate relationships to objects in a time of heightened dissociation between physical proximity and emotional intimacy. The object unites the hard surfaces of technological interfaces with the fragility of delicate hand embroidery. Through using the somewhat outdated craft of embroidery and by highlighting the effort involved in its production, the object intends to strip the normally sleek experience of the smartphone as a tool considered only for its ability to serve a purpose, hiding the labor manifested through its usage.

The work points out a progression in capitalist production by employing a tedious, monotonous physical task to question what in a contemporary Eurocentric context has been considered our most marketable resource. Namely personal time and attention being increasingly injected in the global economy by use of smart technology facilitating constant connectedness (and the increased capitalization of previously ‘free’ time).

Due then to the increased dependence on technology as a means of maintaining human connection as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic consequent lockdowns, business has crept further into the mundane world of the individual, consuming what was previously unreachable.

Text by Niklas Ayris This project was made with the support of Mains d’Œuvres.

Courtesy of the artist

SAY YES TO GRAVE! is an infomercial for a fictional company that provides digital afterlife services. The work playfully examines digital maintenance from a relational perspective – who will manage the mass of digital information you have accumulated after your death?

The acronym GRAVE is presented as a mnemonic device for remembering useful tips to ensure that your data is protected and that access to your files is given in a responsible way in order to avoid embarrassment after you die.

The installation complements the infomercial by inviting viewers to work at the GRAVE call center by routing incoming calls from customers with complaints and queries about digital afterlife management.

Installation by Dasha Ilina and Erica Jewell Video by Erica Jewell, Dasha Ilina, Lina Schwarzenberg Sound recording by Aude Langlois Camera work by Giacomo Piazzi This project was made during the Silicon Friend Camp