Dasha Ilina. Foto: Violetta Wakolbinger

On the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Hi NSA, and welcome to my crib, artist Dasha Ilina will give a presentation and talk about her artistic practice on Thursday, May 8. Titled Inside the Infinite Office, the event will take place in the main hall of Filodrammatica (Korzo 28/1, Rijeka), starting at 7 PM.

Infinite Office – a term coined by Meta to describe the future of work they envision with the Metaverse – is as perverse as it sounds. According to Meta, in the future we will all be working from home, but in an office with all of our colleagues through a VR headset, making the distinction between work and leisure virtually nonexistent. But aren’t we already working all the time? Portable technology allows us to be constantly available and invites our bosses to email us at 23:00 on a Saturday.

Even outside of the traditional work setting, we are laboring for tech companies at all hours of the day, producing valuable data and content that they can now happily use to train their new AI models. The current understanding of how these companies function and the future they envision for us has become so opaque and obscure that we have started to spread a folklore of the digital age, in order to cope with the ever-changing technological environment.

During this talk, Dasha Ilina will speak about the artworks on display in her exhibition Hi NSA, and welcome to my crib, which, although set up as different rooms within of a house, evoke various aspects of surveillance, labor, and data production that might make you feel like we are already living in an infinite office.

Dasha Ilina is a Russian techno-critical artist based in Paris, France. Through the employment of low-tech and DIY approaches, her work questions the desire to incorporate modern technology into our daily lives by highlighting the implications of actually doing so. Her practice engages the public in order to facilitate a space for the development of critical thought regarding social imperatives for care of oneself and others, privacy in the digital age, and the reflexive contemporary urge to turn to technology for answers. She is the founder of the Center for Technological Pain, a project that proposes DIY solutions to health problems caused by digital technologies for which she has received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica. Her project Technosommeil is in the collection of digital art works of the Département Val-de-Marne (Mallapixels). Ilina’s work has been exhibited at institutions such as Centre Pompidou (FR), MU Artspace (NL), Gaîté Lyrique (FR), Hartware Medienkunstverein Dortmund (DE), NeMe (CY), ISEA 2023 (FR) as well as various talks, workshops, and performances held internationally. She is also the co-director of NØ SCHOOL, a summer school that focuses on critical research around the social and environmental impacts of information and communication technologies.

→ https://dashailina.com/