Katya Ev
(ekaterina vasilyeva)

Olga Deryugina

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The Fragility of the Boundary (on Iceberg. Blue Room) 

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2018

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Iceberg. Blue Room is a constructed situation in which the viewer is assigned a central role. The viewer was invited to sign up for a session in the Blue Room via Telegram or SMS. A phone number was provided in an advertisement on Avito [www.avito.ru, local popular equivalent of eBay] , where one could send a message. At the agreed time, the viewer would arrive at the 'blind_spot'. A sign on the door to the room read, "No video surveillance." Inside the room, filled with blue light, there was a bed with pristine white linens and a sleep mask, as well as a table with a laptop turned on. The laptop had Tor [vpn browser https://www.torproject.org/about]  installed and was open to The HiddenWiki page about the dark web. Next to the bed was a nightstand with a glass of water and a package of Melatonin with instructions. Theoretically, the viewer could stay in this space for an unlimited amount of time. When they left the room, they were expected to send a message to the same number from the advertisement."

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Art, as we know from its history, as soon as it began to realize itself as modern and autonomous, as a separate field and not a craft, it immediately began to expand its own boundaries - each time jealously reclaimed - in every possible way; to loosen the boundaries between the author and the viewer, to recruit the viewer as a co-author (this primarily concerns performative and participatory practices; among the earliest examples and techniques we can recall the use of reverse perspective in painting, when the illusion of including the viewer in the space of the painting was created). Since the late 1960s, artists have been emerging who choose to dematerialize the object in favor of creating an environment or situation. 

 

Yet, what art hardly ever does, though, is to leave the viewer alone with themselves. The publicity of a work of art is almost never questioned. If art is not preoccupied with questions of form and its own history, then it necessarily imagines itself to be public. Existing in the social field and as a platform for socially important knowledge or experience. To exist in the social field today means, above all, to be visible. An attempt to make the experience of art private, personal, and removed from the public field would probably look radical. Iceberg. Blue Room is provocative precisely because of its attempt to escape the panoptic logic of the metropolis, of visibility as such. To dare and provoke is to invite the viewer to share in the experience of anonymity. In this case, the technologies of escapism are the Tor vpn-browser or sleeping pills. 

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Making things and connections much more visible is one of the key features of the global web.

 

When we think of the Internet, we most often think of so-called 'Surface Web' and most often perceive it as a source of publicly available knowledge. On the 'Surface Web', search is based on the principle of analogies or relations that were once established between this and that object, in other words, each new iteration of a sign expands its field of visibility, its indexability, as well as its relations with other signs, eventually leading to the expansion of the semantic field as well. The logic of hyperlinks, in turn, leads to the problematization of the very boundaries between different social groups, actors and institutions - they are constantly shifting and subject to revision.

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Search engines and web archivers have limitations: not all pages can be indexed by algorithms - for example, password-protected commercial resources, sites with constantly generated and updated content, and a significant part of catalogs within catalogs (e.g., libraries) do not fall within the field of visibility of search engines. Anything that cannot be indexed falls under the definition of “Deep Web”.

 

The Internet - in all its diversity and multilayeredness - is changing the way we think about knowledge. Knowledge today is the result of a collaboration between machine and human: since it is impossible to manually assemble a catalog of all sites and their interconnections, a machine is often unable to structure such data sets on its own (see on Semantic Web technology, for example).

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On the darknet, most of the resources do not have links to external sources and to “neighbors”. In order to find something, one must initially possess some kind of knowledge (at least, know what to look for and where to look). Here one is not looking for the new - this is a space to meet the already known. Anonymity and the absence of associative links between pages allow for the reproduction of repeated experiences (obviously related to some kind of addiction). 

 

It is equally important to note that here begins the zone where generalizations lose any cognitive value. So all that remains for researchers is to describe the instruments. Slide over the surface and notice the traces.

 

Anonymity is beyond the binary opposition “individual-society”. Above all, anonymity is devoid of history, it is discontinuous. Society sees it as something extra-systemic - either some kind of invasion or, on the contrary, something excluded. We can only judge the anonymous by the traces left behind. At the same time, to be anonymous is to lose one's belonging to society, in a sense, to lose one's identity.

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In fact, the general line of separation between the “superficial” (integral) and the “shadow” is precisely in the statement of completeness and visibility: for example, the world of nation-states is a world that is seen and described, its boundaries are immutable. The boundaries of the global network are movable and unobvious, its structure is difficult to describe; nevertheless, its main property is to manifest connections. The shadow world has no fixed boundaries, it is devoid of identities, it is devoid of long-term memory (or history), it is devoid of centralization, it is devoid of society. It is impossible to imagine society without the distribution of roles, and processuality, constant change of positions and redistribution of roles are immanent to the social. 

It is a space of projections, streams of desire, where nothing interrupts their flow. A space without a subject. But it is by no means a space without a market or without hierarchies. Money and libidinal flows can perfectly well do without a (legal) subject  and without the state. The same applies to information. In the shadow world, the circulation of flows is fast and virtually unimpeded, but somehow they always flow back into the surface world.

 

The shadow internet exists precisely because there is the tip of the iceberg - the internet, where everything is on the surface and everything is interconnected.

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