Objectivity

Objectivity by “bezvlastje”: an audiovisual manifesto

short film and live drone improvisation
2023

Flags of endless countries
Will be sharp like fern,
Sprawling like moss,
Deep like stone

To gather the warmth of the sun
And provide it for free — to all

Soviet epistemology, based on the dominance of Reason over matter, established Nature as a laboratory (from “labor“) where humanity could experiment and realize its most ambitious projects. In the same time, human itself was seen as a raw material, a resource that needed to be properly shaped and narrowed.

From Belomorkanal to BAM and other major soviet industrial and colonialist projects, both human and nature were tamed and framed. Rivers detoured, seas connected, impenetrable forests turned into perfect construction material, “criminals” and “delinquents” transformed into disciplined workers (“perekovka“), optimization of work gestures and organizational processes turned factories into perfectly running machines.

 

This soviet techno-social approach inherits from a much older paradigm: the anthropocentric and scientocentric Renaissance gaze. Marked by the invention of perspective and popularization of scientific measurement tools, it separates ourselves from being and op-poses nature as something external from us. Whereas we are not existing “despite of” the nature, not even “in” the nature. We are nature, and as such, our gaze and sensitivity should be different. Objectification and externalization are fundamental epistemological operations that made possible destructive industrial projects, in the name of profit and “progress”.

This video is a reflection on the europeocentric and scientocentric paradigm, its consequences and the contemporary resistance practices mainly by indigenous communities, but also by antiauthoritarian alterglobalist movements that criticize not only capitalism in its wildest, but also the deep epistemologies that we have to question in ourselves.

The video is a collage from various films, mainly from soviet scientific educational films on cybernetics, quantum mechanics, complex stochastic processes, radio-physics, that were produced in 1960-1980s and aimed at high-school and university youth. It also uses some of the footages from the famous propagandist movie “Belomorkanal”, about the first experiment of using Gulag’s prisoners for an industrial construction of a canal connecting lake Onega and the White Sea and piercing the beautiful land of Karelia.

In the current context of Russian war against Ukraine, we see an urge for decolonization and dissolution of the so-called russian “federation”. This video is an appeal to reconsider the soviet project and soviet past. But we are not fooled by an illusion of a “good democratic west” either, as we acknowledge its colonialist foundation. Hence, the narrative of this video seeks to reconnect indigenous struggles across the world and antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist riots in western metropolis. That is why, the video also uses footages from the recent black block riots in Paris (where the author currently lives), and gatherings of indigenous activists and radical environmentalists against pipelines in Canada and the US.

The video was originally created by bezvlastje for a live at the Experimental Sound Gallery in Saint-Petersburg. The music was played live on analogous wooden synthesizers built in Karelia by SynthCone. No post-editing was made.

bezvlastje is a one-woman project by Ksenia Ermoshina, an anarchist and a researcher from Saint-Petersburg, now exiled in Paris. It conjugates drone, power electronics, field recordings and exploration of raw electricity sound. It sees drone as form of semantic sabotage, as it questions hierarchies in sound and structures in composition.

SOME VISUAL REFERENCES

  • Редкие кадры хроники. СССР. Часть 1 – Rare Chronicles of USSR; 1930. Pt 1 (link)
  • Радио-передающие устройства – Radio transmission devices (link)
  • Электрификация СССР – Electrification of USSR; 1963 (link)
  • Учебные фильмы по электротехнике 1985 г. Фильм 5 – Educational films on electronics; 1985 (magnet link)
  • Сетевое планирование и управление; 1973 – Network planning and management (magnet link)
  • Учащимся об информатике и компьютерах – On informatics and computers for students (link)
  • Диссипативеные структуры в нелинейных средах – Dissipation structures in non-linear environments (link)
  • Бифуркации – Bifurcations; 1986 (magnet link)
  • Взаимодействие элементарных части; 1984 – Interaction of elementary particles (link)
  • Нелинейные структуры в синергетике – Non-linear structures in synergetics (link)
  • Лазеры – Lasers (link)
  • Учебный фильм “Коррозия металлов и способы защититься от неё” – Educational movie “Corrosion of metals and methods for protection against it” (magnet link)
  • История строительства беломоро-балтийского канала, 1933 – “History of construction of the Belomor-Baltic channel; 1933” (magnet link)