A series of photographs, development of which began at the «Vaults» Centre for Artistic Production, House of Culture «GES-2». Selected works.
Exhibition at «The Vaults», House of Culture «GES-2», December 2025. Manual optical prints on Fujicolor Crystal Archive
Experiments, test prints. 2025
«0000 0000» 2025
— the empty character (NUL) in ASCII, indicating the start or end of data
Water is not only the foundation of life on Earth, but also a condition for the existence of digital data. This resource is needed in large quantities to cool data centres — the invisible physical anchor of the virtual world. In the coming decades, most of them will be affected by the effects of the environmental crisis — some by rising sea levels and others by drought. The rapid growth in the consumption of data centres, due largely to the development of artificial intelligence, exacerbates the environmental crisis. Because of the IT sector, water and electricity are already scarce in many regions of the world, and the amount of information processed and associated resource costs are only increasing.
Preparation of an art object for the exhibition at the Pennlab Gallery (Winzavod CAC), 2025
The belief in the immortality of digital data has sparked a wave of widespread archive digitisation. There is a high probability that the absence of physical copies of virtual data will lead to a new ‘Dark Age’ — a digital one. Unless new methods of storing information are found, its disappearance is inevitable.
Tests, 2025
The title of the project refers to the structure of binary code—the foundation of digital computing and computer architecture, where each character represents a combination of zeros and ones. If the sequence is altered by even a single character, the file will be corrupted. This also applies to images that exist within the binary code system. The photographs in the series have undergone a process of ‘reverse digitisation’—they have been transferred from the digital realm to analogue media, not always without distortion, mirroring digital glitches. In doing so, the project offers a theoretical path to salvation in the event that, in order to avoid data loss—total digital darkness—the only option is to transfer virtual archives back into physical storage.
Predominantly, data centres are cooled with fresh water, which accounts for less than 3% of the world’s total water supply, of which less than 1% is accessible.
Installation at the Pennlab Gallery, Winzavod CAC
«Complementarity principle» 03/03/26-10/04/26, Pennlab Gallery, Winzavod CAC. curated by Egor Zaika. Photo by Pavel Basin
Special thanks to: the team of «The Vaults» Artistic Production Centre, and in particular Olga Balabanova, Ivan Sakharov (analogue printing techniques), Andrey Shagin (optical manual photo printing), Egor Zayka (exhibition curator), Vladimir Levashov (text editing), and Larisa Lapshina (invaluable help and support).
