curated by Valentinas Klimašauskas

Valentinas Klimašauskas
Curator

Artists
Andreas Angelidakis, Jakub Choma, Olivia Coeln, Anna Daučíková, Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Himey, Anna Jermolaewa, Jakob Lena Knebl, Ulyana Nevzorova, Ocean Earth, Goda Palekaitė, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Agnieszka Polska, Artūras Raila, Daniil Revkovsky & Andriy Rachinsky, Paul de Reus, Nina Sarnelle, Nedko Solakov

An Incomplete & Unreliable Guide to Social Media War Room

Let’s be clear. This guide is incomplete and unreliable, the data conflicting or missing, the war hybrid and ongoing. The room is a riddle in a labyrinth. Social media a synonym for something else. We are still trying to understand what else, exactly. “The moment has come when all the crises – economic, ecological, migration, informational and political – are intertwined, and nobody can entirely figure out where they originated and how to address them but many declare to have ‘the solution’,– concludes Marta Barandiy in her policy paper about the Russian information war against the West. However, this statement also accurately reflects the nature of the ongoing information wars. Thus, here we are, surfing between various waves of pandemics and various ecopolitical crises, trying to control, monitor and understand – not necessarily in this order – ourselves and the ever-changing world.

What is the Social Media War Room?

Social Media War Room (SMWR) may be described as a particular area that is specially designed to extract insights by visually monitoring certain real-time actions. Thus, it consists largely of multiple screens displaying data from an arsenal of sources. Accordingly, the exhibition is built around diverse works that are connected to monitoring (semi)public acts, mining reality, researching social networks in Ancient Greece, behavioral surplus, data exhaust, political demonstrations, leaked material, media spectacles, various online collections, public voyeurism, amongst others. SMWR may be compared to the News Room or War Room – they all are rooms for monitoring and controlling the ongoing situation.