Alexandra Anikina is a researcher, media artist and filmmaker who investigates algorithmic culture and critical posthumanities. Alexandra works with experimental film, software and lecture-performances. She recently completed her PhD on procedural films at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been shown internationally, including VI Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Gaîté Lyrique, Paris; Anthology Film Archives, New York; NCCA Moscow; Korean Film Archive and, most recently, Art Sonje Museum, Seoul, Sanatorium Gallery, Istanbul, Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale. Her works are held in the collection of NCCA (ROSIZO), Moscow. In 2018 she co-curated IMPAKT media art festival with the theme ‘Algorithmic Superstructures’.
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Alexandra Anikina uses the history of Soviet media technologies to probe the pervasive Western cosmologies of technological progress and to critique the temporalities of data governance and control. Thinking the processes of ideologisation as acts of scale-shifting and making-urgent, she draws on Soviet philosophy and post-socialist experience in order to challenge the states of catastrophic and urgent consciousness of the late techno-capitalism. The starting point in her research is the rural history of her own family tree and the early industrialisation, in which Soviet narratives of progress had to adapt to seasonal temporalities of the village, mixing together notions of technology, nature, local folklore and new urbanist mythologies. She is interested in exploring models and approaches of non-hierarchical forms of technicity, rooted in Soviet philosophies of cosmism and cybernetics. While careful not to produce new binaries, her research clearly re-examines the disillusionment attached to the communist history, and opens up new avenues for the planetary conversation on the impact of digitality.