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Fellowship

Fellow 2019/2020

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Oleksiy Radynski at a Fellows co-convened event, BAK, February 2020. Photo Tom Janssen.

Oleksiy Radynski

Filmmaker and writer Oleksiy Radynski uses documentary film practice to examine the relationship between fact and fiction. His films have received a number of awards at film festivals. They have been screened at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Oberhausen, 2019, 2018, and 2015; Stroom, Den Haag, The Hague, 2019; e-flux, New York, 2019 and 2015; S A V V Y Contemporary, Berlin, 2017; DOK Leipzig, 2016; Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, 2018 and 2015; post, the Museum of Modern Art’s online resource, 2020; among other venues. His texts have recently been published in Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (2018), Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (2017), and in e-flux journal (2020, 2017, and 2014). He is a participant of the Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv. Radynski lives and works in Kyiv.

 

Oleksiy Radynski

Filmmaker and writer Oleksiy Radynski uses documentary film practice to examine the relationship between fact and fiction. His films have received a number of awards at film festivals. They have been screened at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Oberhausen, 2019, 2018, and 2015; Stroom, Den Haag, The Hague, 2019; e-flux, New York, 2019 and 2015; S A V V Y Contemporary, Berlin, 2017; DOK Leipzig, 2016; Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, 2018 and 2015; post, the Museum of Modern Art’s online resource, 2020; among other venues. His texts have recently been published in Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (2018), Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (2017), and in e-flux journal (2020, 2017, and 2014). He is a participant of the Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv. Radynski lives and works in Kyiv.

 

Fellowship Research Trajectory

Is Data the New Gas? is a research project that looks at fossil fuels and big data as two intertwined forces guiding the development of today’s global society. Departing from the ideas by thinkers such as Aleksander Bogdanov, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Viktor Glushkov, it reimagines the genealogy of today’s global energy infrastructure. This research is primarily concerned with the case of the disputed Nord Stream II (NSII) natural gas pipeline, a collaboration between Russia and Germany currently under construction in the Baltic Sea. The NSII project embodies the structural interdependency of authoritarian politics with practices of fossil fuel extraction and, broadly, the exploitation of natural resources. Oleksiy Radynski’s research traces this interdependency by focusing on the political and cultural history of fossil fuel and data-related infrastructures on the Eurasian continent, unfolding around the Soviet-era, Kyiv-based mathematician and engineer Viktor Glushkov. His visionary 1960s and 1970s work proposed developing a network for cybernetic governance sometimes referred to as the “Soviet Internet.” Instead, his cybernetic expertise was utilized for a different task: the computerization of Druzhba (Friendship), the world’s longest oil pipeline, which carries Siberian oil to Europe to this day, and upon which much extractivist infrastructure have been modelled. This research takes the form of an essay that’s been published in e-flux journal in March 2020, and is reprocessed into a script for an archive-based essay film that links the trajectories of Bogdanov’s total organizational science, Vernadsky’s theory of the noosphere, and Glushkov’s cybernetics to the future scenarios of environmental and anti-authoritarian liberation struggles.

 

Online Screening of Oleksiy Radynski’s Landslide and Interview with Grant Watson

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Oleksiy Radynski’s film Landslide (2016) premieres online 26 August 2020 as part of the screening series From Matter to Data: Ecology of Infrastructures, 29 July–9 September 2020, Museum of Modern Art, New York. This series presents a selection of 15 films and video works available in three part. Radynski’s film is part of […]

War and Cinema

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Oleksiy Radynski curates a War and Cinema, an art film program on e-flux that explores differing uses of moving image media and war.

Is Data the New Gas?

“In 2017, The Economist famously claimed that “data is the new oil.” At the time, Wendy Chun’s response to this statement was: “Big data is the new COAL. The result: global social change. Intensely energized and unstable clouds.”12 Still, both coal and oil are likely to decline as energy sources. Another question worth asking, then, is: what […]

Aliens, Spacetime, Storytelling, and Infrastructure: December Fellows Intensive

In December 2019 the BAK 2019/2020 Fellows gather for their third Fellows Intensive, co-convened by Fellows Oleksiy Radynski, David Muñoz Alcántara, and Diana McCarty along with BAK. Synthesizing and pushing their own and each other’s individual research trajectories, in December the Fellows visit local institutions like IMPAKT, Casco Art Institute, and Universiteitsmuseum; create and participate […]

Program