Made in the same year as the Serpukhov-15 incident, Wargames was a film that speculated on the beginnings of accidental war, automated weapons and hackable military facilities.  The plot focuses on a high school teenager who discovers a backdoor into the computer that controls America’s nuclear weapons. Thinking it can’t possibly be a real military computer, the teenager at first thinks he’s playing a computer game, unable to comprehend the enormity of global violence now at his fingertips.

The computer itself was designed to replace human workers (those in power don’t want moral judgements and ethics to stand in the way) so it begins to play the ‘game’ back. And once it starts, it won’t stop.

The film’s tagline is ‘the only winning move is not to play’. Against the background of my research interests, it’s reminding me of something I read in Carissa Veliz’s book Privacy is Power: ‘the internet does not allow you to remain silent’ (p230). It is incredibly difficult to opt out of systems of surveillance and networks that amass data for ‘algorithms of oppression’, to borrow a phrase from Safiya Umoja Noble.

The technologies of such systems of control rely on our inputs, which is why the issue of choice is so pertinent.

In the film, choice was looked at through the lens of computer automated weaponry.

Finally, in Wargames, to stop the computer and to avert catastrophic destruction, they have to convince it that continuation is futile. The competitive cycle of input and response must stop. There are no winners in nuclear war.

I’m wondering what I can take away from this in relation to my research. Maybe it’s that there are no winners when huge amounts of the population are criminalised, subjected to limited opportunities, and marginalised and discriminated against by opaque computerised processes.

I am currently researching into artists from Ilford. (Ilford is one answer to where I’m from)

Gillian Wise was a British visual artist born in Ilford. She was part of the English Constructivist movement of the 1950s before becoming a key member of the Systems group.

“Her work follows the principles of experimentation and reduction to elemental units (line, colour, and plane). Her structures play on the effects of the geometry of light and industrial materials, as well as contrasts between transparency and the primary colours.” – aware

Gillian Wise was born in Ilford in 1936. She grew up in Ilford until leaving the area to study at 18 in Wimbledon. She exhibited as part of the British constructivists and became their youngest member in 1961. She challenged the predominance of American modernism at the time and then continuously throughout her career. She clearly understood art and artistic production to be an overtly political matter and spoke often about the CIA intervention in Cold War cultural production.

From her book, Low Frequency:

“There artists of all stripes and their nascent agents had to be American to get the full treatment of nurture and sponsorship since that is what policy demanded. Policy from Washington. Out of this was born the Abstract Expressionist group… the two names which have been retained as most representing that moment are Pollock and Rothko, although the latter was trying for a stylistic variant. While Pollock reflects some early Alexander Rodchenko (one of the original and prolific members of the Russian Constructivist movement) experiments, Rothko’s attempt at mysticism, à la Malevich, is a very thin affair.”

Her work was overtly political and she herself was an avowed Leftist who won a British Council scholarship to research Russian constructivism in 1969. She travelled to Leningrad, exhibited in Helsinki and joined the Systems group, a collection of Marxist artists who successfully produced and showed work throughout the 70s.

Gillian Wise was the only British artist to create work for the opening of the Barbican centre in 1982. Her work, the Alice Walls, inspired by the Russian avant-garde, remained entirely uncredited until 2014. She referenced it as, “a dark episode in the annals of support for national artists and, of course, women.”

The history of this Ilford-born artist gives so much rich context to the sidelining of genuinely Leftist and Marxist positions throughout the Cold War. It also references the definite and unacceptable misogyny of the mainstream British art establishment who have since begun to rewrite their silence around Gillian Wise with her inclusion in a variety of shows.

While on the surface it seems that Ilford plays a limited or invisible role in the artists history, one striking historical coincidence keeps me wondering.

In 1937, one year after Gillian Wise was born, construction on the Gants Hill underground station in Ilford began. The station was designed by Charles Holden and was inspired by stations on the Moscow Metro.

Before it was eventually opened to the public in 1947, the ‘under construction’ station was used as an air-raid shelter. After consultation between Moscow and London about the building of the Moscow Metro in the 1930s, British architects returned to London with some new ideas. Gants Hill is designed with a central vaulted concourse separating two platforms in order to maximise the amount of space for the flow of people.

Getting to the platform level of the station is a striking experience. As you travel down the deeply-set downward steps the square floor tiles slowly come into view before the marvel of the ceiling is revealed. The station has barrel-vaulted ceilings and is tiled in a geometric pattern that is reminiscent of the Krasnye Vorota Metro station in Moscow which opened in 1935.

Ivan Fomin was the designer of the Krasnye Vorota Metro Station. Fomin worked in a variety of styles throughout his lifetime, including Art Nouveau, Neoclassicism and an intermediary style of architecture known as Postconstructivism.

By the early 1930s, Constructivist art and architecture had fallen out of favour and was soon to be replaced. Stalinist architecture would become the dominant form of expression for the next decades. Wedged in between these two larger forms is a brief architectural style known as Postconstructivism (sometimes referred to as early Stalinism).

Constructivist work had been wildly imaginative and avant-garde in its use of shapes, materials and technology. It was avowedly political, aiming to incite a social purpose for all people in public spaces. The demise of Constructivism comes alongside the rise of Stalin and the impact of centralised state power. The Stalinist architecture that followed utilized classical forms representing a return to traditional notions of power. Dmitry Khmelnitsky writing about this period suggested that Constructivism was ended by the force of Stalinist power. Khmelnitsky suggests that “traces of the Constructivist style in the Postconstructivism of the 1930s are a sign of indecision, not tradition.” There was a vacuum that state-sponsored artists were filling with a combination of what came before (Constructvisim) and even further back (Classicicism). This combination of ideas was the starting point for Stalinist architecture. Postconstructivism is truly then a misnomer for the return of classicist forms and styles with accidental traces of Constructivism.

Ivan Fomin himself had a deep love for classicism and had spent a long time attempting to develop his own form of proletarian classcisim. In the 1930s he partook in key competitions to design the Moscow Metro. He won just one and designed the station Krasnye Vorota with vaulted ceilings and a central concourse. A model of the station was at the 1938 World’s Fair in Paris where it won the Grand Prix. Fomin designed the station in what would become called Postconstructivism.

Gants Hill station in Ilford, designed by Charles Holden adapted from a design by Ivan Fomin, bares the scars of the Constructivist movement being clamped down on by the Stalinist regime.

Gillian Wise, born in Ilford, developed a career as an artist inspired by Russian constructivist art. She would even travel on a British government grant to research Russian constructivism in the country itself.

Only after this trip to Russia does Wise give up being a Constructivist artist and move on to join the Systems group.

I’m not saying that architectural ghosts haunted Gillian Wise as a child until she was able to exorcise them in the country from which they originated but…I am saying that.

thanks Rebekah

How can a forest disappear without any trees being cut down? Here are two images showing the same region, the Uinatas mountain range, that show how something can disappear in an instance in satellite-assisted visualisations.

Researchers show that 6% of global forests – equivalent to the size of China – disappear when you define a forest by 10% tree cover instead of 30%. Tree cover describes the density of trees in an area and is used to produce forest/non-forest maps which the researchers say are causing issues.

I started looking at forests because the Serpekov-15 bunker is an area of Russian forest, and this finding relates to my interest in the discrepancies within computer-assisted, data-driven vision. From one perspective, there is a forest. From another, there isn’t.

We might be physically present in that forest and yet it wouldn’t exist.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/86986/is-that-a-forest-that-depends-on-how-you-define-it

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/87176/when-a-definition-makes-a-forest-disappear

It was the OKO satellites connected with the Soviet M-10 supercomputer that mistakenly identified sunlight on clouds as the movement of nuclear missiles (OKO being the Russian word for ‘eye’). They detect infrared radiation which is then used to interpret the trajectory of missiles from the heat of their exhausts.

The OKO satellites moved on elliptical Molniya orbits of which there are some nice visualisations on the Wiki page.

Molniya translates as Lightening in Russian and this type of orbit has been used for telecommunications, TV broadcasting, and weather monitoring as well as in the military early warning systems I’m looking at.

I’ve been looking for photos that show the inside of the Serpukhov-15 bunker. This is the only image I have come across so far and it’s unverified.

I came across an interactive digital work called OKOgame that uses NASA satellite imagery to form an audio-visual experience triggered by mouse clicks. It revolves around a target-like centre which splits into rings that you can control with your mouse. Working like a puzzle, the aim is to get them to fit seamlessly together revealing the original satellite image. There are various levels, each becoming more complicated with an increasing number of moving parts. The soundtrack is recordings taken from within space shuttles.

This is the second part of my reflections on Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology and which sections are resonating with my research.

He writes about the materiality of concrete and how a poured substance can create this sense of claustrophobia and imprisonment:

“It is the coherence of the material itself that must assume this role: the centre of gravity replaces the foundation. In concrete casting, there are no more intervals, joints, everything is compact; the uninterrupted pouring avoids to the utmost the repairs that would weaken the general cohesion of the work. (p47).

‘Their grey cement relief was silent witness to a warlike climate’ (p12).

Although the bunkers themselves are solidly anchored into position, unable to move and or be impacted by events on the ground, Virilio knows that it’s the speed of the things that they are controlling that is at the core of their power. He focuses on the trajectory of weapons, how quickly they are able to move, and the battle for speed.

‘At the heart of combat’… “a new infrastructural-vehicular system always revolutionizes a society in overthrowing both its sense of material and its sense of social relationship” (p19).

It seems for him that it’s the speed of trajectory that is crucial. And related to this is the miniaturisation of space, of making distances feel shorter and easier to travel across. It ties into the omniscient, all-seeing systems of satellite observations, of mapping technologies, and geospatial tools of control.

“A homogenizing process is under way in the contemporary military structure, even inside the three arms specifications: ground, sea, and air is diminishing in the wake of an aeronautical coalesce, which clearly reduces the specificity of the land forces…(T)he volumetric reduction of military objects: miniaturization” (p18).

Finally, he makes a broader point about how technologies of speed and travel are related to the desires of military activities:

“It should never be forgotten that the ancestor of the automobile, the log transporter of the military engineer Nicolas Joseph Cugnot, during its first trip from Paris to Vincennes, was hauling a cannon” (p47).

Bunker, France, ca. 1958–65. Photo: Paul Virilio

This week I’ve been reading Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology (1967), a collection of texts and photographs documenting his research and visits to the military bunkers of the Atlantikwall along France’s northwest coast. Spanning coasts from northern Norway to Spain, the Atlantikwall consisted of 15,000 bunkers built to conceal radar stations, submarine pens, and various military arsenal.

He reflects on what it feels like to enter one of these ominous monolithic spaces and the relationship between death, tombs and military architecture.

‘I was more impressed by a feeling, internal and external, of being immediately crushed. The battered walls sunk into the ground gave this small blockhouse a solid base; a dune had invaded in the interior space and the thick layer of sand over the wooden floor made the place ever narrower. Some clothes and bicycles had been hidden here; the object no longer made the same sense, though there was still some protection here. A complete series of cultural memories came to mind: the Egyptian mastabas, the Etruscan tombs, the Aztec structures . . . as if this piece of artillery fortification could be identified as a funeral ceremony…’ (p11).

He describes trapdoors in cement floors leading to crypts packed with ammunition, round or hexagonal inner chambers, and often the placement of what alludes to a religious alter or plinth in the centre of the space.

“The bunker was built in relationship to this new climate; its restrained vo1lume, its rounded or flattened angles, the thickness of its walls, the embrasure systems, the various types of concealment for its rare openings; its armour plating, iron doors, and air filters – all this depicts another military space, a new climactic reality” (p39).

I also found it interesting to read his thoughts around the relationship between territorial representation (maps, satellite views) and military expansion. He writes about these representations being strategies of military control – satilletes and radar systems – and desires around ‘controlling expanding territory, of scanning it in all directions (and, as of now, in three dimensions)’ (p17).

“The “conquest of space” by military and scientific personnel is no longer, as it once was, the conquest of the human habitat but the discovery of an original continuum thar has only a distant Iink to geographical reality.”

Another thought I had whilst reading this was the act of fortification and what it means to use the earth’s material itself and underground locations as a kind of barrier.  It’s making me think of the subconscious and how the spatiality of physical spaces can have psychological connotations and interpretations. Also, what it means for the decision-making processes and the actions that are expected to happen at these sites.

“The fortification is a special construction; one does not live there, one executes particular actions there, at a particular moment, during a conflict or in a troubled period” (p42).

I am attempting to make a interactive radio play controlled by speaking so the first things I have looked at are modern radio plays….which happen to be fictional podcasts

I never knew the radio play lived on in this form but I have to say

These three podcasts Carrier, The Message and Lif-e.af/ter have been a huge inspiration in how I can use sound as a way to craft a world that feels real and lived in.

Now the differcult bit is to finish writing the episodes.

The Oko early warning satellite system was operated from an underground bunker in the military townlet of Serpukhov-15, near Kurilovo. This is where the command would be sent from to launch a retaliatory missile strike; deep underground, far from anything that is happening on the surface. The perception of events above ground are channelled through flows of data, radar, and computer signal processing.

To begin my research, I decided to go for a walk, virtually, trying to get as close as possible to the bunker as I could. Obviously the exact location is not readily available but from geosatellite imagery, I spot a compound that features several huge white dome structures that suggest a site used for surveillance and listening via antennas.

My walk takes me through a woodland of what looks like mostly firs and birches on a beautifully sunny day with clear skies, or at least it was when Google cars were driving along these same roads surveying the scene. At the closest point to the compound, I find a gathering of cars, a few drivers are milling around – I wonder what they are doing here, what brings them to the outskirts of this military townlet? 

As I’m moving/clicking forward, I’m thinking how such major decisions about world-changing events are made from places that are concealed and hidden from public view. I’m struck by what a contrast it makes; beneath this tranquil woodland lies a facility constructed to command the launch of deadly missiles.

I’ve been gathering quotes from Petrov, possibly for an audio work or soundtrack for a video or installation. What I take away from his recollections are:

• the tension between the job’s requirements (obeying orders) and a sense of personal responsibility
• doubt that emerges when gut instinct clashes with given information
• the necessity of contemplation and time to process decisions

“I had all the data. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it.”

“The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it. A minute later the siren went off again. The second missile was launched. Then the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Computers changed their alerts from ‘launch’ to ‘missile strike’.”

“The slightest false move can lead to colossal consequences. That hasn’t changed.”

“There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike. But we knew that every second of procrastination took away valuable time; that the Soviet Union’s military and political leadership needed to be informed without delay.”

“All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders – but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”

“My colleagues were all professional soldiers, they were taught to give and obey orders.” 

“I thought the chances were 50-50 that the warnings were real. But I didn’t want to be the one responsible for starting a third world war.” 

“Can you imagine? It was as though a child had been playing with a vanity mirror, throwing around the sun’s reflection. And by chance that blinding light landed right in the centre of the system’s eye.”

These quotes were from his interview with Time magazine and BBC reportage.