We have no idea what we're doing but we look cool doing it
A series of lectures, workshops, and parties inside a chalk circle with camping table, pillows, and blankets

2018
"There was a protest rave in front of parliament in Tbilisi last night. Seems mind-boggling how this many people were able to unite, and for what purpose. Good on them, of course. I was too lazy to watch the vid though, it all seems pretty clear anyway.

Activism, dissent, protest, occupy movements — it all sounds too strong, demands too much energy. I find it more fitting to talk about the weak symbols, the small deeds, the so-so resistance, the temporary autonomous zones within the realm of imagination. To talk about the therapeutic effect, which I now find more vital to our survival than any clash over rights and freedoms."


The project was a schedule of hybrid events: a series of lectures, workshops, performances, and parties, uniting three communities: magicians, fiction writers, and hackers. Each community shared their practice of constantly refactoring reality and resisting and evading contemporary narratives.

Some of the events took place online. At the beginning of the project, the communities were not familiar with each other and worked separately. First, there was an open-call for speculative fiction among fiction writers. Then, the magicians created rituals based on the ideas from the fiction writers' texts. These featured a ritual of magical protection of bionic prosthetics against hacking and deactivation, or a charm against theft of consciousness and uploading it to a torrent tracker.

Hackers also worked with the ideas from the fiction writers' texts and developed tools, gadgets and software to either postpone or bring closer dystopian scenarios.

The three communities met in the installation space, which was a circle of chalk 5m in diameter. There, pillows and blankets were laid out, and an archive of the work done by the three communities was presented. The bulk of public lectures, workshops, concerts, and parties took place in the installation space, where each community shared its practices of challenging reality and escaping mainstream cultural narratives.
© 2015-2023 Alisa Smorodina