Dear Visitor,
My name is Valia Fetisov . I’m a media artist and software engineer interested in the intersection of social psychology and technology. More specifically, my passion is constructing artificial situations to explore people’s reactions. If you don’t want to read further, here is an old video that introduces my work.
Currently I’m working on a tiny exhibition space called Space in transition as an artist and a curator. Recent works include User flow – a research-based project conducted on Social Credit System and Call to action.
But the key work for understanding the origins of my interests is still the Installation of experience (2011). It is a room with an automatic door at the entrance, which closes each time someone comes in, so people are trapped there for an unknown amount of time with no instructions for how to get out.
Some of my other works include: a voicemail community Diane (2017); an online-activity tracker of my friends Be my friend (2016); a way of entering into a video surveillance system Control yourself (2012); and Paranoiapp (2015), a tool for the social psychology experiment in the form of a mobile application.
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Be my friend is a tool (currently in development) that would allow you to record all your facebook friends' online or offline statuses. This would give you the power to know if they were online of offline or when they went to sleep and got up at any time in the recorded past. And, of course, you can get a sense of how addicted they are.
Picture shows all my friends by X, and a time by Y. One pixel equals one minute
It started from the lecture I gave in 2014 about “consumer surveillance.” The idea behind this is that surveillance, which for a long time was the privilege of governments and secret police, has become a business model of today’s corporations. And now it’s becoming a part of our social relations.
The simplest example of this transition is a notification you get if someone read your message in a chat. Somehow this has become socially acceptable, if still very frustrating for many of us. But for digital natives it will be fine to share every bit of available information, like that shown in the picture. I think it’s unavoidable.
List of the previous events can be found here.
Write me if you have any questions.
Thank you for reading,
Valia