Imaginary Motherland.

Some Notes on The Sprawl

(Propaganda About
Propaganda) and a Google
Doc Conversation with
Metahaven
Lesia Prokopenko

30 January 2018

Founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden,

Metahaven’s practice spans art, filmmaking, and design
to provoke new imaginaries that are equally bound to
aesthetics, poetics, and politics. Recent solo
presentations include Information Skies, Auto Italia,
London (2016), and Mumbai Art Room, Bombay (2016);
The Sprawl, YCBA, San Francisco (2015); Black
Transparency, Future Gallery, Berlin (2014); Islands in the
Cloud, MoMA PS1, New York (2013). Recent group
exhibitions include Tamawuj, Sharjah Biennale 2017,
Sharjah, UAE; Fear & Love, Design Museum, London
(2016); Dream Out Loud, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
(2016), The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?), the 11th
Gwangju Biennial (2016); All of This Belongs to You,
Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2015); Private
Settings: Art After the Internet, Museum of Modern Art
Warsaw (2014); Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York
(2013). Recent publications include Black Transparency
(2015), Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? (2013), and
Uncorporate Identity (2010). Music videos by Metahaven
include Home (2014), and Interference (2015), both with
musician, composer and artist Holly Herndon, as part of
an ongoing collaboration. Metahaven’s full-length
documentary, The Sprawl (Propaganda about
Propaganda), premiered at the International Film Festival
Rotterdam in 2016. Its successor, a short film titled
Information Skies, was shot and edited in 2016 and has
been nominated for the 2017 European Film Awards. The
short film Hometown, a successor to Information Skies,
was shot in Beirut and Kiev in 2017.

***

I found out about the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

late in the evening when I got on a bus heading from
Berlin to Warsaw and finally cared to check my Facebook
news feed. It was bursting. The bus WiFi network was
functioning decently, but the backrest of my seat was
broken, and I had to keep it vertical by sitting awkwardly
straight, otherwise it would land in the face of a person
sitting behind me. This person happened to be a big
blonde Lithuanian elderly lady who would knock violently
on the backrest of my seat any time it tilted an extra
couple of centimeters in her direction. I couldn’t fall
asleep anyway, so I ended up guarding her comfort by
balancing my seat or leaning against window glass and
reading, reading, reading through an endless flow of
information on the crash of MH17. Once In Warsaw, I
picked up a coffee at Starbucks, the only place that was
already open this early, and walked all the way to the
Ujazdowski Castle where I needed to pick up some stuff
before heading to Frederic Chopin airport. I collapsed
uncontrollably into one of the hammocks hanging around
the park next to the Castle, and spent in it an hour and a
half before the meeting I had there, letting my spine
recover and listening to a group of kindergartners
practice Spanish with a native-speaker nanny. I
pretended to be reading a book in order to appear less
suspicious, but I knew my brain was peacefully asleep,
shredding half-consciously all the consumed media
sensations, patriotic outcries, fits of grief and rage, waves
of panic, and comic conspiracy theories that would never
ever beat the contingency, grotesque, and
maneuverability of actual reality lurking in the glitches of
the infinite scroll.

The Sprawl1, say Metahaven. Sprawling in a hammock, I

would close my eyes and watch the information sprawl.
We will be witnessing the same processes again and
again, learning painfully to navigate them, mastering a
new language that has always been gradually inventing
and establishing itself from shreds and scraps. This is the
language in which a turquoise tube of mascara looted
from the crash site of MH17 is not a fact but a trope. This
language is described and studied in The Sprawl: when
applied in the interests of particular power relations, it is
called «propaganda». It embraces the loss of meaning
and fuels fights for multiple shades of evasive truth, while
taking good care of preserving the structural status quo,
mobilizing «identities» and «values» as a promise of
selective wellbeing. Such flow and rhythm of
«propaganda» has been made apparent by digital tools
and networks, but it’s hardly a recent invention or a
phenomenon that hasn’t been described before. It’s just
that our attempts to face and grasp the language of
«propaganda» are always being slowed down by its
persuasive effects — and by the fear to be left alone and
misunderstood in one’s questioning of the states of
affairs that define the subtlest aspects of our everyday
life. At one time Socrates was sentenced to death for
precisely this.
Metahaven, The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), and
sprawl.space, 2015-2016. 70 min, in English, Russian, Arabic. English
subtitles. Commissioned by Lighthouse, co-produced by Lighthouse and
The Space.

In his concise book The Three Ecologies first published in

1989, Félix Guattari wrote: «Now more than ever, nature
cannot be separated by culture; in order to comprehend
the interactions between ecosystems, the
mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes
of reference, we must learn to think «transversally». Just
as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of
Venice, so our television screens are populated,
saturated, by «degenerate» images and statements
[énoncés]. In the field of social ecology men like Donald
Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another
species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York
and Atlantic City; he «redevelops» by raising rents,
thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families,
most of whom are condemned to homelessness,
becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of
environmental ecology»2. This passage illustrates
beautifully the relations between information flows and
material phenomena, which has only recently become a
trendy yet still questionable issue in the discussions on
the nexus between digital platforms and real life affairs —
which both are, in the end, real life. Xenofeminism
Manifesto has been one of the most prominent and
prominently concise recent attempts to work on
emancipatory tactics within this phenomenon: «Digital
technologies are not separable from the material realities
that underwrite them; they are connected so that each
can be used to alter the other towards different ends.»3
Metahaven manage to aestheticize on a large scale —
and thus to playfully deconstruct — the proliferative
qualities of the language of propaganda in these
upgraded conditions. One of the stances of The Sprawl is
«What happens when interfaces tell you what to think,
and interfaces are about reality.»

Metahaven, The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), and

sprawl.space, 2015-2016.

Our communication with Daniel van der Velden and Vinca

Kruk sprouted from a never completed group project,
thanks to which, however, we ended up exchanging
emails on absurdist poetry, advertising, AI, airport
customs control experiences, and the like. At the moment
Metahaven are working on a new film, shot in Beirut and
Kiev — a sequel to Information Skies (2016)4, a piece on
virtual reality and the texture of truth in the digital world.
The chosen settings are eloquent. Ukraine has been the
ground for the most explicit, refined, and uncanny
narrative collisions, vision distortions, and logical failures.
Its war on «propaganda» carried on with «propaganda»
instruments — that is, defensive counter-narratives,
restrictive value-based choice of allowed marketable
discourse, and maladroit sterilization of history — is only
a part of «the sprawl», the global proliferation of the
phantom language of power, to be taken with food. The
Sprawl gets inside this language, and uses design tools
as formaldehyde to immerse and store its tropes in for
further examination. Moreover, the specimens are
immediately supplemented with analytical comments and
poetic footnotes wrapped in stylized theatrical
generalities — which does not necessarily aim at
denunciation of particular cases and asserting any
universally applicable optics, but definitely estranges,
defamiliarizes (in the sense as coined by Viktor
Shklovsky) and illuminates the inventive automatisms of
present-day quicksilver propaganda. Its material
manifestations come through as systemic aberrations —
ultimately, not less real than the status quo that precedes
them. That’s the reality The Sprawl captures: «Oh,
Novorossiya. Imaginary motherland, spiritual Rorschach.»
It’s fed by the language that appears to be fighting it,
because there are no colours within quicksilver. It’s rather
amusing to expand the metaphor of quicksilver by
recalling that it is the colloquial for the chemical element
Mercury, and Mercury is a Roman god of financial gain,
commerce, and communication. ISIS fighters eat M&M’s
— it’s in The Sprawl, too.

Metahaven, The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), and

sprawl.space, 2015-2016.
The mentioned systemic aberrations are there not as the
signs that a certain established system has to be fixed
and retained. Largely, they are its own products, and the
signs of stagnation of particular political languages that
are willing to benefit from — but unable to contain — the
rearrangements accounted for by information
technologies. The Sprawl is about this stagnation.
Benjamin H. Bratton, featured in the film, refers
particularly to the «relationship between the sovereignty
of state and the apparatus of planetary-scale
computation». The changes in the notion of space
brought, roughly speaking, by the internet, require and
inevitably advance the transformation of political
infrastructures and the evolution of corresponding
languages. The longer and harder these changes get
inhibited by reactionary stances — the more disastrous
and stupefying are the ways the surface fails and breaks,
the more of Guattarian «mutant algae» corrupt the
possibilities of balance and new sense. But nonsense is
also what sparks poetry — poetry as a transformative
twist of language and reality. This is the deterritorialized
area Metahaven offer one to enter.
Metahaven, The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), and
sprawl.space, 2015-2016.

LP: The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) features

the following text: «In 2014, a strange set of events
unfolds. Without apparent plan or structure, they seem
connected. Our views of the world are changing, as if we
wake up from a dream. We no longer see the internet as a
means of communication, but as a way to change the
nature of reality itself». Which events in particular do you
mean here? 2014 was indeed a very intense and
exhausting year — what were the points you felt like
connecting? What do you remember about it?

MH: The project came into being as a kind of news feed,

in which war in Ukraine, the rise of Islamic State (IS), and
the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa were shared in the
same media space. We asked ourselves in which ways
such distinct developments are connected, and what it is
about their being shared online that enhances that
connection. The feeling was that of a boundless
expansion of uncontrollable forces. Making the film was
what we needed to do in order to understand what the
film was about, if that makes sense. The film is about
cognitive contagion, epistemic alarm. We went inside the
contagion and began to inhabit it. Every piece of media,
or propaganda, contains in its surface, its treatment,
traces of the way in which it was made, produced. Every
piece of propaganda contains in its mediatic texture, in
the properties of the image and its surface, also a
message about itself. So, the project had to become an
embodiment of this idea, propaganda about propaganda.
The film is, eventually, mostly about Russia and Ukraine,
but the way in which it is about it differs from most other
documentaries.

It feels as if many people in the West still experienced the

events of 2014 as glitches. But what was happening was
a falling apart of reality, a disintegration, into versions.
Different versions, mutually exclusive, yet overlapping the
same space-time. For us as filmmakers, it is important to
arrive at this idea without being overly analytical. There is
emotion, even nostalgia, at work in this notion of
versions, in which everyone is getting to have their own
truth, and in which a winning power is defined in equal
parts by the capacity to slide alternative versions of the
same events into the bylines of history, as well as by a
capacity to absolutely believe. Not just to believe in a
particular version, but eventually, a capacity to believe at
all. Thinking of one of the final scenes in Tarkovsky’s
Stalker (1979) here, in which the Stalker, finally home,
complains about his former travel companions, the Writer
and the Scientist. Both of them, he says, are unable to
believe, which is why he despises them. The events that
are covered in The Sprawl sustain a sense of epistemic
uncertainty, in which the more attractive option for all
sides becomes creating a totalizing sense of being
politically and morally right. What disappears,
increasingly, is an epistemic baseline against which to
measure these claims, and, more importantly, a means of
enforcement for such a baseline other than its
amplification into the same spaces, often online, that also
sustain all the other narratives. We hope this isn’t too
abstract!
LP: Perhaps, the contradictions you are talking about that
made themselves visible after a wave of what felt like the
utmost emancipatory experiences point to structural and,
in particular, infrastructural deadlocks and collapses.
Mechanisms and practices that were justified by the
common denominator of democracy and the nation state
as its framework seem to be not only insufficient in
dealing with the trouble, but also serving as a naturalized
idea that obscures both the macroeconomic, market
motivations sustaining the violence — and the everyday
life of humans involved in these situations. Could we say
that to change the nature of reality is to change this
status quo and the distribution of power? Wouldn’t it
imply the moment of complete disavowal of power as
well? The internet could be a means to observe how
losing control and gaining control are interwoven in this
process, but we absolutely can’t predict where it takes us
— although, letting it take us somewhere seems to be the
biggest gain. In the first interview since her release from
prison, Chelsea Manning said: «[...] the world’s shaped
me more than anything else. It’s a feedback loop». By the
way, I’m fond of the work you did in support of her. The
print design saying «Infiltrate with Love» in particular,
which also features the slogan — or brand — of
«Paradise Politics». I’d like to think that this feedback
loop is precisely what «Paradise Politics» stands for.
What would you say?

MH: The t-shirts we designed in support of Chelsea

Manning were part of a collaboration with Holly Herndon
and Mat Dryhurst, and a fundraiser by CTM Festival and
Transmediale. The term «Paradise Politics» was
introduced by Holly and Mat around the album Platform
(2015). And they, in turn, were drawing on the work of the
theorist Guy Standing, who talks about a «politics of
paradise.» In Paradise Politics, all binaries are dissolved
into an ecstatic space where the formal distance or
difference between bodies, political subjects, citizens,
addressable units, becomes overruled by their
fundamental connection, and by a capacity to dream
about the future. In Holly’s music the artistic rendering of
these ideas is not a straight-up translation. It is never
literal or one-to-one. There is an ecstatic emotion about
layering, about getting there and arriving, rather than
assuming to have already accomplished, which is very
humbling and appropriate. What we recognize in Chelsea
Manning’s words, «the world’s shaped me more than
anything else,» is the concreteness of life. Life-changing
events don’t usually happen through vague abstractions,
but in actual events, especially when still confused about
their outcome.

It is important to create an analysis, cartography, or

speculation, but even more important to tell from one’s
own perspective, which is somehow always situated,
concrete, and therefore limited, within a super-uncertain
reality. In his 1995 film Schnittstelle (Interface), Harun
Farocki placed himself and his editing studio in-between
various mediated realities, almost like a factory,
transitioning from film to video. Farocki addressed the
moment that the former Romanian dictator, Nicolae
Ceaușescu, lost control of the media. Television cameras
turned to the streets, where people were protesting.
Farocki took his camera and started filming out of his
window. What does this mean in the digital age, where
there is neither film nor video anymore as an attestable
material reality in the hands of a filmmaker, and images of
protest, which are everywhere, are everywhere, but do
not necessarily suspend disbelief? Farocki asserted that
the digital image is competing with, and on the verge of
defeating, the cinematic image. For Farocki, it was
essential that the image sustained a relationship to its
underlying materialism, and in Interface, he operated on
the verge of its disjointment: he could still touch with his
hands the celluloid film as it sled through his editing set,
but he could no longer touch the videotape in the same
way. Paradise Politics also faces this problem with regard
to its media: that the material truth of that media is
disconnected from the solidarity of bodies. That it exists
in another realm, in which the conditions of that solidarity
have already been negotiated away and merged with
Google-space, Facebook-space, and so on. Mat
(Dryhurst) has done interesting work on re-investing in
self-owned or collectively managed platforms, comparing
it to the rise of indie labels in music.
Metahaven, The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), and
sprawl.space, 2015-2016.

LP: Technology, that is, the internet, has been changing

our relations with language and information similar to
how the invention of printing changed them, and, later,
the invention of photography — and this inevitably
implies transformations in the perception of time. Film, as
a medium, is one of the ways to explore and manipulate
time, which is, at the moment, a more appealing idea
than ever. How do you treat temporality in your work?

MH: Up to the 2010s, the internet’s physical dislocation

from political jurisdiction was seen as an important factor
in its emancipatory capacity to produce political change.
One can say that’s very counter-Farocki; the materiality
of protest was physically separate from the data. «The
internet,» «online space,» in this stage, existed and
acted on behalf of liberal democracy and was its most
important agent after the free market. Twitter was in Iran,
but it servers were not. WikiLeaks published documents,
and no single government or company had the capacity
to order their removal. Political change in this
deterritorialized sphere of communication appeared as
«liberal» to the West. The normless computational
«outside» from which it was enacted onto particular
authoritarian pockets was still an «everywhere and
nowhere,» made out of Silicon Valley-built tools. Under
Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, «internet
freedom» was elevated to a US foreign policy instrument
that would advance American interests. Ironically, this
was about idealizing the normlessness (in an ethical and
legal sense) as long as it came from American-built,
American-owned computational instruments vis-a-vis
particular, and very textured, non-American realities. In
realizing how the focus on technology has backfired, isn’t
it true that today talking about technology, including
social media, is the same as avoiding to talk about our
lives? There is too much fetishization going on. To see
the former Web 2.0 being taken over by trolls,
propaganda, and fake news—that are able to make a
platform’s measuring tools and analytics, in a purely
quantitative sense, believe in their reality—is one way in
which it becomes evident how this focus on technology
has backfired. As with the recent protests in Iran (2018),
all the West still sees is their connection with the internet,
a narrative which is continued by the Trump
administration.

Let’s see the internet as one infrastructure among many

others. One that was laid out initially by the military, but
then was advanced as if it were the property of
humankind. Then, it was the corpus of an overarching
political version of all events triggered in its wake, just like
the roads of the Roman Empire were, once, only
supposed to carry Roman troops. To us it has become
important to speak from the perspective of the inhabitant
of the infrastructure, rather than its architect or map-
maker. What is the taste of the vineyards next to the road
after it was recently asphalted?

In our films, including Information Skies, but also in our

new essay, Digital Tarkovsky—which is to be out soon
with Strelka Press—we address duration or temporality.
Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Sokurov are heroes of
ours who used, and use, time as their primary instrument.
But we want to look at this through the lens of platforms,
and in the digital age (sorry for the term), where duration
is associated with Facebook, Instagram addiction, and
Netflix binge-watching. We are convinced that there is a
cinematic core to our time spent on the smartphone—if
only because it is banned from most movie theatres.
Metahaven, Information Skies, 2016. 24 min, in Hungarian.
English/Korean/Arabic/Hindi subtitles. Nomination, European Film Awards
for Short Film 2017. Made possible in the framework of Gwangju Biennale
2016.

LP: Your film Information Skies particularly embraces

Tarkovsky’s style, but also the sense of dislocation his
story of time would bear. Apparently, this is one of the
present-day motifs. Space is politically charged,
marketed — along with that, it is ultimately ambiguous
and inconsistent. It can be hacked, too. All the spaces of
Information Skies are a non-place. At times, a
romanticized non-place. Here we may recall the
etymology of the term «dystopia». Displacement could
be an emancipatory tactic, but it could also be a forced
position, an upgraded prison — and one may be easily
tricked into normalizing this condition: of course, it is
fascinating and sedating. This is what Information Skies
partly is about. What do you want to do with the space in
your latest films — and how do you navigate it?
MH: The suspension of disbelief happens at another
level. The mountainous forest environment contrasts with
the animation scenes, in which there are almost no
concrete landscape elements visible, except for graphic
shapes filled with graphic patterns of night sky, which we
call the «steppe of pixels.» The combination of these
cinematic naturalist shots and the abstracted anime
sequences is important for what the film is, we think.
When we shot Information Skies, cast and crew lived
together for six days in a lodge near a lake in the Black
Forest. To us, the concreteness of a shoot remains
important, for many reasons, but there is no reason to
stick to a «realistic» storyline that is built from a shoot.
For our forthcoming film, Hometown, commissioned by
Christine Tohmé through the Sharjah Art Foundation,
we’ve been shooting in Beirut and Kyiv, and we are
currently editing it. It is a sequel to Information Skies. We
wanted to embody the idea of living with contradictions,
and the idea of belonging with contradictions.
Metahaven, Information Skies, 2016.

LP: Why have you chosen to shoot your new film in Kyiv
and Beirut? What does your poetic concept of Hometown
stand for in this work?

MH: We became quite influenced by the late writer and

scholar Svetlana Boym. Somewhat in line with her work,
Hometown is not a film about the cities in which it is shot.
Kyiv and Beirut together form a new city, the
«hometown,» which does not exist. Many of our films so
far have been self-produced. We have to create our
stories out of our circumstances. So it happened that in
Spring 2017, we worked in Beirut with the arts
organization Ashkal Alwan, and had the possibility to stay
in this city for a period of time. We felt that Beirut was a
place where the notion of contradiction, which we explore
in the script, would resonate, and it did. For Information
Skies, we had worked together with the fashion designer
Yulia Yefimtchuk, who is based in Kyiv, and we also
produced a printed piece together with her for Sleek. It
felt like a good opportunity for a larger collaboration with
Yulia and her colleague, Tania Monakhova. To shoot in
Kyiv seemed logical. «Hometown» is not a concrete city
but it is where we situate ourselves in spite of all that’s
vague and unpredictable. With melting ice cream and
self-made currencies, without any certainties given by
the clock, and nevertheless: hope.

Metahaven, The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), and

sprawl.space, 2015-2016.

LP: It feels that the creation of Hometown has also had a

lot to do with the ways you embed literature in your work,
with the work of (spontaneous) instruments of narration.
And well, this is where this deterritorialized projection or
fiction of «hometown» is located — in discourse. There is
a fragment in The Sprawl based on a quote from Leo
Tolstoy’s essay What Is Art? It seems to be relevant here
too, in terms of projection. Besides, it is a text in which
Tolstoy denounces «ecclesiastical and patriotic
superstitions» carried in art, performing a certain
«propaganda about propaganda» himself. How did you
land at this reference?

MH: It’s quite impossible to overstate the influence that

Tolstoy’s essay, What Is Art?, has had on us. Indeed,
Tolstoy denounces art as an instrument of the state or
the church, as well as a self-sustaining institution, which
may be one reason why most curators don’t respond well
to the essay. But it is exciting to see which works Tolstoy
comes to see as art: «an anonymous story about a
chicken, the singing of the peasant women on his estate
to the banging of scythes, the most sentimental of genre
paintings, doorknobs, china dolls,» in the words of
Richard Pevear. Or the ritual in which members of a Mansi
community in the Ural perform the hunting, wounding,
and death of a deer, in which the roles of hunter, the
mother deer, and the little deer are all played by humans.
Art is not an object with this or that status; it is on the
contrary the transfer of emotion from narrator to listener,
and more importantly, the commonality that is created by
this unity. The work speaks immediately, clearly, and
absolutely. He denounces most official forms of art,
including Wagner’s, Shakespeare’s, and his own. A nihilist
logic, a didactic mindset, and a dismantling of poetics,
and strong feelings of religion drive Tolstoy toward a
rejection of all art that is clever, pleasing, or impressive.
The text brings us upon art objects that do not have, or
seek, status, but that directly seek a fundamental, shared
emotion which for Tolstoy has important ethical
overtones. What is Art? is truly ecstatic in its conclusions.
And it’s had a profound impact on us. The part that is
cited in The Sprawl is a definition of art as a transmission
of feeling from one person to another. Tolstoy uses the
example of a boy in the woods who encounters a wolf,
and later recounts the story to someone else. If the story
is told in such a way so that the listener experiences the
same things as the boy did, this would be art. But if the
boy invented the encounter and told someone about it,
and the listener would feel the same, that also would be
art. The work of art does not need to refer to something
that actually happened; it may be invented, constructed,
as long as there is the transfer, the sharing, that
generates the reality of its feeling. For Tolstoy, what art
transfers, what it communicates, is the Good, «the
quality that can’t be defined, but that defines everything
else.»
Metahaven, The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), and
sprawl.space, 2015-2016.

1. Metahaven, The Sprawl (Propaganda About

Propaganda), 2016

2. Félix Guattari, «The Three Ecologies», (London and

New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 2000).

3. Manifesto on Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation by

Laboria Cuboniks, 2015.

4. See Rick Poynor, Metahaven’s Information Skies – a

new kind of film for the technosphere?, Creative Review,
2016; Aaron Santry, Highlights from the Rotterdam Film
Festival, Frieze, 2017.