Coordinated°

Russian opposition protests meet severe repression by the Russian authorities. Especially following the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 it became impossible to express any alternative position safely. People are going to jail for reposts on social media, eldest independent channels are being closed and protest organisers are facing serious lawsuits. A lot of people are scared to go to the protests because of the terrible consequences.

COORDINATED° proposes a framework of a moving decentralised protest, communicating the locations with autonomous flying agents – drones - in an encoded way. Pretending to be just an entertaining performance, drones are transmitting a hidden message - coordinates of the next location - that could be read with the help of AR.

Since a lot of infrastructures to capture people by police are being prepared overnight, the moving protest could lower the chance of being arrested, the use of drones will make it harder to create lawsuits against organisers and the decoding mechanism based on AR increase the time for police to understand the next location and move their infrastructure in a top-down way, which is always slower than bottom-up self-organisation of the protesters.

The artwork is trying to shift the way we perceive technology. While a lot of machines are being used for war, oppression, and surveillance, could other machines help to organize the resistance? It is time to engage in a critical conversation about the distributed networks connecting humans and non-humans symbiotically to stand for freedom and against oppression in a bottom-up way.