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 a video that introduces my work.
Currently I'm working as a fellow at the Digital Earth fellowship, study at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and working on the new project titled “Call to action”. Recent projects include Diane and Be my friend.
But the key work for understanding the direction of my interests is 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.
To get deeper into my story, I started to work in the field in 2010 with a project called The Worst: I explored an existing photographic website by collecting the worst images according to the community rankings. I was interested in the phenomenon of leftovers or in the ability of a community to force out some specific materials.
Some of my other works include: Space of a sound (2011), a distributed sound trap; Control yourself (2012), a way of entering into a video surveillance system; and Paranoiapp (2015), a tool or social psychology experiment in the form of a mobile application.
Paranoiapp is a social-psychology experiment in the form of a mobile application and an algorithm of users' interaction. The project is based on the fear of losing your own privacy. But unlike others, we want to aggravate that fear to see what happens in the future.
To take part in the experiment you need to install the application on your mobile phone. After being installed the app continuously leaks your geolocation data and sends this information to another user that is chosen by the algorithm.
The aim of the algorithm is to choose only a few people to follow for a whole city. In addition to that we also provide a communication layer for users who have a common target so that they can collaborate with each other in a chat to plan further actions.
Slide 01 of 02. Paranoiapp screens
Slide 02 of 02. Installation view
The project was made in collaboration with eeefff group (Dzina Zhuk and Nicolay Spesivtsev). Design: Maxim Karalevich. Application development: Anastasia Sologub, Kirill Horhulev, Eugene Shibeko, Vladimir Artyukhov, Gleb Dremyk. More info on the project website
Current exhibition: “General Rehearsal” in Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia, till September 16th. Past events
Write me if you have any questions.
Thank you for reading,